and a shift to household self-sufficiency in food. This pro­cess was evident in many CEE countries during the 1990s as a substantial proportion of the population, often older, newly unemployed and unskilled, retreated from the cities and towns to rural housing where an older, poorer but more secure way of life could be pursued.
     Farm restructuring involved the reallocation of land, labor and capital and included organizational reform such as a move from cooperatives to family farms. In CEE there is now a wide range in the type of farm organization from family farms, private cooperatives, joint stock companies and part-time farmers. The restructuring has led to produc­tion efficiency gains but also contributed to the short term production declines seen in the early 1990s. Restructuring was complicated by conditions in the industry pre-reform including the type of farm organization, the degree of capi­tal intensity, the extent of technology use and the degree and speed by which these initial conditions were reformed.
     Crop production in the former USSR increased at about the same rate from 1961 to 1980 as world production. However, production levels remained stagnant in the 1980s, before falling about 30% in the 1990s to where produc­tion levels in 2000 were the same as in 1961 (Lerman et al., 2003).

2.1.1. Changes in farming and rural population in North America
In NA, the proportion of farm and rural populations as part of the total population has declined significantly since 1945 (Figure 2-4). Mirroring these changes in population have been changes in the agricultural workforce. In 1945, 16% of the total labor force in the United States was employed in agriculture, but this dropped to 4% by 1970 and 1.9% by 2002 (Dmitri et al., 2005). Primary farm operators also begin to work more off-farm jobs during this time period. In 2002, 93% of farm households had off-farm income, a threefold increase since 1945, when 27% of farmers worked

off-farm (Table 2-1). The decade of the 1950s saw the larg­est exodus from farming (Lobao and Meyer, 2000). During the "Farm Crisis," 600,000 farmers exited farming between 1979 and 1985 (Heffernan and Heffernan, 1986); this exit particularly affected the economic base of rural communi­ties in the Midwestern states.
     The shift in the relative percentage of urban to rural dwellers is often perceived as an exodus from rural areas, but during this time the total rural population has held relatively constant (Figure 2-4). It is important to look at the geographical consequences of changes in the farming population. For instance, farm size in the US heartland rose by 18% between 1980 and 2000 (Paul and Nehring, 2005). Similar strong growth in farm size occurred in the Lake and Northern Plains states but slower growth was evi­dent in some other areas. Farming-dependent counties were sprinkled throughout much of the US in 1950. By 2000, more than two-thirds of farming-dependent counties were concentrated in the Great Plains of the United States, a giant swath in the middle of the country stretching from the Prai­rie Provinces of Canada to the panhandle of Texas (Barkema and Drabenstott, 1996; Dimitri et al., 2005).

Agricultural workers in NA. Since WWII the characteris­tics of hired farm labor supply have fluctuated widely both in North America and in Europe, with labor supply and demand being dependent on changes in farm structures, changes in consumer preferences, the growing power of re­tailers and the changing importance of the agricultural sector relative to other industrial sectors in the economies of NAE countries. The agricultural sector has been insulated from some of these changes because of its particular labor force structure, being largely dependent on farmer and farmer-family labor. It is estimated that 70% of the US agricultural production workforce in 2003 were farm operators, part­ners and their unpaid family members. Hired workers make up the remaining third of the workforce (Runyan, 2000;