Understanding agricultural transition

This book emerged from the Final Symposium of the KATO Research Project which took place at Humboldt University Berlin in the year 2000. The Project with the full title “Comparative Analysis of the Transition Process in the Agricultural Sector of Selected Transition Countries” was oriented towards a profound theoretical and empirical analysis of institutional change in three research areas, i. e. (1) liberalization of markets, (2) privatization of land and non-land assets, and (3) restructuring and reorganization of farms. These research topics were investigated in the agricultural sectors of three transition countries; Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. The Project did not only aim at research objectives, but also pursued an educational objective, which was to train twelve junior researchers from Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Germany. Academic training was organized jointly as an “East-West-Ph. D. Program,” that proved to be very fruitful, stimulating a profitable exchange of knowledge and an intensive process of learning. Today, seven years after the Symposium took place, not only all three countries under investigation, i. e. Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, are Member States of the European Union but also all junior researchers have finalized their thesis and are working successfully in different fields, mainly as senior researchers or professors in Western and Eastern universities. The transition process is still going on, but has changed its character, and at least many formal institutional reforms are finalized.