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 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070030-5

1950's. Large investments in coal, chemicals, copper, and food processing are aimed largely at increasing long-run export capacity. (U/OU)

'''FIGURE 5. Land utilization, 1971 (U/OU)''' (picture)

1. Agriculture, fisheries, and forestry (U/OU)

a. Agriculture

Poland is the largest agricultural producer in Eastern Europe (excluding European USSR). About 62% of the land area is devoted to agriculture including 48% under cultivation and almost 14% in meadows and pastures (Figure 5). The amount of arable land per capita ― about 0.46 hectare in 1971 ― ranks among the top 10 countries in Europe. Poland's climate and soil permit cultivation of a wide variety of crops. Fairly mild winters with moderate rainfall are favorable to the cultivation of winter grains. The frost-free season is long enough for the successful cultivation of most summer grains, sugar beets, and potatoes. The predominantly sandy soils, however, require good management to make them highly productive.

The agricultural sector has adequate investment funds, but industrial inputs are not available in sufficient quantity and quality. The socialized agricultural sector is much better supplied than the private sector with most types of agricultural machinery, fertilizer, breeding stock, and new varieties of seed. Storage and shipping facilities are inadequate as a result of persistent shortages of building materials and transportation equipment, especially refrigerated trucks, so that serious losses occur from spoilage. Moreover the regime has had scant success in recent years in attracting trained young men to the farms and keeping them there, so that a manpower shortage occurs during the harvest season even though about 36% of the Polish labor force (6 million persons) work in agriculture. The preference of trained agronomists and graduates of agricultural colleges for administrative positions in the cities rather than for jobs as advisors on farms further complicates the introduction of new agricultural technology.

The principal crops grown are wheat, rye, barley, oats, sugar beets, and potatoes. Of the total area sown in 1971, 57% was in grains, 18% in potatoes, 6% in industrial crops (sugar beets, oilseeds, tobacco, and flax), 14% in fodder crops, and 5% in other crops. Rye, of which Poland is the world's second-largest producer, is the country's most important grain crop, occupying 45% of the total grain acreage. The total area annually planted to crops in Poland has been gradually declining since 1960. In addition, there has been a shift in acreage from grain — which covered about 60% of sown land in 1955 — to fodder and industrial crops. Declining prices in the world sugar market led Poland, a surplus producer, to cut back sugar beet acreage some 14% between 1965 and 1970. Nevertheless, the output of sugar beets continued to increase because of the larger input of fertilizer; only in 1969 — a bad weather year — did output fall below the 1961-65 annual average. The rising price of sugar in the international market may induce Polish officials further to stimulate domestic output by boosting producer prices for sugar beets.

Poland has made relatively good progress since the mid-1950's in raising yields per hectare of major grain crops and since the mid-1960's, for root crops. Yields in the immediate postwar period were far smaller than those on the same lands prior to World War II, the drop being particularly sharp in the former German

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070030-5