Restructuring Market Relations in Food and Agriculture of Central and Eastern Europe: Impacts upon Small Farmers [antikvár]

Preface •¦I With regard to equity and poverty reduction small farm are preferred to large. Are 11 small farms being marginalized on agricultural markets as new supply chains becoming dominant? This is the key question of Regoveming Markets Project (RM) which started in 2005. The Project initiated and sponsored a broad set of research activities and professional dialogues covering all the six continents of the world. Central and Eastern Europe /CEE/ was one of the regions covered by the Project. The RM activities in the CEE countries were coordinated by the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Corvinus University of Budapest Hungary and were conducted in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia. The regional outcomes of the project were presented and discussed at a regional seminar on November 7-8, Warsaw, Poland. This volume includes the materials presented at this seminar including an overview of the overall project objectives and initial findings. The transition to market economies and changes in the political system have made significant impacts upon the various components of the food chain and related market relations in the region. Privatization in agriculture and food processing in the first half of the 1990s has been followed by a revolution in the retail sector created by the entry of multinational trading companies and opening of super and hyper markets in late 1990s and in recent years. Markets and market relations have been in constant change and the process is still continuing. Developments have not been uniform across the region. The new EU member states are far more advanced than Eastern Europe and the Balkan and especially some segments of the CIS. There is however, uniform concern on how these changes impact upon the small farmers and what kind of measures can be recommended to facilitate the adjustment of these farms to the evolving new market relations. As the findings of the RM indicate the answer is not straight forward to the core question of the project. The situation is different in various regions but there is evidence that under the traditional operational patterns of small scale agriculture there is a growing evidence of exclusion. On the restructured markets small farms are quickly loosing their traditional efficiency advantages due to increased transaction costs to participate in the markets. In fast growing economies small farm-