Farm organization

The study examines land and water reforms as the main components of agricultural sector restructuring during the transition to a market economy. The experience of Central and Eastern European countries and CIS is assessed in the light of market principles. The main focus of the study is on the agrarian reform in Turkmenistan. The achieved results are evaluated, and prospects for further development of the Turkmen model of agricultural transition are discussed in the framework of world experience. The monograph is the result of a joint study carried out by the authors under Grant No. TA-MOU-98-CA17-011, U.S.-Israel Cooperative Development Research Program, Economic Growth, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The articles examines the impact of a series of institutional changes during the 1990s on patterns of land ownership, farm income, crop specialization, and overall agricultural output in Turkmen-istan. More specifically, the changes investigated entail the distribution of state-held irrigated land to private plots min 1990–1992, allocation of land to independent private farmers in 1993–1996, and the conversion of collective and state farms to associations of private lease-holders in 1996–1997. The study is based on official government statistics, a 2001 survey of private farmers, and a 2002 survey of leaseholders in peasant associations. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: Q15, Q18, Q24. 6 figures, 4 tables, 10 references. urkmenistan is a huge country of 491,200 km 2— the fourth largest by area in the former Soviet Union (FSU) after Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Yet it has a relatively small (but rapidly growing) population of about 6 million people, which puts it in the group of FSU " midgets " (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Baltic republics) in terms of absolute population size. More than half the population (55 percent) resides in rural areas, compared to one-third for the FSU as a whole, but only 5 percent of the country's agricultural land (1.6 million hectares) is cultivable, compared to 40 percent in the FSU. The remaining 95 percent of agricultural land in Turkmenistan is desert pastures—33 million hectares fit only for camels and flocks of karakul sheep (Goskomstat SNG, 2003). Thus, despite the vast expanses and the small number of people, the effective population density is very high, and Turkmenistan suffers from the phenomenon of " agrarian overpopulation " : there are only 0.5 hectares of arable land per rural resident, compared to the average of 2.3 hectares for the FSU. Prior to 1991, Turkmenistan's agriculture could be characterized as a cotton monocul-ture. Half the cropped land was under cotton and the country, with a share of about 0.5 percent of arable land in the USSR, supplied more than 15 percent of total cotton production in from official statistical sources, a 2001 survey of private farmers, and a 2002 survey of leaseholders in peasant associations. The surveys encompassed 144 private farmers (14 percent of the farmers reporting to Turkmen statistical organs in 2000) and 1,100 leaseholders (0.3 percent of all leaseholders in the country). The private farmers were sampled at random from a national list of about 1,000 farms reporting to statistical organs. The leaseholders were sampled by a two-stage procedure: 110 peasant associations were selected at random from a national list of 592 associations and 10 leaseholders were then sampled at random in each association. Both surveys were conducted in face-to-face interviews by independent private interviewers using detailed multi-part questionnaires. The authors wish to thank anonymous reviewers for insightful comments.

Agricultural transition in Uzbekistan, as in all CIS countries, is driven by a process of land reform, which involves redistribution of land among producers and concomitant changes in farm structure. In this article we review the process of land reform since Uzbekistan’s independence and examine its impacts on agricultural growth and rural family incomes. The analysis is based on official statistics and data from a farm-level survey carried out in 2007.