Change in agricultural output in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 1970-1989

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of the Soviet and Eastern European states' agricultural output fluctuated regularly. In the early 1970s, growth fluctuation ranged between -3.5 and 12 percent, before it became relatively stabilized, between -2.5 and 4.6 percent, from 1976 until communism's fall. While agriculture management varied by country, collective farming was the most common system used in the Eastern Bloc. With hindsight, the industrialization (or lack thereof), mismanagement, and collectivization of agriculture in the Eastern Bloc ultimately proved to be a failure, and both agricultural output and productivity in the East fell well behind that of Western Europe or North America. For example, Soviet sources from the 1970s believed that productivity per worker in the USSR was roughly one-fifth of the U.S. While some scholars have criticized these exact figures, there is no argument that the West vastly outpaced agricultural development in the Eastern Bloc.