Through a community study carried out in a settlement in Eastern Hungary, my study aims to present the integrating role of various agricultural part-time works in local societies. This paper explores the way in which different agricultural factory forms and employer-employee relationships influence the structural and ethnical layering in local societies, as well as the forms of integration they offer to members of local societies. My case study aims to shed light on the way ongoing macro-social processes shape Hungarian rural areas and, in particular, on the way they transform social and ethnical relations in local societies.

Keywords: agricultural day labour, ethnicity, rural poverty, land concentration

Full text (in Hungarian)

In our study we analyse the agriculture of Harghita county, i.e. a mountain area of Romania. Upon reviewing the literature regarding agricultural changes after the regime change, we shall present a typology of current agricultural actors developed with quantitative methods. Then, we shall argue that since the accession to the European Union we can witness a polarisation of farms in the mountain areas dominated by family farms. We will present that besides families decreasing or completely giving up their farming activities, some farms have increased, but this is a very specific situation and it heavily depends on agricultural subventions. While their entrepreneurial character increases, farms preserve their partly self-sufficient character and pluriactivity.

Keywords: farm types, economic strategies, the agriculture of Romania, agricultural enterprise, peasant farming, polarisation of the agricultural sector

Full text (in Hungarian)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role and position of Hungary in LEADER transnational cooperation projects of the rural development policy in the European Union between 2007 and 2013. On one hand we study – on a basis of official data – the main characteristics of the distribution of rural development projects among EU member states applying basic descriptive methods supplemented by certain concentration measures to quantify the inequalities of projects and funds and thus exploring the role of Hungary in the process of project generation and fund absorption. On the other hand, we apply basic network analysis techniques and network measures to illustrate and describe the transnational cooperation network among countries in the European Union and the position of Hungary in this cooperation network. According to the results, the distribution of both projects and financial resources allocated through these projects prove to be rather concentrated and Hungary seems to have a kind of comparative advantage as for possibilities of initiating transnational cooperation projects.

Keywords: rural development, cooperation, social embeddedness, social network analysis

Full text (in Hungarian)

In this study we investigate the LEADER program, specifically the role of local products in the livelihood of economic actors. We also investigate the characteristics and problems of this supporting form (if these affect the operators’ selection and economic behaviour), and we point out the impact of local products on the image of regions. Fieldwork was carried out in two disadvantaged areas of Hungary: in the settlements of the Eastern-Northern Szatmár LEADER and the Western Zala Termálvölgye LEADER, basically by means of interviews. Besides these, we analysed the web sites and developmental documents of local action groups. In this study we refer to two kinds of local product producing: the “need-supplying” and the “brand-creating” types. The difference between them – according to our results – lies in the definition of consumers and product markets. In the first part of our study we present the characteristics of these two types and then we investigate – according to the LEADER terminology – “communal” and “entrepreneurial” local product producers, demonstrating that these actors’ groups are not coherent. Finally, we investigate the role of local products in image creation at regional level, analysing the results and difficulties of the branding process in these two regions.

Keywords: local products, LEADER, economic actors, local market, image of the region

Full text (in Hungarian)