Development and evolution of forms of cooperation in Hungarian agriculture during the 20th century

Troján, Szabolcs – Csizmadia, Máté – Csordás, S. Tibor

Keywords: intensive farming, concentration, financial cooperation, integration, producer organisations

The forms of cooperation which are common in Hungarian agriculture are fundamentally different from those characteristic of Western Europe. This was caused principally by the collectivisation process implemented after the Second World War. Our paper presents the various forms of cooperation found in Hungarian agriculture and food industry, form the beginning of the 20th century to our present days.
The socialist reorganisation of Hungarian agriculture resulted in close ties between the entities engaged in agriculture and food industry, creating straightforward product chains and enabling the modernisation of production processes. Co-ops and state farms, as well as production systems and agro-industrial corporations employed state-of-the-art technologies of the time, and their production was comparable to that of the rest of the world.
After the change of political system in 1989, the tights product chains between agriculture and food industry in Hungary became fragmented. Industrialized agricultural production was replaced by farming carried out on small estates, leading to a considerable loss of efficiency and competitiveness in agriculture. In the years between 2000 and Hungary’s accession to the European Union in 2004, the establishment of forms of cooperation commonly used in Western Europe, such as Producer Groups, gained momentum. Currently, in 2008, the share of Producer Groups in agricultural production is not significant.

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