28/01/2026
Alexander Gavranich naše gore list proveo je istaživanje o našoj poljoprivredi. rezultat je čista depra:
🌾 Prior to independence, Croatia was part of the former Yugoslavia, where production was characterised by smallholder private producers—peasants and family farmers—and capital-intensive state farms.
🏭 Both small and big farms contributed to socially-owned and vertically integrated food and agricultural processing enterprises known as 'agro-combinates' (think famous Croatian brands like Podravka, Gavrilović and Vindija). This was an imperfect agricultural system but one that worked.
What I found:
🔍 After independence in 1991, Croatia's agricultural strategies systematically framed peasants, family farmers, and socialist-era agricultural enterprises as the 'problem'—outdated and incompatible with the state's agricultural future.
💊 Prognostic neoliberal reforms such as privatisations and a planned reduction in farmers were described as 'rational' and 'necessary' steps towards achieving international integration and subsequent global competitiveness.
💰 The real beneficiaries? Political and economic elites connected to the state's dominant political party—the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ)—who acquired former socially-owned agro-combinates through corrupt state-mediated privatisations in the 1990s and 2000s.
📉 What was the result in the agricultural sector? Since 1990, agricultural output has contracted by half and there has been a 75% reduction in the number of farms. Today, Croatia has a staggering annual food trade deficit of €1.9 billion.
Why this matters beyond Croatia:
🔗 This study shows that the convergence of international integration pressures and a state captured by one main political party can be mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory. In short, neoliberal reforms typically reduce the state's influence, but in Croatia, it had the opposite effect, facilitating a form of crony capitalism and entrenched HDZ's grip on the country and its enterprises.
❓ Since EU accession in 2013, critical questions remain about how enduring party state capture intersects with EU agricultural funding in Croatia.
📚 There's a striking gap in research on this nexus. Similar dynamics of clientelism and party state capture persist across the former Yugoslav space and other post-socialist EU members, pointing to future opportunities for comparative research and the potential for a new theorisation of food regimes in these geographies.
What role has the state played in the establishment of the current food regime in a post-socialist setting? Focusing on Croatia, I undertake a critical discourse analysis of the national agricultural...
