Abstract
As literally every East European nation struggles to reformits agricultural sector, land reform in its many forms figures preeminently in strategic thinking on the problem. Estonia's historic program, instituted during the first republican period, was a highly successful reform from many perspectives. With political as well as economic goals, the reform had an important social dimension as well in that it reinvigorated entire rural regions and established a vital family farming system. The land reform's achievements owe as much to the social and human infrastructure created in Estonia as it did to changes in land tenure, land assembly, and land use. This may be one of its most important lessons for those attempting to craft a new agricultural structure for this and other nations in the region.
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Additional information
Mark B. Lapping is Professor and founding Dean, The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Additionally he serves as Associate Director, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. In 1989–90 he was a Fellow of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, where some of the research for this article was conducted. He expresses his gratitude to his colleagues at the University of Tartu (Estonia) and to anonymous referees for helpful and cogent comments.
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Lapping, M.B. The land reform in independent Estonia: Memory as precedent — Toward the reconstruction of agriculture in Eastern Europe. Agric Hum Values 10, 52–59 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217730
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217730