The article reviews the latest available statistical information on gender inequalities in labor markets and in access to financial institutions, social services, and education. After a general ...review of agricultural development, household food security and rural poverty, population structure, and labor outmigration in Central Asia, the article examines the women’s role in the labor market, including both formal and informal female employment, the feminization of agriculture in the region, gender gaps in education and wages, and constraints on women’s access to extension services and land ownership. It is observed that women’s asset ownership rights and their access to supply and product markets are constrained by social norms. The article concludes with some conclusions and policy recommendations. This reassessment is designed to strengthen the qualitative approaches of the gender literature with some quantitative approaches from agricultural and development economics.
The classification of agricultural producers by legal-organizational form (agricultural enterprises, peasant (family farms), household plots and gardening associations), traditionally used by the ...Russian official statistics, is outdated and masks the dynamic changes that have taken place. Due to the lack of output and sales data in 2016 agricultural census, the paper uses some assumptions to calculate the so called “standard revenue” as a measure of the potential output in each census farm. The results highlight that there is only a small share of commercial production units in Russia and there is high heterogeneity of agricultural producers within each legal-organizational farm type. Contrary to
a priori
expectations, a large number of household plots became commercialized between the previous census in 2006 and the latest census in 2016 and they contribute 19% of the standard revenue of all commercial census units, more than the share of family farms. These results suggest that the old classification used for statistical purposes does not reflect adequately the dynamic changes stemming from the response to market signals.
Using long time series of basic agricultural statistics in 12 countries of the former Soviet Union, this article explores the changes in resource use, agricultural production and productivity during ...the transition. While the share of labour employed in agriculture has increased in all the countries analysed, the share of agriculture in GDP has declined, pointing to generally decreasing productivity of agriculture relative to manufacturing and other sectors of the economy. The precipitous transition decline that began in 1991 with the break-up of the Soviet system gave way to definite recovery starting around 1998. Agricultural growth and performance are shown to be positively linked with individualisation of farming in transition countries and with various measures of policy reform. Countries that have achieved greater progress in the implementation of agricultural reform record better agricultural performance.
The article reviews the development of smallholder farming in Central Asia's former Soviet republics. One of the striking features of the agricultural transition in Central Asia (and Commonwealth of ...Independent States CIS in general) is the dramatic shift, since 1992, from the predominance of large corporate farms to individual or family agriculture based on a spectrum of small farms. Evidence shows that individualization of agriculture is associated with the observed posttransition recovery in Central Asia (and in CIS in general) and that small family farms outperform the large enterprises. This clashes with the traditional philosophy of economies of scale and with the inherited view of small family farms as an undesirable aberration. We discuss the policies that helped smallholder farms in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan and severely restricted their growth and development in Uzbekistan and especially Turkmenistan.
•Russia’s agriculture is growing faster than GDP since 2012, after decades of decline.•Food imports are decreasing, per capita food consumption is increasing, but food access of low-income families ...is restricted.•Land is concentrated in a small number of large users, and state support is allocated to the largest corporations.•Agroholdings increase their role relative to independent agricultural enterprises.•Size does not guarantee success as many agroholdings fail and reorganize.
Russian agriculture has shown stable growth since 1999. The food trade balance steadily improves and the share of imported food in retail markets is decreasing due to the government’s import substitution policies. Russia has re-emerged on the world arena as a food exporter and now ranks among the leading exporters of wheat and vegetable oil. Agricultural production growth has become export oriented. To continue its growth, Russia’s agriculture should emphasize returning unused land to cultivation and adopt new technologies to increase the comparatively low crop and livestock yields. The skewed land distribution and agricultural support system, both strongly biased toward large farms and agroholdings, constrain the development of small farms and prevent their participation in food value chains, negatively impacting on rural development.
In 1995–96 the President of Azerbaijan, Heydar Alieyev, launched a program of agrarian reforms that caused a sweeping and irreversible shift from Soviet-style collective agriculture to individual ...farming in his country. These reforms led to an impressive recovery and substantial productivity improvements in agriculture. The agrarian transition in Azerbaijan contrasts with that in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, where land privatization has been accompanied by policies encouraging the persistence of large corporate farms and where agricultural recovery has been much less impressive. For this reason Azerbaijan is today viewed as one of the few examples of successful land reform in the former Soviet Union. The impact of the Aliyev agrarian reforms went far beyond the recovery of agricultural production. The new policies had a significant impact on rural poverty and they were instrumental in increasing the incomes of Azerbaijan's large rural population, which relies on agriculture for a substantial part of the family budget. To understand the successes and limitations of land reform, Rural Transition in Azerbaijan evaluates the record of rural reforms, focusing on policy change, farm level performance, and the impact of reforms on rural incomes and rural family well-being-issues that today are at the core of the agenda in many international organizations.
This article examines the impacts of land reform policies in CIS countries on agricultural performance, including growth and productivity. The focal thesis of the study is that agricultural ...development in CIS is mainly driven by policy factors, and it is changes in policies (whether agricultural or general economic) that cumulatively affect growth, employment, and productivity in the large rural sector in CIS.
The data used in our analysis are taken from an authoritative database that utilizes statistics regularly reported to the Interstate Statistical Committee of the CIS in Moscow by the member countries (CIS 2005). The CIS database covers all the years from 1980 to 2004, and thus provides a useful comparative view of the last decade of the Soviet regime and the 15 years of transition. Some inevitable gaps in the CIS database have been filled in from country yearbooks.
Agroholdings have become a major player in Russian agriculture in less than two decades. Nevertheless, there is no legal definition of agroholding as an organisation, and no statistical information ...on agroholdings as a distinct category is collected. Only informal definitions exist, which regard agroholdings as groupings of agricultural enterprises linked into a single management network. The numerous publications on Russian agroholdings are mostly based on limited or sporadic data. This is the first study that assembles a full list of more than 1,000 agroholdings in Russia and analyses the corresponding data from official sources. The study examines the role of agroholdings in Russian agriculture and estimates some performance measures. We group all agricultural enterprises (corporate farms in their own right) in Russia into agroholding members and independent, non-member farms, and perform a comparative analysis of the two distinct organisational forms that are at the focus of Russian agricultural policy.
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