efforts to the cultivation of
their own private plots.

Impressive evidence on this point is provided by official production
statistics for 1964, the latest available on this subject. These data
show that output per acre on the small private plots of collective
farmers and state farm workers was four times larger than output on
state farms and six times larger than that on collective farms.
Constituting only 6 percent of the cultivated land, the private plots
produced 23 percent of the total farm output. Nevertheless, the
leadership has publicly credited the advance in agricultural production
to the collectivization of farms.

In 1967 the government proceeded to reduce the size of the private
plots, with a view to their eventual elimination, both for ideological
reasons and as a means of forcing peasants to devote greater efforts to
work on collectivized land. Subsequent steps were taken to transfer to
collective ownership some of the livestock allotted to the farm families
by the collective farm statute.

This action did not measurably improve agricultural performance.
Shortfalls in the production of several important crops, including
cotton, tobacco, and rice, were admitted to have occurred both in 1968
and 1969, and the situation in the livestock sector continued to be
unsatisfactory. A scaling down of the original production goal for 1970
could therefore not be avoided. The farm output target set by the annual
plan for 1970 was 12.5 percent below the minimum and 15 percent below
the maximum five-year plan figures for the same year.

INDUSTRY

A few primitive plants producing consumer goods had been built before
World War II, but industrial development began only in 1949, when
construction was undertaken of a 50,000-kilowatt hydroelectric power
station, a textile mill capable of producing 22 million yards of cloth
per year, and a sugar mill with an annual capacity of 10,000 tons of
sugar. Industrial construction continued under the first and second
five-year plans (1951-55 and 1956-60, respectively) during the 1950s,
with substantial financial and technical assistance from the Soviet
Union. This development was temporarily interrupted in the wake of the
political break with the Soviet Union in 1961 but was soon resumed with
aid from Communist China (see ch. 6, Government Structure and Political
System). The interruption was said by the Albanian leadership to have
retarded industrial growth by three years. Dis