Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 143

Present-day Hungary, the land east of the Alps, west of the Transylvanian hills, and south of the Carpathian Mountains, is one of the best-endowed agricultural areas of the European Union. With good land in the Danube valley and the Great Hungarian Plain, only two people to each hectare of cultivated land (Great Britain has nearly ten), and about ten per cent of its working population still involved in agriculture, it is a major producer and exporter of cereals, oilseeds, fruit, wine and livestock products. This book was published by the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture in the year in which Hungary became part of the European Union, and its agriculture subject to the Common Agricultural Policy. It is a survey volume, devoid of any academic apparatus, but as a superbly illustrated account of the main events and trends over the last 150 years or so, it offers an excellent introduction to Hungarian agriculture and rural life.

The three parts into which the book is divided reflect the political changes that have had such an impact on land and farming. János Estók and György Fehér cover the period from the 1848 revolution to the end of the First World War, when over half of the Hungarian national income was still produced by agriculture. They discuss the politics of agriculture – Hungary had a Ministry of Agriculture from 1848 and a national agricultural association from 1849 – and the country’s integration into European markets as a food exporter and an agricultural machinery importer. British firms such as Garrett, Hornsby, and Clayton and Shuttleworth were all selling in the Hungarian market by the 1860s. The phylloxera outbreak occurred a little later in Hungary than elsewhere but was just as devastating. Mechanisation, animal breeding, and the developing food industry meant that the agricultural sector in the late nineteenth century was commercially dynamic, but the imbalance in the estate structure continued. In 1895 only one per cent of holdings were larger than 57.5 hectares, but these bigger farms or estates covered 48 per cent of the country.

The Treaty of Trianon, negotiated in the aftermath of World War I, resulted in the loss of more than half of pre-war Hungary’s land and population, and an even greater proportion of its livestock. A stretch of the north became Slovakia, Transylvania on the eastern side became part of Romania, and some southern districts went to form part of the new country of Yugoslavia. Despite various largely abortive attempts at land reform, Hungary remained a country dominated, in numerical terms, by a poor peasant class, with an inadequate diet and insufficient income, as Péter Gunst argues in his account of the 1919–45 period, to provide enough demand to stimulate industrial production. Wartime food exports to Germany failed to ameliorate the situation, for they were based on a system of forced deliveries, and finally German occupation followed by Soviet invasion completed the ruination of Hungarian agriculture. By the spring of 1945 the granaries and livestock had been looted, the land lay uncultivated, thousands of men had been taken away as prisoners of war, and starvation loomed. Post-war recovery, complicated by the communist policies of forced collectivization and compulsory deliveries, took a long time, as Zsuzsanna Varga shows in the final part of the book. It was not until the mid–1960s that rural electrification, mechanised farming and other technical changes, and a significant decrease in the farm labour force, began to produce a relatively modern agricultural sector. Then the process of adjusting to a new political system had to begin all over again in the 1990s. It is a pattern of change that is foreign to Western Europe, but repeated right across Eastern Europe, and this volume forms a fascinating case study of the process.