Economic reforms launched in the early 1990s have significantly affected Czech agriculture for more than a decade. First was the reform of property rights to land, which was considered an underlying condition for the effective functioning of a market economy. The reform was built upon three principals: restitution of land ownership, transformation of collective farms (division of collective assets) and privatization of state land and assets. Changes in property rights induced significant structural shifts: private individual farms and new forms of corporate farms emerged, while cooperatives declined in number and size and state farms disappeared completely.