s emphasis on mechanization and automation of production. In
the 1971-75 period industrial manpower requirements will be met almost
entirely through natural population increase. Relieving agricultural
underemployment through an expansion of the services sector is not being
given serious consideration on the grounds that "no further expansion of
this sector can be undertaken at the expense of achieving a high level
of productivity in the branches of material production and hence in
agriculture, too."

Raising the low productivity level of collective farm labor through
greater capital inputs, and thereby increasing the incomes of members,
presents a difficult problem not only because of a shortage of
investment funds but also because the magnitude of the collective farm
labor cannot be adjusted to the needs of production, as in the case of
state farms; it is determined by the number of families living on the
farm. The collective farm cannot limit the number of members who may
participate in the work. Each member has the right and, at the same
time, the duty to participate in the work performed for the collective,
and the collective has the duty to provide equal opportunities for all
its members to work and to earn adequate incomes; yet modernization of
production necessarily brings with it an ever smaller need for manpower.

A solution of the farm manpower problem was not in sight by late 1971.
There was general agreement among Romanian economists concerned with the
matter about a need to improve the utilization of the available labor
resources, to increase farm incomes and, above all, to stop the
migration of young people from villages to towns. No concrete program
for attaining these ends, however, emerged from a national conference on
farm labor held in mid-1970. Proposals advanced by a number of
economists to expand industrial activities in the villages,
particularly cottage industries and the processing of farm products,
were questioned by others who feared that these activities would tend to
drain some of the remaining productive elements from the collective farm
labor force.

As expressed by one of the conferees, the search was on for a hybrid
solution that would ensure full employment of the redundant labor force
despite the process of farm modernization--a policy that inevitably
leads to the maintenance of low earnings on many farms because the
available work must be spread among an excessive number of members.