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Romania Administration
Romanian agriculture in the late 1980s remained the
most
centralized in Comecon. A complicated and constantly
changing
network of overlapping state and party agricultural
bureaucracies
had evolved over the previous four decades. The Ministry
of
Agriculture set production targets and oversaw the
distribution of
resources among the judete. It became the frequent
target
of Ceausescu's ire and received much of the blame for
agriculture's persistent problems. In 1978 the Congress of
the
Higher Councils of Socialist Agricultural Units and of the
Whole
Peasantry and its permanent bureau, the National
Agricultural
Board, were established. The apparent purpose of the new
body was
to approve and thereby legitimize the PCR's policy
directives. The
following year a joint party and state agricultural
policy-making
body was established--the National Council For
Agriculture, Food
Industry, Forestry, and Water Management. Meeting as
frequently as
four times a year in plenary session, the council provided
a forum
for Ceausescu to address thousands of agricultural
specialists and
functionaries.
In 1979 pursuant to the guidelines of the New Economic
and
Financial Mechanism enacted the previous year, a network
of agroindustrial councils was set up to coordinate the
activities of as
many as five state and cooperative farms in an area served
by a
single state machinery station. A Stalinist holdover
abandoned in
the rest of Eastern Europe, these stations controlled
access to
tractors and other heavy equipment. In the 1980s the agroindustrial councils gained additional powers to coordinate
agricultural production, food processing, research, and
agricultural training. After 1980 judet and village
people's councils bore responsibility for fulfilling
agricultural
production targets set in Bucharest. In each judet
a
General Directorate for Agriculture and Food Industry made
assignments to individual state and cooperative farms.
Data as of July 1989
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