State Farms
Through consolidation of 370 previously existing state agricultural enterprises, the farm reorganization of February 1971 created 145 larger enterprises subordinated to the Department of State Agriculture in the Ministry of Agriculture. In addition, seventy-four state agricultural enterprises for fattening hogs, raising poultry, and producing feeds and hothouse vegetables were subordinated to four specialized trusts. The consolidation increased the average size of the state enterprises from 16,000 acres to 34,600 acres of farmland. The enterprises comprised about 3,000 state farms on an area of over 5 million acres. Romanian sources reported that the reorganization was intended to bring management closer to production, to ensure improvement in all aspects of farm operation, to intensify concentration and specialization of production, and gradually to attain agro-industrial integration.
In official terminology, state agricultural enterprises will operate on the principle of economic self-administration. The enterprises will be responsible for their subordinate farms and will supervise operations according to the principle of internal economic administration. Briefly, this means that the agricultural enterprises and the farms must be financially self-sustaining, that directors of enterprises and farms are accorded a certain measure of discretion in planning and organizing production and in the use of resources, and that financial rewards beyond the normal pay accrue to each farm's managerial personnel and workers in accordance with the farm's own performance, regardless of the results obtained by other farms within the enterprise or by the parent enterprise itself.
Individual state farms, nevertheless, have no juridical status or bank accounts, nor may they enter into direct relation with other economic entities outside the state agricultural enterprise of which they are a part. In large measure, they remain subject to the direction of the enterprise management. Information on the division of authority between the agricultural enterprises and the Department of State Agriculture in the ministry is not available. Complaints have been voiced in the Romanian press about unwarranted interference by higher authorities in the management of both the farms and the agricultural enterprises.
Workers on state farms and other state agricultural units are salaried employees of the state, entitled to paid annual vacations, social security and medical assistance, allocations for children, age or disability pensions, and various other benefits provided by law for employees of state enterprises. During slack periods, workers may be allowed up to 120 days of unpaid vacation per year, without losing seniority or other rights.
State farms are the best endowed agricultural units in the country. Although they included only about 17 percent of the arable land in 1969, they possessed almost 28 percent of the tractors, 24 percent of the grain combines, and similar proportions of other major types of farm machinery. Moreover, they received more than 37 percent of the chemical fertilizers delivered to agriculture and farmed almost 33 percent of the irrigated land. As a consequence, per-acre yields on state farms have been generally higher than yields on collective farms.
Agricultural Mechanization Enterprises
The bulk of the mechanized operations on collective farms has been performed for payment in cash and in kind by specialized state enterprises for the mechanization of agriculture, which control a large share of the country's farm machinery and tractors. This policy has provided the state with an added lever of control over the farms; it was used in the past to extract a substantial volume of farm produce for the state through payments in kind for services rendered. For political reasons, and also because of the weak financial position of many collective farms, the government has not followed the example of other Eastern European states that disbanded their machine-tractor stations and sold the equipment to the farms.
In 1969 the agricultural mechanization enterprises controlled 70 percent of the available farm tractor power and an even larger share of the tractor-drawn and self-propelled farm machinery. State farms owned virtually all the balance. Collective farms, which cultivated 75 percent of the arable land, possessed only 1.6 percent of the tractor power and a still smaller proportion of major farm machinery items.
As of January 1, 1971, the system of agricultural mechanization enterprises was reorganized with a view to improving the quality of their operations. Forty enterprises were established throughout the country—one in each of the thirty-nine counties and one in the Bucharest area—with 772 subordinate stations to service an equal number of farm associations and about 4,500 sections to work with individual collective farms. The main stated task of the mechanization sections is to introduce and expand the mechanization of plant and animal production on the farms.