Agrarian Crises, economic crises of overproduction in the agriculture of capitalist countries. They are manifested primarily in a relative overproduction of agricultural goods and the accumulation of enormous unsold stocks of them. At the same time, there is an increase in the size of farmers’ debts (under modern conditions, mostly to mortgage banks); many small and medium producers are ruined. Competition becomes more acute. Only larger farms using up-to-date machinery and technology can survive. Agrarian crises are accompanied by accelerated concentration and centralisation of production in capitalist agriculture. The most general cause of agricultural crises is exacerbation of the basic contradiction of capitalism—that between the social character of production and the private form of appropriation. Besides, each crisis has its own, specific causes, connected with the changes in agricultural production on the scale of the world capitalist economy. One feature of agrarian crises is that they are not strictly periodic and are usually very prolonged. The first agrarian crisis began in the early 1870s and lasted until the late 1890s; the second lasted from 1920 and up to the Second World War. After the war, in 1948, a new agrarian crisis began which continued until the early 1970s. The main reason of agrarian crises tending to be so prolonged is the monopoly of private ownership of the land and the existence and growth of ground rent, which makes agricultural produce more expensive and therefore more difficult to sell. High ground rent prevents enormous capital from being used productively in agriculture. This obstructs the rapid large-scale renewal of fixed capital, the attainment of higher labour productivity, a reduction of production costs and, in the long run, of prime costs of the goods, which would have facilitated 12 their sales. Another reason that agricultural crises invariably last a long time is the existence of a large number of small-scale farmers who cannot reduce production to get out of a crisis. For these reasons, curtailment of production caused by a price drop happens more slowly in agriculture than in industry, if at all. Overproduction of agricultural goods is relative: millions of people in the capitalist world are starving. With the advance of state-monopoly capitalism, the capitalist state introduces anti-crisis measures, curtailing agricultural production and keeping agricultural prices at a certain level whenever a tendency appears for them to decline. State- monopoly regulation of agriculture promotes concentration of large-scale capitalist production through the ruin of farmers and poor peasants which converts them into wage-labourers. Since World War II, agriculture in the capitalist countries has been growing increasingly intensive owing to the widespread use of machinery and chemicals, which has caused further concentration of production and the mass ruin and disappearance of small and mediumsized farms. Even this, however, has failed to prevent agrarian crises, since only an end to capitalist production relations, as has been shown by the experience of the socialist countries, is capable of doing so.