Economy, Farming

Farming has a minor role in the German economy. Together with forestry and fishing, farming accounts for about 10 percent of the GDP in the former East Germany as compared to 1 percent in the country as a whole. Only 3 percent of the labor force is involved in these sectors. Germany imports about one-third of its food. The nation’s principal crops are wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, and barley. The fruit industry is also important, producing apples and grapes, some of which are used to make Germany’s famous wines. In addition, farmers raise livestock, including hogs, cattle, sheep, and poultry.

Since 1950 the numbers of farms and farmers have dropped dramatically. Most farms are small—only 2 percent are larger than 100 hectares (about 250 acres). The smaller farms, located mostly in the west, are often owned and operated by families who support themselves with other jobs. The competitive pressure of the European Economic Community (EEC, now EU) helped drive many West German farms out of business. Another factor was the general rise in urban wages and living standards that induced many young farmers to leave farming for better-paying jobs in the city and led to the gradual disappearance of the farmhands required to operate most farms. A third reason was the better education and mobility of rural youth, which broke down the rural isolation that had once kept many Germans on the farm.

In East Germany, a drive for agricultural collectivization in the 1950s eliminated small and medium-sized farms and expropriated large landholdings. The Communist government considered farming to be no different from industrial production and strove for large-scale mechanization of the resulting large cooperatives and state farms. All farmers were forced into production cooperatives whose number shrank further over the years while the number of people employed in farming dropped from 17 percent in 1960 to 10.6 percent of the total labor force by the end of the 1980s.

West German farm lobbies have been powerful in extracting subsidies and favorable governmental policies. The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU also regulates farming, and its subsidies have created some embarrassing situations of overproduction. German unification, among other things, demonstrated the economic superiority of well-managed small and medium-sized farms in the West over the collective and cooperative giant farms of East Germany. The latter proved quite inadequate to the tasks of marketing and meeting refined consumer demands, and generated huge problems of air and water pollution. They also failed to inspire desire in their cooperative farmers to take back and maintain their own original farm properties once the collectives were broken up.