Agriculture is organized on the Stalinist Soviet model: all activity is centrally planned, and farm operations are carried out by state and collective farms. Government policy has accorded a high priority to the expansion and modernization of agricultural production as a means of attaining self-sufficiency in foods. In an effort to obviate the historical dependence on grain imports, the government has placed special emphasis on increasing the output of bread grains, which furnish the bulk of the people's diet, and on a rapid rise in the production of potatoes as a substitute for bread.
Great importance is attached to the expansion of industrial crops, such as cotton, tobacco, sugar beets, and sunflowers, in order to provide raw materials for the growing domestic industries, in addition to maintaining traditional exports. Expansion of grape vineyards, olive groves, and other fruit and vegetable growing has also been promoted to develop larger exportable surpluses. According to official data, farm output increased half again as fast as the population between 1950 and 1967, but it is still inadequate to supply the country's minimum needs for bread and livestock products.
The government's ambitious farm modernization program has been imposed on tradition-bound peasants averse to rapid change. A large part of the land improvement and irrigation work has been accomplished through mass mobilization of peasants and of the urban population for so-called voluntary work on the model of the Chinese coolie system. Socialization of the land has had a deleterious effect on work incentives, with a consequent lag in the planned growth of agricultural production. Measures adopted by the government to ensure better work performance on the collective farms did not prove sufficiently effective, and a scaling down of the five-year plan target for agricultural production could therefore not be avoided.
To provide the additional acreage needed for crop expansion, large-scale programs of land reclamation and melioration have been executed. At the same time, heavy stress has been laid on the improvement of farm techniques and on mechanization as means for increasing yields and production. A planned expansion of livestock herds and of the output of livestock products has been hampered by inadequate incentives for peasants and by a shortage of fodder. The agricultural potential is limited by the predominance of rugged mountain terrain and by frequent spring droughts that cause extensive damage to crops. To minimize the adverse effects of the droughts, an extensive irrigation system is being developed.
In 1967 the area of land in agricultural use, excluding forests, roads, and homesites, amounted to about 3.0 million acres, or 43 percent of the country's total area. More than half of the agricultural land was in unimproved natural pastures, with an additional small acreage in natural meadows. Cultivated land bearing field and tree crops totaled about 1.4 million acres, of which about 1.1 million acres were arable land, equivalent to about two-thirds of an acre per capita. Almost half of the cultivated land was located in hilly and mountainous zones, which are less productive than the coastal plains. The agricultural acreage was expanded by 3 percent between 1950 and 1967, but a significant further expansion is precluded by the country's rugged terrain.
A high priority has been placed by the leadership on expanding the cultivated area and raising its productivity through land reclamation, soil improvement, and irrigation. Most of this work has been accomplished manually, through mobilization of large numbers of people for massive projects and with the participation by members of the armed forces. Between 1950 and 1969 the area of cultivated land rose by almost one-half to a total of more than 1.4 million acres, at least 185,000 acres of which have been reclaimed since 1965. The bulk of the increase in cultivated land was achieved at the expense of natural pastures and meadows, the area of which has declined by about 265,000 and 50,000 acres, respectively, since 1950. About 70 percent of the increase in cultivated land was added to arable acreage.
By the end of 1969, however, the reclamation work had fallen behind the five-year plan schedule. In early 1970 the government therefore took special measures to ensure that the entire 285,000-acre reclamation program would be completed as planned, bringing the total cultivated acreage to about 1.5 million acres. Very substantial progress in this endeavor was reported to have been achieved by the end of March, largely through the mobilization for this task of about 200,000 persons from urban and rural areas.
Expansion of the irrigation network has proceeded somewhat more slowly than planned, with the use of the same mass construction methods. As reported by the State Planning Commission to the People's Assembly in mid-February of 1970, about 140,000 acres had been brought under irrigation during the 1966-69 period, and approximately 55,000 more acres were to be added in 1970. These figures imply a total irrigated area of about 645,000 acres in 1969 and about 700,000 acres planned for 1970—an increase of 2,470 acres over the original five-year plan target. Attainment of this goal would require a construction volume in 1970 equal to the total achieved during the first two years of the five-year period and almost half again as large as the volume in 1968. About half the arable acreage was irrigable in 1969.
The agricultural organization consists of two types of farms: state farms, operated under the direction of either the central or the local government, and collective farms. State farms, modeled after the sovkhozes of the Soviet Union, were established beginning in 1945 on lands confiscated from large landowners and foreign concessionaires and contain some of the most productive land in the country. Managers and workers of state farms are salaried government employees, who may receive special bonuses for superior production achievements.
Collective farms were organized through the forcible consolidation of private holdings. Begun in 1946 against strong peasant resistance, collectivization did not assume major proportions until 1955 and was virtually completed only in 1968 with the consolidation of remote mountain villages. The basic features of the collective farm are: complete government control; collective use of the land and other principal means of production; obligatory common work by the members, based on established minimum work norms and enforced through economic and other sanctions; and distribution of the net income to members on the basis of the quantity and quality of work performed.