Agricultural privatisation and farm restructuring in Slovenia

This chapter studies the process of agricultural privatisation and farm restructuring in Slovenia. In the pre-Communist period the Slovenian farm structure was rather egalitarian and was dominated by small and medium sized farms. Under Communism, the process of collectivisation failed and small private family farms remained the dominant organisational structure in Slovenian agriculture. However, the Communist regime imposed institutional limitations on size and organisational changes of the peasant farms as well as on their economic activities. As in Poland and in the rest of former Yugoslavia, a bimodal farm structure of small-scale, traditional private peasants and large- scale state farms (in former Yugoslavia usually called ‘social farms’ ¹ resulted under the Slovenian Communist regime. The state farms mostly used capitalintensive technologies and were in large-scale production units. More labourintensive agricultural production was in small-scale family farms, which made up the major share of output and factor use in agriculture. Several institutional regulations and economic policies discriminated against the private sector, causing a more part-time orientation of private farms (Bojnec, 1994).