About domestic agricultural co-operation in the “Gazdálkodás” journal I.

Tenk, Antal – Troján, Szabolcs

Keywords: first steps, croft production, forms of co-operation, integration attempts

The “Gazdálkodás” covered ambitions for agricultural co-operative integration in this country continually since 1958. Following the organisation of so called “socialist” large scale farms in the 1950’s the topic gained increasingly more space and was covered in the journal increasingly more frequently. First of such articles dealt with possibilities of co-operation between croft farming and socialist co-operatives, but as time elapsed a number of studies was published on the spread and outcome of various forms of co-operation within the co-operative system.
Articles did not just cover practical experiences, but they also reported the proceedings of domestic and international conferences in detail. Furthermore the “Gazdálkodás”, attempting full coverage, continually published studies of the domestic situation as well as those of foreign experts writing about the topic and the summaries of relevant books, assisting in this way the orientation and attitude of home specialists about already operating or desirable forms of co-operation in agriculture. In these articles some authors at least in the beginning treated the various concepts of co-operation quite freely and frequently described cases of integration, which in these days would not considered integration at all.
From the beginning of the 1970’s more and more studies deal not only with co-operation between several co-operatives and their experiences, but also with new forms of co-operation between co-operatives and state farms, the so called inter-enterprise co-operation emphasising their significance. The new system of economic administration introduced in 1968 gave a large impetus to this process whose favourable effects were mostly felt in agriculture. The standardisation of terms concerning integration was achieved in a scientific conference held in Budapest in 1974 with the participation of economists from the seven socialist countries belonging to the Soviet sphere of influence. The new economic mechanism favoured rapidly spreading co-operation in agriculture.