Understanding the nature of the world food system has been a major objective of IIASA's Food and Agriculture Program (FAP), since it began in 1977.
Scholars from different nations have worked together in the FAP. The interactions of scholars from many different nations and perspectives sometimes reveal preconceptions regarding systems one is not fully familiar with. And often this provides interesting questions for fresh analysis.
This paper on efficiency of socialist cooperative agriculture is one such example of such analysis. The questions posed here were raised in discussions when a group of FAP scholars from different nations visited a cooperative farm in Hungary. In this paper the authors have advanced some hypotheses to explore the reality behind the apparent comparative inefficiency of socialist cooperative farming