considered to be
not only of great economic and social importance but also of great
ideological, political, and educational significance because, among
other things, they reflect the determination and readiness of the broad
working masses to implement the Party's line. Official complaints about
flagging enthusiasm for housing construction in 1968 suggest a less
favorable public acceptance of this practice than that proclaimed by the
Party dogma.

AGRICULTURE

Agriculture is organized on the Stalinist Soviet model: all activity is
centrally planned, and farm operations are carried out by state and
collective farms. Government policy has accorded a high priority to the
expansion and modernization of agricultural production as a means of
attaining self-sufficiency in foods. In an effort to obviate the
historical dependence on grain imports, the government has placed
special emphasis on increasing the output of bread grains, which furnish
the bulk of the people's diet, and on a rapid rise in the production of
potatoes as a substitute for bread.

Great importance is attached to the expansion of industrial crops, such
as cotton, tobacco, sugar beets, and sunflowers, in order to provide raw
materials for the growing domestic industries, in addition to
maintaining traditional exports. Expansion of grape vineyards, olive
groves, and other fruit and vegetable growing has also been promoted to
develop larger exportable surpluses. According to official data, farm
output increased half again as fast as the population between 1950 and
1967, but it is still inadequate to supply the country's minimum needs
for bread and livestock products.

The government's ambitious farm modernization program has been imposed
on tradition-bound peasants averse to rapid change. A large part of the
land improvement and irrigation work has been accomplished through mass
mobilization of peasants and of the urban population for so-called
voluntary work on the model of the Chinese coolie system. Socialization
of the land has had a deleterious effect on work incentives, with a
consequent lag in the planned growth of agricultural production.
Measures adopted by the government to ensure better work performance on
the collective farms did not prove sufficiently effective, and a
scaling down of the five-year plan target for agricultural production
could therefore not be avoided.

To provide the additional acreage needed for crop expansion, large-scale
p