Czech, Hungarian Collectives Are Rare Success Story--and Apt to Stay : Agriculture: A plan to return farmlands taken away 40 years ago draws little interest from today’s workers.

At 32, Jindra Novak is too young to know the lot of private farmers like his grandparents, who husbanded a family spread in the fertile Elbe River valley until Communists seized it in 1948.

But what he knows of the old life holds no romance.

Then, farmers got up before the sun to milk the cows and feed the fowl. Nights were spent tending to travelers taken in to earn a few extra crowns toward a truck or a tractor. A day off was an unfathomable extravagance.

Now, Novak and his colleagues at the Progress collective, a 3,500-acre vegetable farm on the tree-studded Bohemian plain northeast of Prague, divide their work into eight-hour shifts so everyone can count on a two-day weekend. They take vacations, holidays and sick leave as if they worked in a factory. Fleets of farm machinery stand ready to help them, dispatched with the precision of air-traffic control.

The industrial regimen that the Communists inflicted on agriculture may have driven the Soviet Union into famine and disorder, but it fostered efficiency in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and bestowed both with a rare economic success.

Food is plentiful, and those who produce it can now enjoy a more civilized lifestyle. Farmers and politicians alike have come to the conclusion that, despite the reformist zeal sweeping Eastern Europe, they shouldn’t try to fix agriculture if it isn’t broken.

“To return to the style of farming we forsook in 1948 is neither rational nor possible today,” said Novak, chairman of the 280-member collective a few miles upriver from his family’s old land. “The main attraction of a collective is that you don’t have to work 365 days a year.”

Only one of the collective’s members is seeking his land back under a government plan to restore private property taken away during the rabid nationalizations that began more than 40 years ago.

Two generations have succeeded the farmers who were brutally driven from their land by collectivization, and a global trend toward agro-industry has stacked the deck against the family farm.

“The world hasn’t stood still during these 40 years,” said Frantisek Trnka, president of Czechoslovakia’s Agricultural Party. “Private enterprise has its place, but I’m convinced that in the long run family farming has no chance.”

Most farms in Czechoslovakia and Hungary before the age of Communism were family operations of less than 100 acres. Today, the average collective farm in Czechoslovakia runs close to 4,000 acres, and Hungary’s agricultural complexes are usually more than twice that size.

If a farmer wanted to recover his family’s land and go it alone, he’d be competing with huge enterprises that can produce food more efficiently and sell it for less.

“Farm workers today are extremely specialized,” noted Zdenek Karfik, a legal adviser in Czechoslovakia’s Agriculture Ministry who grew up on a collective farm. “The general know-how passed from father to son under the old system has been interrupted. We now have people who work exclusively as combine mechanics or feed analysts. They wouldn’t have a clue how to manage an entire operation.”

Nor does the average family have the wherewithal to buy expensive new machinery that would be needed to compete with the thriving collectives.

Anti-Communist activists contend that farmers are being duped by holdovers from the old regime who are trying to retain their power and ideology in the countryside. But most farmers say too much has changed to simply turn back the clock and restore a rural routine that few even remember.

“Look at what has happened in the United States and in West Germany. There has been a marked shift away from individual farms to agro-industry,” said Trnka of the Agricultural Party. “To discard collectivism just because it came from the Communists is a stupid and primitive view.”

Under the current system, farmers in both Hungary and Czechoslovakia usually earn as much as factory workers. Each member is entitled to a percentage of the collective’s profits as well as a share of the produce for personal consumption or sale at private farmers’ markets.

While the collective strategy is widely supported, farmers and planners concede that there is much room for improvement. Collective and state farms are overstaffed and dependent on subsidies that are disappearing as the new governments execute the transition to a market-oriented economy.

Czechoslovakia needs to trim its farming work force from 8% of the population to less than 3%, said Trnka. Food processing needs expanding and modernizing to offer local consumers as-yet-unknown conveniences such as frozen dinners and microwave foods.

Karfik said farms in Czechoslovakia have about 20% more workers than they need, on average, and Hungarian agro-economist Zoltan Miko said farming in his country would have to be scaled down from its current 25% share of gross national product to less than 15%.

But market pressure should be relied on to encourage efficiency, not heavy-handed measures invoked by the government, Miko said.

Budapest’s new center-right government opposes restoration of farmland seized from Hungarians after World War II because of the wide-scale disruption of the food industry that would occur. More than half of Hungary’s territory is under cultivation, but the majority of those with historic claims to the land long ago abandoned the countryside.

For those entitled to restitution, the government proposes instead to issue privatization coupons that can be redeemed for land only if the individual intends to farm it. Otherwise, the coupons could be used to buy stock in industrial enterprises.

Hungarian lawmakers approved a land bill last summer that would have restored private ownership according to the 1946 registers--the last official land accounting before the Communist takeover two years later. But the Constitutional Court threw out the plan as unworkable, plunging political forces into a new round of squabbling over how to determine who owns what.

The Czechoslovak Parliament is expected to pass a land law in early March that will allow citizens to reclaim nationalized farmland or, in cases where restoration would unduly disrupt others, property of equal value in another location.

Prague’s privatization plan has raised some objections because it embraces a Communist theory that land belongs to those who farm it.

Unclaimed farmland and post-1948 improvements such as housing and equipment will be valued during a second phase of privatization, then parceled out among cooperative members in the form of shares.

Those with historic land claims usually stand to benefit more if they leave their property in collective ownership, as they can then share in the division of all assets. Those who want their land back must leave the collectives, running the risk of finding no renter interested in farming their few isolated acres.

The Czechoslovak plan uses 1948 as its point of reference in determining ownership, although there were several earlier land distributions. Large estates of the nobility were broken up after formation of the first independent Czech state in 1918, and thousands of Germans and Hungarians were stripped of their property after World War II.

Some former landowners, such as 71-year-old Arnost Biskup, contend that collectives are now in the hands of young people indoctrinated by Communists into believing that there’s no road back.

“I’m convinced it’s not true that the majority want to retain collectives. This is just continuing propaganda,” said Biskup, a Slovak whose sprawling family estate was broken up before World War II. “Over the past few years, the Communist Party has infiltrated the collectives, and they’re fighting to stay in power. They threaten people, telling them they’ll lose their jobs.”

Biskup said he wanted to recover his family’s 940-acre estate so his children and grandchildren could launch an enterprise growing biologically pure foods.

Collective members, however, contend their majority intends to stay put.

“I don’t own any land, and I have no intention of going private,” insisted Pavel Tomanek, a 43-year-old who repairs air-conditioning equipment at a 12,000-acre fruit farm. “We were never prepared for that kind of responsibility.”