Transition to smallholder agriculture in Central Asia

Abstract

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.

Temporal and Spatial Changes in Crop Water Use Efficiency in Central Asia from 1960 to 2016

“…This resulted in an increase in sown area, from 34 × 10 6 ha to 43 × 10 6 ha. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred simultaneously with political and management system reform in Central Asia [7,8]. A large amount of cultivated land was abandoned due to a lack of labor and agricultural machinery, such as in northern Kazakhstan [9].…”

The “left behind”: Smallholders in contemporary Russian agriculture

“…The decline in CEE nations is somewhat surprising given that many former communist nations joined the European Union in the “big bang” of 2004 and became eligible for European Union subsidies and improved access to markets. Smallholders in Russia, however, stand in stark contrast to Central Asian states, where smallholder access to land and food production has increased (Lerman & Sedik, ). Their paper in this symposium argues that Central Asia is a success in terms of individualization of land and smallholder production.…”

Introduction to symposium: Smallholders in communist and postcommunist societies

“…Even with an increase in land individualization in CEE, the majority of individual smallholders operated in conditions similar to the communist period, which is to say that they continued to have little land and insecure access to capital and supply chains, and they were not closely integrated with external markets (Mathijs & Noev, 2004). The paper by Lerman and Sedik (2018) in this symposium, however, shows not only an increase in land usage by smallholders but also a rise in productivity and food output, surpassing that of corporate farms.…”