Agrarian Reform in Kyrgyzstan

The dramatic changes that occurred in Kyrgyzstan’s agriculture during the transition from plan to market are perhaps best illustrated by the shifting role of agricultural enterprises and individual farms. In 1988, toward the end of the Soviet era, just 500 agricultural enterprises (collective and state farms) controlled 98% of arable land. The quasi-private sector consisting of hundreds of thousands of small household plots controlled the remaining 2% of arable land. Twenty years later, in 2008, the share of agricultural enterprises (about 1,200 privatized successors of collective and state farms) in arable land had gone down to 25%, while the share of the individual sector (the traditional household plots and some 300,000 peasant farms that have emerged since 1992) had increased to 75%.