Summary Agriculture in East Germany

This article describes the development of agriculture in East Germany, both the Soviet occupation zone of Germany as well as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between the years 1945 and 1990. The agricultural policy in the GDR occurred in three phases. The first of which was the so-called Bodenreform ("land reform"), where around 40% of the land used for cultivation was expropriated and redistributed without compensation. In 1952 the second phase of collectivization coincided with the abolition of privately owned and run farms. As early as the 1960s the third phase of specialization and industrialization began, in which the GDR leadership tried unsuccessfully to demonstrate the superiority of socialism through forced collectivization and economic structures which originated in opposition of the so-called capitalist foreign countries. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the trend in East German agriculture was toward larger units; some crop-producing collectives and state-owned farms combined to create Agricultural Cooperatives holding up to 4,000 or 5,000 hectares. These agribusinesses, known as Cooperative Departments of Crop Production ("Kooperative Abteilung Pflanzenproduktion" – KAP ), which included food-processing establishments, became the dominant form of agricultural enterprise in crop production. In the early 1980s, specialization also increased to include livestock production. In 1985, East German agriculture employed 10.8 percent of the labor force, received 7.4 percent of gross capital investments, and contributed 8.1 percent to the country's net product. Farms were usually organized either in state-owned farms ("Volkseigenes Gut") or collective farms ("Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften"). Development phases in chronological order First phase: expropriation of land and redistribution to new farmers Preliminary planning After the Casablanca conference, a twenty-person working committee of the central committee of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was formed with members of the National Committee for a Free Germany in Moscow on February 6, 1944. Working closely with Soviet authorities, the working committee composed the "action program of the bloc of militant democracy", in which goals such as the eradication of the National Socialist legacy, the creation food security, and the creation of an alliance between the workforce and "working" farmers were formulated for further the development of agriculture and rural areas. The action program called for land reform without addressing the circumstances. The KPD leadership was most experienced in urban environments and, due to their origins, wasn't able to precisely makes plans for agriculture and therefore limited themselves to applying Marxist theories. The concrete plans simply remained that small farmers were "natural allies" and landowners as undesirable. Edwin Hoernle was one of the few members in the KPD with any agricultural expertise and had warned Moscow of the economic consequences, however the expropriations persisted despite this.