Challenges And Opportunities For Agriculture Of Central Europe According To Farm Structure And Abounding With Capital

Hungary and Poland are two applicant countries, which know the date of the admission into European Union, but the problems of the agriculture are great in both of them. The ways to the recent conditions were different, but the economic situation is similar. In Poland, mainly on the Eastern part of the country, there is a huge number of traditionally small farms operating under the economic size limit, and which are usually have not got adequate farming implements to up-to-date technologies, and their effectiveness is low. At the same time on the Western part of Poland there are Prussian type, better-mechanized, more effective large scale farms. In Hungary as a result of the economic transition the earlier large scale farms were privatised and great number of small farms came into being, which had not got any technical assets to the competitive agricultural production, and there are considerable number of private large farms mainly with “inherited” technical equipment from the earlier large scale farms. Based on these conditions the questions are: how many farms could be competitive with Western ones and how many farms have to be operated because of employment of rural people; how the efficiency of farm assets could be increased and how many investments are necessary to develop the farms to a competitive level. (The research was partially supported by an OTKA theme No. T037519)