|
Yugoslavia Agriculture
Yugoslavia has abundant fertile farmland. Throughout the
postwar period, the private sector predominated in both amount of
land tilled and production. In 1987 the 2.6 million privately
owned farms in Yugoslavia accounted for 84 percent of all
agricultural land. The social sector in agriculture included
large agroindustrial complexes, or combines, which also processed
the food they produced and dominated the food processing
industry. The agricultural social sector also included state
farms, owned and operated directly by the state, and general
agricultural cooperatives. Most of the farms in the social sector
were located in the north, in the Pannonian Plains of Vojvodina
and eastern Croatia. All government agricultural investments and
subsidies were reserved for state farms and general agricultural
cooperatives; this meant that social sector farming was usually
more efficient and more technologically advanced than private
sector farming (see
table 14, Appendix).
Over 65 percent of arable land in Yugoslavia was devoted to
the cultivation of cereals, particularly corn, wheat, and rye.
The principal nonfood crop was tobacco, which supplied the
domestic cigarette industry; hemp, cotton, and hops also were
widely cultivated and processed domestically. Almost all the
cotton and more than half of the tobacco came from Macedonia,
while more than 60 percent of hops were grown in Slovenia.
Cooperative farms on the Pannonian Plains produced corn, wheat,
sugar beets, potatoes, and sunflowers. All regions of the country
produced wine, each area with its own characteristic varieties.
Yugoslavia was also known for cultivation of orchard fruits,
particularly plums, apples, pears, and peaches.
Pigs, sheep, horses, and cattle were the main types of
livestock raised in Yugoslavia. Pigs and poultry were raised for
meat, cattle for meat and dairy products, sheep mainly for wool.
Serbia was the largest pig-breeding area; the large Muslim
populations of Bosnia and Hercegovina and Kosovo limited pig
breeding in those regions. Sheep raising was centered in the
uplands of Serbia and Macedonia, beef and dairy cattle in the
northern republics and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Live animals and
meat products were two of Yugoslavia's largest export items in
the late 1980s.
Irrigation, flood control, drainage works, and facilities for
produce distribution and storage were adequate only in some
regions of Yugoslavia in 1990. Construction of such agricultural
infrastructure required heavy capital expenditure that was often
unavailable because of the chronic undercapitalization of
Yugoslav agriculture. Thus, Yugoslav farming enterprises remained
highly vulnerable to weather conditions in the 1980s. For this
reason, and because of population growth and higher nutritional
expectations after World War II, Yugoslavia was a net importer of
agricultural products through the entire postwar period. The
United States, the Soviet Union, Australia, and Canada were
Yugoslavia's main suppliers of food, mostly grain.
In the 1980s, the Yugoslav agricultural sector performed
inefficiently. The food distribution system was weak, farm
incomes were low, and until the 1990 reform agricultural prices
were under strict control. Moreover, because most investment
funds were earmarked for the social sector, state farms showed
higher yields than farms in the much larger private sector. State
agricultural investment policy thus prevented application of
modern agricultural methods in over 80 percent of agricultural
activity, resulting in inefficient use of large amounts of
agricultural machinery and artificial fertilizers. The
longstanding imbalance of agricultural investment and the
importance of the private sector were recognized in the 1980s by
the federal government
Green Plans (see Glossary), which devoted
special attention and funding to agriculture and officially
recognized the private sector as the most important supplier of
farm produce. The Green Plans did increase crop yields somewhat,
but in the late 1980s they were unable to overcome the inherent
weakness of investment and infrastructure policy.
Data as of December 1990
|
