This book was written by different economists (mainly specialists in agriculture and development) and Romanian officials of agriculture. It contains economic analysis of the transition process of the Romanian agriculture in the last decade, the prognosis for the future, and is not anthropological. However, this book is helpful to anyone who wants to know more about the restructuring of agriculture in Romania and in the Eastern Europe in general, and about the role of the European Union in this process. This book provides the reader with various economic data and demonstrates how different fields of agriculture and agricultural policy are connected with each other. Because of their economic focus, the different authors of the book do not go deep into social processes; instead they give a statistically argued analysis of recent changes and developments in Romanian agriculture.
In the introduction, written by Kenneth J. Thompson, the reader receives a good overview of the history of the Romanian agriculture and the micro- and macroeconomic context which influenced its development. Thompson outlines the main aspects of government policy which are essential in order to understand the following chapters. This overview also provides good material to compare agricultural decollectivization and restructuring in Romania with similar processes in other former socialist countries. Many processes resemble the developments of the early 1990s in Estonia, for example, such as the voucher system (p.6), which was popular in the decollectivization process in many former east block countries, and the decrease of the GDP (p. 2-3) that influenced peoples’ decision to ‘return to the land’ also in Romania. Still, there were several specific features in the agricultural transition in Romania which were influenced by the World Bank and EU Common Agriculture Policy (p. 11-13). The interplay of these two institutions with the Romanian government is analysed in the next chapter by Sophia Davidova and John Lingard, who show how subsidies and price structures channelled the development of the trade orientation in Romania.
The 3rd chapter by Marian Rizov and Johan F.M.Swinnen is valuable for an anthropologist (and others) who is interested in the property regime of agriculture. The authors analyse the current situation and also briefly describe of the property relations in the socialist period. As for the recent developments, the authors outline several categories (age, human capital, alternative source of income, land tenure, etc.) which had impacts on private farming at the end of 20th century.
In order to obtain a general understanding of the book’s subject, the reader should pay attention to the next chapters about the general financial situation and position of banks toward the investments in the private farming (Chapter 5, Christine Coulomb and Sophia Davidova), and how EU policy and programs influence agriculture outside the EU (Chapter 7 and 9, Paul Webster, John Lingard, Lionel Hubbard and Adriana Cristoiu, andMarc Duponcel). It is important to obtain some background knowledge on this influencial side of the agricultural transition because in many countries I know (Latvia, Estonia, Poland) there is a discussion on this issue at the national level.
The book ends with quite a pessimistic summary (Kenneth J. Thompson), which states that although Romania is in a good position in terms of location, transport network, climate and natural resources, the future of the agriculture is uncertain because of shortage of fuel, machinery, irrigation and legal infrastructure. At the beginning of the review I stressed that this book is not written from an anthropological point of view, and therefore some conclusions are rather questionable for me. The authors prefer the concept of the agriculture how we know it from the Western hemisphere and support the idea of clearly defined and controllable land ownership (p. 220), specialised large scale enterprises (p. 221) and transparent legal situation. Many works of anthropologists have proven that transparency and clearly defined borders are difficult to reach in the transformation process of former socialist countries and are in many cases unwanted by the actors themselves (see Bridger and Pine 1998, Cartwright 2001, Creed 1998, Kaneff 2002). Lack of transparency does not necessarily hinder (quasi-) capitalist activities of farmers and other agricultural enterprises. They use methods and networks which are sometimes difficult to measure in numbers and this can bring unexpected changes also in the future development. However, anyone researching the agricultural sector in postsocialist areas will find much interesting data and thoughtful analyses in this round-up in Romanian Agriculture.
References Cited
Bridger, S., and F. Pine. 1998. Surviving Post-Socialism. Local strategies and regional responses in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Routledge Studies in Societies in Transition. London and New York: Routledge.
Cartwright, A. L. 2001. The Return of the Peasant. Land reform in post-Communist Romania. Aldershot, Burlington USA, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate, Darthmouth.
Creed, G. W. 1998. Domesticating Revolution. From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Kaneff, D. 2002. Why people don't die 'naturally' any more: changing relations between 'the individual' and 'the state' in post-socialist Bulgaria. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8:89-105.