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This chapter examines how different reforms were chosen and implemented in various transition countries. It focuses on price and subsidy policy reform, property rights reform and farm restructuring, and liberalization and the development of market institutions.

This chapter explains the effects of the different reforms which were chosen and implemented in various transition countries. It provides evidence on the effects of price and subsidy policy reform, property rights reform and farm restructuring, liberalization and the development of market institutions, and on the effects of the interaction between these reforms.

This chapter considers the public career of Mary Ann Gilbert (1776–1845), a landed proprietor in Eastbourne in East Sussex where she established herself as a leading agricultural expert and poor law reformer. Her activities had a substantial impact on local parochial politics and her work was cited and discussed in parliamentary reports and government commissions. Gilbert personifies the overlapping themes of landownership, local influence, and personal authority. Her ability to construct herself as a female expert through cultural confidence and specialized knowledge, her employment of the varying modes of epistolary exchange, her use of ephemeral print culture, and her relationship with parochial government all emerge as particularly important themes. This chapter examines the salience of dynastic subjectivity as well as Gilbert's public spheres, her marriage, and her role in agricultural reform and the allotment movement during her time.

This chapter analyzes the food grain supply chain in India and China. It starts by examining the changing contexts of food security in both countries, and the implications for domestic reforms of agricultural institutions. It then reviews how these reforms have impacted the ability of these countries to provide food grain availability to poorer sections of the population. It introduces a supply chain methodology to map out how food grain procurement and distribution takes place within the agricultural institutional framework in India and China. The existing supply chains in the agricultural sector are subsequently reviewed to identify capacities and constraints in the supply chain. Finally, the chapter comments on the future implications of changes in the agricultural supply chain in both countries for food security and poverty reduction.

When the Czech Republic was still under the Communism regime, agriculture was still organized in collective farms and in large-scale states. By 1989, the last year of Communist rule, 174 state farms accounted for 29.2% of the total agricultural land (TAL) while 1,024 collective farms covered the remaining 70.4%. Private agriculture, which was mostly operated on a part-time basis, proved to be marginal since it only made up 0.4% of TAL. The ownership of various farm assets could be divided into three categories which involve state-owned assets, privately-owned assets, and non-land assets that were collectively owned by the members of collective farms. As such, post-Communist agricultural reform included the following: restitution, transformation, and privatization. This chapter focuses on the legislative framework passed by the Czech parliament which encompasses land tenure and land access as a result of the laws.

This chapter discusses the expansion of the bright leaf tobacco culture. By the 1840s, Caswell, Halifax, and Pittsylvania counties had an active contingent of modernizing planters' and farmers' intent on spreading the message of agricultural reform across the Southside. While the message of agricultural reform initially challenged the development of bright tobacco, in the end reform advice would encourage the new crop's diffusion. Following the Civil War, bright tobacco culture would contribute to many of the conditions that antebellum reformers feared—from catastrophic soil erosion to a decline in farm diversity and profits—but the reformers' message actually stimulated the prewar growth of the crop.

The term intimate landscape is used by photographers to refer to images that capture small portions of broad scenic landscapes while illustrating their interconnectedness. The intimate landscape framework informs a novel archaeological approach for examining discrete landscapes in and around dwelling sites. These household landscapes are dynamic spaces connected to diverse discourses on the individual, local, regional, and global scales. In chapter 6, Fogle studies the impact of a nineteenth-century, proslavery agricultural reform discourse on enslaved households and their associated landscapes at a South Carolina cotton plantation.

The immediate post-Famine period was marked by profound optimism about the potential of Irish agricultural development. For some improvers, agricultural practice offered a fertile ground upon which to plant the seeds of modernisation to facilitate fuller Irish integration into an international capitalist market economy. This chapter suggests that post-Famine agriculturists promoted new understandings of how to productively harness biological agro-material found on Irish farms during and after the Famine. It examines post-Famine scientific readings of the biology and physiology of crops, plants and animals and their subsequent promotion as an aid to Irish food production. In the 1850s, agricultural science was institutionalised via a state-supported network of agricultural schools and model farms aimed at all social classes. Ultimately, however, small farmers exhibited resistance and apathy towards these educational schemes for an assortment of social, political and practical reasons, a factor that restricted the socio-economic effectiveness of agricultural schools. By exploring these themes, this chapter reveals further connections made between food and national improvement while demonstrating that food production, as with consumption, evolved into a site of deep contestation between different Irish social groups and, sometimes, between colonising and colonised powers.

Gorbachev is often criticized for ignoring agriculture in his reforms. In fact, as this chapter shows, Gorbachev was an agriculture expert and sought to implement Chinese-style reforms to give individual households control over farm land. Gorbachev argued that China’s experience showed that private ownership improves agricultural productivity. Nonetheless, political conflict constrained Gorbachev’s ability to adopt Chinese-style agriculture reforms in the USSR. The agro-industrial lobby, which was represented by provincial leaders and by top Politburo officials in Moscow, stubbornly opposed decollectivizing farmland and cutting subsidies. Decollectivization would have benefitted farmers, but reforms threatened farm managers and the fertilizer and tractor industries. By 1991, Gorbachev finally succeeded in pushing through structural reforms, though opposition had managed to stall reform for five years and demanded higher subsidies that left a massive hole in the Kremlin’s budget.

This chapter examines the history of agricultural reforms in India. Agriculture is the most important sector of the Indian economy from the perspective of poverty alleviation and the related goal of employment generation. However, it is the one sector which has been largely left out of the process of economic liberalization and reforms initiated in July 1991. This chapter highlights various government interventions in agriculture, including those that kept Indian agriculture insulated from world markets. It also provides recommendations that can improve India's agricultural productivity. These include integration into world markets, improvement of irrigation system, subsidized provision of electricity to farmers, and rethinking and restructuring of public spending on agriculture.

This chapter examines the Rockefeller philanthropies' winding road into Mexico, beginning at the dawn of the twentieth century and culminating in the establishment of the Mexican Agricultural Program in 1943. The chapter opens with the General Education Board's early and quixotic attempt to overcome rural poverty in the US Cotton Belt, exploring the competing visions that fractured its campaign. Measured by its lofty rhetoric, that program was undeniably a failure. Still, during the agrarian ferment of the 1930s, an unexpected alliance of US southern reformers—led notably by ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels—pushed the Rockefeller Foundation to replicate its earlier efforts in Mexico. By 1943, when the foundation formally partnered with the Mexican government to work in agricultural reform, that push would reach its successful climax.

This chapter focuses on food insecurity in Egypt beyond the preoccupation with macroeconomic policy’s role in facilitating food to meet local consumption needs. It discusses how agricultural reform since the mid-1980s shaped food insecurity, rural development and small farmers’ livelihoods. It examines agricultural modernisation, and how different strategies have been shaped not simply by government policy, but by patterns of capital accumulation in Egypt that have underpinned it. It explores the role farmers and the rural landless played in the context of the 25 January 2011 Egyptian uprising; and how rural social classes may play an important part in the continuing struggles for deeper democracy in contemporary Egypt. It argues that food security can only be understood by exploring how rural relations of production and reproduction are shaped by political and economic power and patterns of land ownership, and how Egypt’s agricultural sector is unevenly integrated into the world economy.

Projects aimed at improving agriculture in the Soviet Union during the post-war period focused particularly on the Ukraine, the Black Earth Region south of Moscow, and central Russia. This chapter focuses on how agricultural reforms were able to be instituted in a place where agriculture was a secondary consideration, such as in this case Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia. It examines the history of agriculture and collective farms in Irkutsk Oblast. The chapter observes that the Soviet government had limited options in terms of enhancing the productive efficiency or capacity of that area. The chapter also tells how the Ministry of Agriculture promoted hunting programs, and how this enabled the Soviet state to successfully redefine its political and economic control over Irkutsk Oblast.

We discuss the Danish agricultural reforms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which both preceded and went alongside the evolution of the dairy sector. These reforms included the abolition of adscription, a mild form of serfdom, which bound peasants to the land, as well as the abolition of communal land ownership (enclosure). We present the long and tortuous progress of these reforms, and how they eventually led to a countryside based on individual property rights over land and labor. These reforms of course made possible the eventual founding of the cooperatives, but also reflected the general enlightenment of the elites. We explain that they also led to losers, however, as a new class of cotters and landless laborers was created. Finally, the enclosure of the traditional landed estates laid the basis for much of the innovation discussed in subsequent chapters, as traditional manors with rights to coerced labor and tax privileges were converted into large farms.

The history of agriculture in the Soviet Union has been marked by the rapid collectivization drive that forced farmers in the country into state-run cooperatives and the subsequent famine that resulted in the death of six million people, a great number of whom were Ukrainians. State officials, entangled with the problem of backward rural mentality, blamed Soviet peasants who did not want to support modernizing reforms for their troubles. This chapter analyses the failure of these agricultural reforms. It is noted that the inability of the state to anticipate, understand, and respond to the complex agricultural environment prevented rural advancement. Relative to this, American specialists Guy Bush and George Heikens have effectively illuminated the reality of life in the Soviet Union following collectivization.

This chapter analyzes Chinese rural development in the reform era. Before the 2000s, China's reform-era agricultural policy could be summed up as decollectivization followed by resource extraction and neglect. Between 1978 and 1984, the replacement of the people's commune system with household contract farming resulted in historic poverty reduction. After 1984, however, central government investment and growth rates in agriculture started to decline. As was the case during the Maoist period, local governments were expected to be self-reliant and raise their own funds for development. Under pressure to impress higher-level officials with economic achievements, many local governments resorted to imposing heavy taxes on farmers. These went toward developing industry instead of providing public goods. In 2004, China had entered a new era in which “industry should nurture agriculture, and the cities should support the countryside.” Two policies in particular came to embody this principle. First, after a period of experimentation with rural tax reform, the central government decided in 2006 to completely eliminate agricultural taxes. Second, a policy called Building a New Socialist Countryside was introduced as the top domestic priority of the eleventh five-year plan (2006–2010).

This chapter develops and analyzes a new structural model of variable input use, production, acreage allocations, capital investment, and consumption choices in the U.S. farm sector. The theoretical framework identifies and incorporates the restrictions that are necessary and sufficient to estimate variable input use using only observable data and to aggregate from micro units of behavior to county-, state-, region-, or country-levels of data and analyses. The chapter defines, specifies, and estimates a dynamic life-cycle model of decision making under risk in order to discipline the model and associated parameter estimates for risk aversion in agricultural production and investment decisions with the interactions that naturally occur among the available alternative investment and savings opportunities in the economy.

This chapter focuses on the impact that the massive reform projects of the eighth shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune had on the various fields of knowledge, including honzōgaku. These included a relaxation on the state control over imported books, which favored the introduction of various Western book on natural history, the financing of honzōgaku schools, herbal expeditions, and surveys of natural riches. In the long run, the state involvement in natural studies would impart to this disciple a utilitarian aspect that would fully develop only a century later.