Reformers inherited systems which differed so much that in some cases efficiency-oriented reform led to large falls in output while in others, reforms issued in the same spirit resulted in output increases. However, initial conditions can not wholly explain past performance and to an even greater degree will not determine the future of these economies. Initial price levels, technologies and political environments in some sense can be thought of as only establishing the boundaries within which the reforms take place. In almost all countries, there has been room for being bold or for being timid. Moreover, the influence of initial conditions will decline over time. Hence, while the nature of the policies mattered in the past, it will matter more and more in the future. For no other reason, then, is it worth trying to take stock of the lessons we have learned from transition. Considering the above discussion, the first lesson is that we should be careful about which indicator we use to measure transition performance. If we use an indicator of allocative efficiency instead of output to measure success, it is less clear that the European agricultural transitions were such a failure when compared to those in China and Vietnam. If prices need to reflect long-run scarcity values of outputs and inputs, then efficiency required that output prices were raised in East Asia, a move that naturally would lead to higher output. Likewise, when subsidies were removed, rational producers should use less inputs be used,u planting gutter actions as seen by the record in the CEECs and Russia where the ratio of output to input prices fell sharply, obviously led to falling output in these countries. But the lessons go far beyond measuring success or failure.
More fundamentally, it does appear from the evidence on the collective transition experiences that any reform strategy in order to be successful needs to include some essential ingredients. In other words, ultimately successful transition requires a complete package of reforms. All countries that are growing steadily a decade or more after their initial reforms have managed to create macro-economic stability, to reform property rights, to create institutions that facilitate exchange, and to develop an environment within which contracts can be enforced. We clearly see the problems of not making progress in all areas. For example, when rights are not clear, as in Russia, producers have little incentive to farm efficiently or to invest and restructuring is constrained. We see in other places that the creation of strong individual property rights is not sufficient. For example, in Poland in the initial years after reform, farmers had secure rights over their land. But, their inability to access inputs or to sell output prevented them from reaping the gains of specialization and improved labor effort. Both output and productivity growth performed poorly. In general, where both rights and markets came together we have seen productivity rises; where not, decline continued and/or subsistence farming proliferated.That said, however, one of the most powerful lessons is that although all of the pieces of the reform package are needed, there is a lot of room for experimentation and variation in the sequencing, and in the form of the institutions that appear to provide incentives and facilitate exchange and contracting. In other words, there is no single optimal transition path. Instead, the optimal transition strategy needs to take into account institutional and political characteristics of each country. Moreover, while all of the ingredients are ultimately needed, they do not need to come all at once. For example, in China, reform without collapse was possible by introducing property rights reform first and gradually implementing policies that liberalized markets and facilitate decentralized exchange.
Such sequencing helped China grow rapidly in the initial years and steadily since. In CEECs, after the initial politically-led disruptions, maturing property rights and the gradual emergence of markets and other ways of exchanging goods, services, and inputs have lead to productivity growth. Furthermore, in the case of property rights, incentives can come in many forms. At least during transition, full privatization in the initial period was not always needed. Sometimes political economy realities limit the scope for privatization, such as in the case of land ownership in China where only user and income rights were privatized – and then even imperfectly. However, the increase in the rights to the residual led to improvements in farmer decision making and resulted in major increases in output and productivity. Additionally, regarding economic organization, there are many examples of hybrid forms, whereby the state-run agency or former collective has been able to continue to operate, and do so more efficiently since its members or managers have been granted clearer income, use, and transfer rights. For example, in China the state was able to use commercialized state input suppliers to create competitive fertilizer wholesale and retail markets . Similarly, in the CEECs, some corporate farming organizations which are never observed in Western economies, and which many experts had, ex ante, considered to be inefficient, have performed close to the efficiency level of family farms . Successful institutions of exchange—nascent markets, forms of contracting, etc.—also have many hybrid characteristics. In fact, some of the most successful transitions have not gone straight from planning to decentralized market-based exchange. Markets, as it turns out, are emerging, but doing so quite slowly. China’s experience demonstrates not only that, when politically feasible, partial reform in a sectoral sense and two-tier pricing can end up creating markets that make the liberalization of the partially reformed sector successful, but also that such policies can create a trading class that leads the push to expand the reforms and ultimately eliminate the need for planning.
Whether considering institutions that create and maintain property rights or those that facilitate exchange, policies should accommodate institutions that are flexible. Flexibility is needed because transition is so uncertain. Moreover, successful transition may trigger rapid growth which itself will require institutions to adapt quickly. For example, in land markets, the initial focus should be on stimulating short term land leasing, an institution much more adapted to transition circumstances. Later on, long term leases and land sales should develop. In general nontraditional and flexible institutions have been more successful.Widespread conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture, combined with intensification of farming practices, is causing major declines in biodiversity globally .The turnover of species through space and subsequent heterogeneity of community composition is a primary determinant of the total species diversity present in a landscape . Thus, by homogenizing communities, agriculture can act to reduce biodiversity on both local and regional scales . Spatial heterogeneity in community composition can be influenced by a variety of deterministic and stochastic processes. Species are thought to ‘deterministically’ track the biotic and abiotic conditions to which they are adapted and, in a heterogeneous environment, this will contribute to the spatial structuring of communities . Stochastic processes,planting gutter such as priority effects or rare long distance dispersal events, can then amplify or weaken these signals . Ecological filters are one deterministic process that can shape community assembly because only species with particular sets of physical, functional, and life-history traits are able to persist . The diversity and distribution of ecological filters in a landscape contributes to spatial heterogeneity. By reducing the diversity of filters, habitat homogenization can reduce b-diversity and species’ trait diversity . The loss of species and/or species trait diversity that can result from conventional monoculture agriculture may also compromise the provisioning of important ecosystem services such as pollination, pest control, and nutrient cycling . Currently, our agricultural system compensates for these lost ecosystem services by increasing external inputs , which can have unwanted negative consequences on both humans and wildlife . The negative ramifications of high-input agricultural systems have fostered the development and refinement of agricultural techniques that minimize external inputs by utilizing and regenerating ecosystem services .
Through local and landscape-scale diversification of crops and habitat, these techniques seek to promote biological interactions that lead to better provisioning of ecosystem services. Such systems also support higher local biodiversity and spatial heterogeneity in community composition than conventional monoculture agriculture. Particularly, techniques that foster landscape-level diversification by maintaining or restoring fragments of natural habitat have been shown to be effective in supporting greater numbers of species and the ecosystem services that they provide while also increasing community level b-diversity . However, if landscape diversification reduces yields, it may lead to further extensification, harming biodiversity . Recent work suggests that land-sparing arguments promoting intensive, simplified agriculture are over-simplified , because such forms of agriculture often also lead to extensification . In the most simplified agricultural areas, natural habitat is nearly nonexistent. In some cases, farmers have adopted the habitat restoration technique by planting strips of native plants along farm edges to help diversify the landscape, without removing arable land from production. Hedgerows have been shown to support higher diversity and abundance of various ecosystem service providers, including beneficial insects, and birds . It remains unclear, however, whether they mimic natural habitat by re-creating spatially structured communities, by leading to higher b-diversity. In addition, communities with diverse traits can provide higher quality and more stable ecosystem services . Thus, if hedgerows maintain the spatial heterogeneity of communities at different hedgerows by supporting species with a diversity of traits, they may promote the provisioning of ecosystem services such as pollination in agricultural areas . Understanding whether simple restoration interventions such as hedgerows can counter biotic homogenization when replicated across a landscape will be critical in assessing their value for ecosystem service provision and biodiversity conservation. Focusing on pollinators, key ecosystem service providers , here we ask whether hedgerows support more spatially rich communities with more diverse suites of species traits. We do so using a long-term dataset from the highly simplified and intensively managed agricultural landscape of California’s Central Valley. We also identify which mechanisms are likely responsible for driving the spatial trends we find. Specifically, we uncover the processes leading to the observed patterns in pollinator b-diversity and, further, investigate whether there is evidence that pollinator species track biotic and abiotic resources. Lastly, we test whether simplified agriculture imposes an ecological filter on insect pollinators by favoring species with particular set of traits. In our study landscape, hedgerows augment the richness and abundance of pollinators and the occurrence, persistence, and colonization of both resource generalists and specialists , while also exporting pollinators into agricultural fields . Understanding whether hedgerows support spatial heterogeneity of communities is the next step toward understanding whether they can conserve biodiversity and promote the provisioning of ecosystem services in agricultural areas.We surveyed pollinators from 21 hedgerow sites and 24 unrestored control sites, located in the Central Valley of California in Yolo, Colusa, and Solano Counties . This is an intensively managed agricultural area dominated by monocultures of conventional row crops, vineyards, and orchards. The monitoring sites represent a sample of field margin conditions across the northern Central Valley. Hedgerows, which consist of native, perennial, shrub, and tree plantings , are ca. 3–6 m wide and approximately 350 m long and border large crop fields. They are typically planted along field margins where they do not remove valuable land from production. Hedgerows differ in age from newly established, ‘maturing’ to ‘mature’ . By investigating hedgerows at different stages of maturity, we can determine whether the effects of hedgerows on b-diversity accumulate with hedgerow maturation. We also monitored unrestored control sites which are weedy edges that represent a variety of relatively unmanaged field edges found in the region. Control sites were selected to match conditions surrounding the hedgerow sites. For each hedgerow, we selected 1–2 unrestored controls adjacent to the same crop type , within the same landscape context. The crop fields adjacent to hedgerows and controls were similarly managed as intensive, high-input monocultures. The mean distance between monitoring sites was 15 km, and the minimum distance between sites of the same type sampled in the same year was 2 km. The entire area surveyed spanned almost 300 km2. We sampled pollinator communities between April and August each year from 2007 through 2013 . Sites were sampled between two and five times per year . In each round of sampling, the order in which sites were sampled was randomized. Surveys were conducted under sunny conditions when the temperature was above 21 ” C and wind speed was below 2.5 m s# 1.