o by car from the farm center to any of the neighboring
villages than to reach them by telephone.

LABOR AND WAGES

Official data on manpower and employment in agriculture are incomplete
and incommensurate. The number of people gainfully employed in
agriculture in 1970 was reported to have been 35.2 percent of the total
in the economy, compared to 54.7 percent in 1960 and 44.9 percent in
1965. Full-time employment on farms of the agroindustrial complexes in
1970 was reported as 1,117,000 people--a reduction of 278,000 from the
1,395,000 employed in 1965. Yet the number of female collective
farmworkers alone in 1969 was reported to have been 1,682,000, more than
1 million of whom participated full or part time in the collective work
of the farms. No explanation concerning the discrepancies in these
reported figures was available. The Sixth Five-Year Plan is variously
reported to call for the transfer of an additional 220,000 or 350,000
people from the farms to nonagricultural employment.

The out-migration, mostly of young people, from agriculture brought
about a deterioration in the age structure of the remaining farm
population. The proportion of the sixteen- to twenty-five-year-old age
group on farms was only 9.2 percent in 1969, compared to 22.3 percent in
industry. Conversely, the proportion of persons fifty-five years and
older was 29.1 percent in agriculture, compared to 8.6 percent in
industry. The program for the modernization and intensification of
agricultural production and, more particularly, the planned high level
of mechanization demand the employment of large numbers of highly
skilled young people. A series of economic, social, and cultural
measures is therefore urgently needed to halt the drain of young
manpower from the farms.

By 1971 the agricultural school system had not adapted its training
programs to the actual needs of the emerging agroindustrial complexes.
At the same time a serious problem in the employment of available
technicians was presented by the scornful attitude of many farm managers
toward specialists with secondary education. In 1971 farms employed more
than 4,000 people without the requisite training in various professional
positions. Although some of them may have compensated by experience for
the lack of training, the situation was considered deplorable by a
number of agricultural economists.

Under previously prevailing conditions, payments to farmworkers differed
widely,