Land Reform in Romania – a Never-Ending Story

Wim van Meurs Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story

Introduction In the past ten years, history has demonstrated its power in the question of peasants and the agrarian problem during the post-communist transformation process. History has seemed to repeat itself in more than one way: rather than learning from (negative) past experiences in solving the social and economic dilemmas of rural modernisation, political leaders have tended to repeat past mistakes, partly because they were under the same structural pressures as had existed after the First World War and after the communist takeover. Such mistakes are to focus on the question of land workers (chestiunea agrara – the social aspects of rural modernisation) and political tactics, while ignoring the agrarian problem (probleme agricola – the economic aspects, i.e. the need for a parallel modernisation of agricultural production in terms of equipment, infrastructure, and market orientation). In each instance, rulers have created the ideal peasant by decree: the smallholder of the inter-war period, the collective or state farm worker of the communist period, and again the restituted family farm of the 1990s. Yet, all three regimes have failed to address the problem of how to create the precon- ditions for a modernised and productive agricultural sector. A related mistake has been the general system-independent inclination to rely on state intervention and control when it comes to changing agriculture. For villages, the consequences of post-communist privatisation and the transition to a market economy are quite different from those for cities: in the city, privatisation and the liberalisation of the economy mean business opportunities for all and the promising of new patterns of ownership. By contrast, in rural communities privatisation generally means the restitution of property to former owners. Thereby, as the pri- mary means of production – arable land – is a fixed commodity, future patterns of ownership seem to be pre-ordained. In particular in south-east European states, land reform and modernisation of agriculture are pivotal to the post-communist transformation. Not only does an improvement of agricultural production contribute significantly to the well-being of the population but, for most south-east European countries, agricultural products also constitute one of the few realistic export options in a competitive world market. Do- mestically, past reforms of property rights, including expropriations and nationalisation, have given the agrarian question an additional ethnic dimension. With its con- flicting claims and incompatible concepts of justice – ranging from historical property rights and concepts of social equality to arguments of economic profitability and com- petitiveness – land reform is central to the democratisation process and the consolida- tion of civil society in general.

The history of land reform Like in most other central and east European countries, post-communist land reform in Romania constitutes the fourth phase of such reform in modern history. In the

2/ 99 South-East Europe Review S. 109 - 122 109 Wim van Meurs eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the gradual abolition of corvée1 and the liberation of peasants from the land marked the end of feudal relations in agriculture. Peasant unrest at the turn of this century and the spectre of the Russian Revolution led to a second reform of land ownership in most post-Versailles nation states. Fearing the revolutionary potential of the rural populations and their susceptibility to communist propaganda, most governments made the implementation of a more or less radical redistribution of land ownership one of their central objectives after World War I. The latifundia2 of the large landowners were broken up following the setting of limits to the ownership of arable land: the remaining land was confiscated by the state (although compensation payments were the rule) and sold or redistributed to (landless) peasant families. Thereafter, the peasant not only became the mythical symbol of national renaissance in the nation-building process, but also gained some political weight. Peasants’ parties became a political force to be reckoned with all over central and eastern Europe.

Regional differences in feudal agricultural relations One of the peculiarities of Romania in terms of the peasant question and agrarian reform is the large regional differences, for example in land ownership, natural conditions and legal regulation The relevance of these regional differences holds for the reform of feudal relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as for post- communist restitution policies in the 1990s. The main cause is the Ottoman occupation of two of the three Romanian Princi- palities: the Princes of Moldavia and Wallachia were vassals of the Sultan in Constan- tinople until 1878, but Transylvania became part of the Hapsburg Empire and shared the modernisation process of these lands. Moldavia and Wallachia remained autono- mous under Ottoman rule, so the land remained under the control of the native aristoc- racy (the boyars), who retained their estates and political power. As the boyars were exempted from tax, a heavy burden – payments and services to the landed nobility as well as most of the state taxes – rested on the peasants, who were usually serfs. The destruction wrought by the Russian-Turkish wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries aggravated the encumbrance of this truly feudal system and, by the early eighteenth century, serfs began to ﬂee to Transylvania and the Ukrainian lands beyond the Dniester river in large numbers. Therefore, the rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia introduced tax reforms to limit the ﬁscal exploitation of the peasantry and they even interfered in the delicate question of the relations between boyar and serf with regard to the land. Between 1746 and 1749, the state enforced the end of per- sonal bondage. Free peasants and serfs now both worked land belonging to a boyar on an agreed basis, making payments for the use of the land. The struggle between state and noble landowners, over both the enforcement of these limits to boyar power and the peasant payments, continued for more than a century. For the boyars, however,

1 Obligatory non-paid work for the feudal lord, amounting to as much as four working days a week for the whole peasant family. 2 The system of the farming of large land areas by tied workers under absentee landlords.

110 South-East Europe Review 2/ 99 Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story ownership of the estates was primarily a status issue: land management practices were directed towards the maximum exploitation of the peasants rather than increasing profits via the modernisation of production. Unlike their Transylvanian colleagues, the Moldavian and Wallachian large landowners lacked the stimulus and the capital for such an undertaking. Meanwhile, the Romanian peasants in Transylvania, over 70% of them serfs, were bled dry by high payments to the state, the church and the (Hungarian) nobility too. In 1784, a rising against the detested corvée was crushed. In the next year, however, serf- dom was formally abolished, allowing peasants to move as they wished if they had fulfilled their obligations to their feudal lords. In general, the hilly Transylvanian area was more appropriate for smallholders than the fertile black-earth plains of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were dominated by large estates. Industrial development, trade and the transfer of land from conservative noblemen to more wealthy market-oriented owners stimulated a relative modernisation of production. In view of the emancipation of the serfs in the 1848 revolution in the Hapsburg Empire and the radical Russian legislation of the 1860s, which liberated the serfs and gave them land, in 1864 the united principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia decided to act. Parliament passed an act giving peasants – who were already no longer legally tied to the estate, but were owed labour dues – private ownership of a plot of land in order to create an independent and prosperous class of small proprietors. The peasant paid the state for the plot and the state indemnified the boyar who had lost labour dues and corvée labour. The law failed its main purpose, as most plots were too small to sustain a family: the peasants were forced to work for the boyars who still controlled the common lands and, in the end, the law was even counter-productive. The principalities became an independent Romanian state in 1878, but Romania remained a land of large estates (with a strong tradition of absentee landlords in Wallachia) and a depressed peasantry. Small family farms remained a minority in agricultural production. Consequently, in 1907 the next spontaneous and threatening rising of the peasantry occurred in these parts of the Romanian lands. The preposter- ously uneven distribution of land had turned the peasant question into a political powder keg without achieving anything for the economic modernisation of agricultural production which would help solve the agrarian problem.

The 1907 peasant revolt and the 1920 land reforms Due to an increase in the rural population in the nineteenth century, family plots had become smaller and smaller: by the end of the century, 85% of peasants either had no land at all or too little to feed their family. Conversely, the 5,000 largest estates en- compassed more than half of arable land. Thus, most large landowners scarcely had a stake in modernising and raising agricultural productivity. The European agrarian cri- sis (due to the import of American grain) aggravated the situation of the rural population. In 1907, the discontent of the peasants turned to violence against the landowners. After the suppression of the rebellion, Parliament began to discuss the necessity of di- viding the large estates for the sake of the rural population and the national economy, thus preparing the ground for the practical measures taken after the First World War.

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The distribution of arable land was disproportionate indeed in Moldavia and Walla- chia: more than 95% of all farms held less than 40% of the arable land, while less than 1% of farms held more than half the land, leaving very little room for potentially competitive middle-sized enterprises (accounting for merely 4% of the farms and 9% of the land), as Table 1 indicates: Table 1 – Number and size of farms in Romania prior to World War I Farm size Percentage of arable land Percentage of farms < 5 hectares 2.9 77.2 5-10 hectares 37.1 18.2 10-50 hectares 8.8 3.7 50-100 hectares 2.1 0.3 > 100 hectares 48.9 0.5

Source: H.L. Roberts (1951): Romania. Political Problems of an Agrarian State, Table VIII, p. 362. Right after Lenin’s April theses (1917), the Romanian king promised a redistribution of the land in order to keep his peasant soldiers fighting. Motivated by the need to prevent peasants becoming communists rather than by an urge to achieve socio-economic advancement, land reform was imperative even for the first post-war Prime Minister, Alexandru Averescu, who had crushed the 1907 peasants’ rebellion as mili- tary commander. The land reforms of 1918-1921 turned out to be the most radical of their kind in the region: the large landowners were expropriated (and compensated) and 6 million hectares (i.e. one-third of the arable land) were handed over to 1.4 million peasants (who had to make payments for 25 years) or turned into community- controlled pastures and forests. The amount of expropriations and compensation regulations differed per region: they were more radical in Bessarabia (the former Russian region) and Transylvania (the former Hungarian region), where the estates had been in the hands of non-Romanians. However, the former sharecroppers – now small landowners – failed to change agriculture: scattered plots were not consolidated, and investments in machinery and better farming methods were never made. All in all, the main motives behind the reforms were of a nation-building or social policy nature, to the detriment of economic rationale: redistribution of the land was to solve the social problem of a growing landless rural over-population by the eviction of the Hungarian rural elite and the creation of a larger loyal class of Romanian proprietors. This, however, was merely a temporary and short-sighted solution to the peasant question, and did not encompass a strategy of economic modernisation for how an agrarian sector absorbing 5-10% of the workforce could feed the national population and contribute to the trade balance of the country. The struggle for political power in the enlarged Romanian state also played a sig- nificant role in the strategy of land reform. Under the circumstances of universal suf- frage, the younger political leaders of the National Liberal and National Peasant parties needed a class of small proprietors as a constituency. At the same time, they had

112 South-East Europe Review 2/ 99 Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story to break the political and economic hegemony of the large landowners united in the Conservative Party. At least in this respect, the reform was successful: the Conserva- tive Party of large landowners lost its constituency and its political power. Romanian, Russian (from Bessarabia), and Hungarian (from Transylvania) large landowners are known to have protested against the nationalisation of their estates and – even more vehemently – against the redistribution of land to smallholders and the landless rural population. Several enraged noblemen even petitioned the League of Nations, depict- ing peasants as incompetent drunks, turning previously ﬂourishing farms into sham- bles. Simultaneously, they depicted themselves as facing penury, although there were many ways around the 50 hectare limit of the land reform: orchards and forestry, for instance, remained unaffected by expropriation under the 1920 reforms. In a way, the boyars were right: the peasants turned out to be incompetent in modernising agricultural production. The distribution of small plots of land to the rural population proved to be only a temporary solution to the peasant question. Without investment in infrastructure and mechanisation, and without a class of middle-sized farming enterprises, the redistributive land reform may have won the ruling National Liberal Party the support of the rural population, but it failed to address the issue of economic modernisation. Table 2 – Number and size of farms in Romania (1930) Farm size Percentage of arable land Percentage of farms < 5 hectares 35.8 75.0 5-50 hectares 45.4 22.6 50-100 hectares 8.4 2.0 > 100 hectares 10.8 0.4

Source: Gábor Hunya (1987): “New Developments in Romanian Agriculture”, in East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 260, Table 1.

The collectivisation of agriculture Like in other central and east European countries, the communist takeover in Roma- nia led once more to a restructuring of agriculture: first, all landowners over 50 hectares were evicted and their land was distributed to the landless and crofters in 5 hectare plots. Only one-quarter of the expropriated land remained in the hands of the state at this stage. In contrast to the previous land reform, the reform law of March 23, 1945 involved not only the estates in Moldavia and Wallachia, but also this time the middle-size farms in Transylvania. The consequences for effective production, however, were similar: with only 6% of farms having more than 10 hectares after redistribution (and the standard plot having only 5), productivity declined dramatically. Like in the first land reform of 1918-1920, non-economic considerations were paramount: the distribution of the small plots was intended to win the rural population over to the new communist rulers while in the medium-term preparing the ground for collectivisation as the 5 hectares was seldom enough to feed the peasant’s family. In March 1949, the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party ordered the collec-

2/ 99 South-East Europe Review 113 Wim van Meurs tivisation of agriculture: the former royal estates, the estates of the monasteries, and some of the largest noble estates constituted the basis of the state farms. Thus, the state farms generally had the best land, the best equipment, and the largest plots. Con- sequently, agricultural workers on state farms were in many ways better off than their colleagues on collective farms: being workers rather than peasants, the employees of state farms did not have household plots, but only small gardens and they received an income similar to industrial wages. The share of arable land of the state farms reached 30% in the 1960s, but in the grain-producing plains of Wallachia and Moldavia it was as high as 40% or more. The plots of the smallholders were merged into collective farms, peasant associations and co-operatives, which became the dominant form of agricultural production within two years. A second collectivisation drive began with decree No. 115 (March 30, 1959) On the liquidation of all remnants of every form of human exploitation in agriculture in order to achieve a continuous rise in the material and cultural standard of living of the working peasantry and the development of socialist construction. Thus, in 1962 the socialist restructuring of Romanian agriculture was declared complete. Private ownership of land was limited to garden plots and mountain meadows or other inaccessible regions inappropriate for collective farming. The garden or family plots were not only a constitutional right, but also a burden: the plots and the livestock on them had to be painstakingly registered. The duties in kind to the state calculated on this basis were set so high that some peasants were forced to buy additional products to fulﬁl them. De- spite the introduction of the MTS organisations, mechanisation never reached a level appropriate for modern agriculture: the machinery of the MTS was rented out to collectives in exchange for grain; while the separation of machine stations from agricultural production, and the MTS preference for large quantities over high quality machines, hampered the improvement of agricultural production, both in quantity and in quality. Table 3 – Growth in agricultural production on collective and state farms in Ro- mania (1960-1984) Period State farms Collective farms 1960-65 81% 19% 1965-70 29% 0% 1970-75 37% 35% 1975-80 13% 11% 1980-84 -1% -4%

Source: H.L. Roberts (1991): Romania. Political Problems of an Agrarian State, Table XIX, p. 370. Up until the late 1970s, Romanian economic policy was dominated by the imperative of rapid industrialisation. After the war, agricultural workers constituted about three quarters of the working population, but only in the 1970s did the industrialisation drive begin to absorb surplus rural labour in large quantities. Thus, apart from Al- bania, Romania was the last east European country to witness the phenomenon of modernisation. Within ten years, rural employment had shrunk from one-half to one-

114 South-East Europe Review 2/ 99 Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story third of the labour force. As a result of the lack of investment in infrastructure, crops, fertilisers and training, however, agricultural production failed to keep pace with the growing demands of the urban population. Typically, the political leadership tried to remedy these incongruencies by stricter administrative controls, the centralisation of price and product regulation, and a flood of decrees – the same method that had failed in the 1930s. Central planning not only prescribed production figures to be (over-)fulfilled, but also determined when sowing or harvesting had to start! The austerity policy of the 1980s aimed at paying off the foreign debt relied heav- ily on the agricultural sector: as agricultural products constituted the largest part of exports to western countries, the priority of industrialisation was partly revised and investment in agriculture stepped up. Nevertheless, in 1980 Romania ranked 20th (out of 23 European countries) in agricultural production per hectare, despite the objec- tively good quality of the soil. The management of the household plots constitutes a telling example of the communists’ preference for administrative control over material incentives: the size of the plots was fixed at 0.15 hectares per active family member, livestock was limited to 1 cow, 3 pigs, and 13 sheep. In total, the family plots constituted about 8% of arable land. Added to the 5% of arable land belonging to non-collectivised farms in highland regions, Romania had, at 13%, the third largest agricultural private sector (after Yugo- slavia and Poland, of course). In the mid-1980s, the restrictions on animal keeping were replaced by strictly calculated deliveries to the state (see below). The goal remained the maximisation of centralised production control and ever-stricter limits on the free market sales of agricultural products. Co-operative workers, however, derived half their income from their household plots, although their total income from household plots and co-operative works was some 50% less than the salaries of state farm employees. As workers in an inferior form of socialist production, their social benefits and pensions were virtually non-existent compared to the state sector.

Ceaușescu’s systematisation of agriculture In contrast to other socialist states, Romania witnessed yet another phase of socialist restructuring in agriculture: a 1974 law constituted the legal basis for the systematisation of agriculture in the late 1980s. The planned agro-industrial centres were intended to break up the traditional socio-economic structures of the villages and improve political-ideological and managerial control, as well as to achieve the ultimate equalisation of village and city, of industrial worker and peasant. Improving the effi- ciency of agriculture and rural structures was not unreasonable: traditionally, Roma- nia was a country of countless smaller and smallest villages (see Table 4). Further- more, improving the village infrastructure ought to have helped labour made surplus by the decline of Romanian industry to return to the villages from where it had come. After a short phase of reforms in 1982-1983 to cope with the deepening agrarian cri- sis, the Party returned to the universal remedy of more centralised control. Corre- spondingly, the drive towards autarky in foreign imports (to save foreign currency) was paired with a bureaucratic system of regional and local self-sufficiency. This system resulted in the production of all products in all regions, independent of the suita-

2/ 99 South-East Europe Review 115 Wim van Meurs bility of the soil and climatic circumstances, and with an inevitable decline in productivity and yield. The curbing of market and inter-regional relations contributed to an increasing disintegration of the agrarian economy in the second half of the 1980s. Thus, in practice the so-called second agrarian revolution proclaimed by the 1979 Party congress turned into an economic and social disaster. In 1988, the Party began erasing villages considered to be uneconomic and transferring peasants to new apartment buildings in the designated agro-industrial centres. The apartment buildings, however, not only lacked even the most basic sanitary facilities, but also failed to offer peasants the garden plots they had previously used to feed their family. In order to keep up his austerity programme – selling most of the agricultural harvest abroad in order to pay off his foreign debts, despite the disastrous food situation in the country – Ceaușescu had to get hold of the private production of the peasants. In 1986, the government formally declared all garden plots and all remaining non-collectivised farms (primarily in Transylvania and Banat) to be the property of the Socialist Republic of Romania and the Romanian people. The action taken against the presence of private property in agriculture as being contrary to socialist ideals ignored the fact that those private farms were far more productive than the state and the collective farms. Ac- counting for 4.5% of all arable land, 15.8% of fruit orchards, and 45% of grassland, they were responsible for more than 15% of Romania’s sheep and cows and produced a quarter of its fruit production. Thus, rather than improving the quality of rural livestock and enhancing productivity, Ceaușescu’s campaign aggravated the food situation in the country and triggered protests and passive resistance. Table 4 – Number of inhabitants per village in Romania (1988) Inhabitants Number of villages Percentage of all villages 1-500 5.673 44.% 501-1,000 3.465 26.9% 1,001-2,000 2.409 18.7% 2,001-4,000 1.041 8.1% > 4,000 303 2.3% Total 12.891 100.% Average number of inhabitants 997

Source: A. Budișteanu (1988): Revista Economica, No. 24 (June 17), p. 4. Protests in the higher Party echelons led by high ranking communists of the oldest generation shared Ceaușescu’s belief in the socialist transformation of nature and mankind, but detested his disrespect for Romanian national traditions and rural culture. The protests had led to a moderation and slowing-down of the systematisation campaign by the end of 1988. Ultimately, it was one of the main reasons for the much publicised “Letter of the Six”, published on March 10, 1989, the ﬁrst sign of protest within the Romanian Communist Party leadership against Ceaușescu’s rule and thus constituting a nail in his cofﬁn. International protests also condemned the destruction of Romanian rural culture and architecture (more than the fate of the peasants), but fo-

116 South-East Europe Review 2/ 99 Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story cused most on the minority aspect. Typically, as the private farms targeted by Ceaușescu’s campaign were concentrated in the same parts of the country as the Hun- garian and German minorities, suspicions were bound to arise as to the ethnic motives behind the seemingly ideologically and economically motivated campaign: were Ger- man and Hungarian villages over-represented among those shortlisted for removal? The December 1989 revolution, however, stopped the second agricultural revolution short and opened a new chapter in the never-ending story of land reform in Romania.

Post-Communist land reform Despite the ideologically-driven process of forced industrialisation, Romania remained to a large extent an agrarian state: in 1989, two-thirds of the territory was farming land; in 1985, 29% of Romania’s workers were still peasants (although it had been 77% in 1930); and in the 1980s agriculture was responsible for up to 20% of GDP. A series of (largely administrative) reform measures had failed to raise productivity and peasant incomes or to stop rural flight. Furthermore, the export of agricultural products had been used to acquire the hard currency to buy machines and tech- nology for Romania’s industries. Thus, the consequences of forced industrialisation and the relative neglect of agriculture are one of the legacies of communism for cur- rent Romania. Like the more moderate reforms of the inter-war period, communist agrarian policies failed to solve the dilemmas of rural modernisation. To make mat- ters worse, in some regions – most notably in Transylvania – agrarian policy had become associated with minority problems and rural planning. In general, however, the post-communist land reform process has created some problems of its own – both macroeconomically and in terms of farm management – adding to the historical dilemmas of the peasant question and the agrarian problem. Immediately after the December 1989 revolution, the National Salvation Front (FNS) introduced reform measures for the agricultural sector: the private plots of the members of collective farms were enlarged from 0.15 to 0.5 hectares. The possibilities for other citizens to lease plots of land were improved. The consequence was a kind of spontaneous privatisation in regions where private farming seemed to promise good proﬁts. In Moldavia and Wallachia, where production depended on the use of state-owned machinery and equipment, the collectives remained predominant. Con- versely, around the cities and in mountainous regions (in Transylvania), collective farming virtually came to an end. The splitting-up of land and livestock in Transylva- nia was sometimes based on old property rights (restitution claims) and sometimes on the years of work spent in the collective. Thus, the tendency was for a return to pre- war structures: private farming in Transylvania, large estates in the Moldavian and Wallachian plains. The ﬁrst tentative reforms prior to the land law of February 1991 revealed the motives and constraints of the National Salvation Front, led by the former communist nomenclature: collective farms were no longer obliged to sell their production to the state, but the state continued to buy agricultural products at pre-agreed prices. Collec- tive farms were permitted to lease land – up to a maximum of 5 hectares – to individual members of the collective, but the use of waged labour on these plots was forbid-

2/ 99 South-East Europe Review 117 Wim van Meurs den. Thus, the FNS regime showed its reluctance to give up state control over agriculture, its aversion to real commercial agricultural enterprise, and a preference for small subsistence farms (5 hectares had been the norm in 1920 too!) over the introduction of economies of scale.3 For fear of creating a new large land ownership, or speculation in a newly-created land market, the new government delayed taking deci- sions in this sensitive policy area for more than a year. Thus, they left a window of op- portunity for spontaneous privatisation in the collective (more than in the state) farms, based on the principle of who works the land owns it, if not on the principle of first come first served. The law of February 1991, in its basic principles – the priority of restitution over land sales privatisation and a preference for smallholder farming – which were estab- lished by a consensus between the FNS government and the opposition parties led by the National Christian-Democratic Peasants’ Party, regulated the restitution of the land. The opposition party insisted on the recreation through restitution of its traditional constituency amongst smallholders; the FNS prevented the emergence of a po- litically and economically powerful rural middle-class by insisting on a limit of 10 hectares. The limit for buying land, however, was set at 100 hectares – an invitation to the old nomenclature who had the connections and resources to outbid restituted farmers. The law prescribed a return to the status quo ante of 1949: thus, the collective farms were dissolved and the land restituted to former owners or their heirs, but the state farms created on the basis of the 1945 law remained untouched, in order to se- cure provisioning for the cities during the transition period until private farms were able to take over. The restitution limit was set at 10 hectares in order to give a plot to those peasants who had been landless when they joined (or were forced to join) a collective farm. Taking the rural situation of 1949 as the norm for restitution, however, ignored the fact that many former landowners had died, moved to the city, or emi- grated. The question how their heirs were to divide the restitution claim among themselves was not regulated and was apt to cause conflicts between family members. The priority of restitution over the claims of those who had lived and worked on the land was also an endless source of conflict. As it turned out, the law had many other defects too: the state farms, for one, were exempted from privatisation and their transition proceeded much more slowly, the state deciding to preserve them as unified production units although they were generally too large from the perspective either of management or of economies of scale. In fact, the state farms were converted into limited liability companies rather than priva- tised. The privatisation of arable land, moreover, was not linked to the privatisation of the machinery and equipment needed to work the land effectively and profitably. The MTS were turned into companies which usually had a local monopoly on agricultural machinery and were able to dictate work conditions and prices. Similarly, the companies preceding and succeeding the farms in the agricultural production chain remained

3 Likewise, the FNS as an opposition party in 1996 objected to a draft law allowing for- eigners to buy land.

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ﬁrmly in the hands of the state, thus preventing the true marketisation of agriculture. The lack of consistency and co-ordination in the restitution and redistribution procedures was largely due to the fact that responsibility for the implementation of the rules was given to municipal functionaries.

The land reform in practice Despite its natural agricultural potential and despite the reduction in exports, Romania is still unable to fulfil the demand for food products in the domestic market. Market economy reforms and privatisation policies have been implemented hesitatingly and without a strategic concept. Most farmers practise subsistence agriculture; every fourth farmer is a pensioner; and only a minority of landowners uses any machinery at all. Romania is, therefore, among the European countries with the lowest agricultural productivity in terms of both labour and the land. Romania even beats Poland in having the largest number of unconsolidated plots per farm and the smallest average farm size. The questions of justice and legitimacy in the re-privatisation of agricultural property were aggravated by the ethnic dimension of communist collectivisation and Ceaușescu’s systematisation of agriculture. Apart from appropriating all estates over 50 hectares, the agrarian law of 1945 had also stipulated the complete eviction of col- laborators (e.g. the German minority) and those who had betrayed Romania by living in an enemy state (e.g. the Hungarians, who had lived in Hungarian-occupied Transyl- vania during the war). Consequently, large estates constituted only 10% of expropriated land. Most evictions tended to take place in the Hungarian or German-dominated parts of the country. Similarly, it was a matter of dispute why Hungarian villages were the main victims of Ceaușescu’s systematisation campaign in the 1980s. As a result, both Romanians and Hungarians watched the post-communist land reform law and its implementation with the utmost suspicion. Due to these manifold disputes on ownership titles, which frequently became court cases, and jumbled government procedures, the re-privatisation and the consoli- dation of property rights has been particularly slow in Romania. By the end of 1992, preliminary ownership titles to 90% of the land subject to re-privatisation had been distributed, but so far the final arrangement of property rights has been achieved in only 5% of cases. In a September 1993 interview with the Bucharest daily Meridian, Gheorghe Antochi, Secretary of State at the Agriculture Ministry, admitted that the implementation of the March 1991 land reform law was falling behind. Antochi said that only 420,000 land property certificates had been issued thus far and that a further five million Romanian citizens were still waiting to get their ownership titles. By 1996, the restitution process began to approach completion, with the restitution of 64% of property rights, and private farms then constituting 70% of arable land and 86.5% of agricultural production. This acceleration was partly due to the July 1996 law on land registry surveys, creating a reliable and up-to-date land register for all of Romania (see further below). Inconsistent restitution rules and protracted court procedures have been particularly damaging for the development of the agricultural sector in Transylvania, the re-

2/ 99 South-East Europe Review 119 Wim van Meurs gion with the best potential for commercial agricultural production of export quality. As long as property rights have not been settled, much-needed investment is slow in coming: thus, most farms lack the guaranteed future and the mechanisation to improve production. Here, the scarcity of land and the longer tradition of private land ownership (dating back to the nineteenth century rather than to the 1918-1921 land reform, as in Wallachia and Moldavia) has multiplied the number of court cases. Deci- sions on restitution and ﬁnal rulings in court have been extremely difﬁcult, as a land register had been introduced only in the 1950s and thus individual memories of the boundaries of the ancestral land and accidentally-preserved documents proving rights of ownership were in competition. Thus the situation occurred in which land became what the American anthropologist Katherine Verdery has called an “elastic commodity”: the characteristic tree marking one corner of grandfather’s land in 1949 may have disappeared, a new bend in the river may have changed the landscape com- pletely, while a silted-up river may have added land belonging to no-one. Evidently most former owners had a generous eye as far as their own land claims were con- cerned. In Tîrgu Mureș county, for instance, a commission was installed to investigate in late 1998 how restitution claims were able to exceed the available arable land by 20,000 hectares! The particular elasticity of the land problem in Transylvania points to a related general problem for the transformation of agriculture in Romania. Again Katherine Verdery has invented the appropriate catchword, with a wink at neo-liberal transformation theorists: the problem of “fuzzy property”. A wholesale transformation of land property rights from public to private has not taken place, rather the outcome of de- collectivisation has been a complex array of property forms. Overlapping claims and rights to land may consist of several people claiming ownership of the same object (as a result of the elasticity of the land) or several subjects may hold partial ownership of the same object, due to a lack of consolidated and transparent regulations. Ownership rights have also been constrained by state intervention, for example the ban on leaving land uncultivated or changing its use from vineyard to pasture, and the limiting of the possibilities for buying and selling land. In sum, the state held the most inclusive rights over land use and disposal. Economically, the priority of historical and social motives and party politics over macroeconomic considerations led to the multiplication of the number of small, smallest and complementary farms (more than half the farms are made up of less than 2 hectares) producing for the subsistence of the farmer’s family and, at best, selling a few surplus products on the local market. In consequence, labour productivity and the yield per hectare diminished owing to the lack of mechanisation and investment, while the share of agriculture in the total working population has increased after 1989, from 28% to 39% (in 1995). Thus, more than one-third of employees produce less than one-quarter of GDP. Structurally and in terms of production quality, however, Romania is not yet competitive on the international market. This tendency was rein- forced by the initial lack of transparency, momentum and consistency in the implementation of the legal regulations, making agriculture unattractive for long-term investment and production strategies.

120 South-East Europe Review 2/ 99 Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story

In sum, a preference for strict state control over agricultural production and rural property rights seems to be a shared characteristic of different Romanian regimes throughout the entire twentieth century. The same applies to the pressures of political support and legitimacy which make political leaders opt for short-term solutions to the social questions surrounding peasants, while neglecting the parallel issue of the economic and technical issue of the modernisation of agricultural production.

2/ 99 South-East Europe Review 121 Wim van Meurs

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