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  • A Plot Of One's Own

    A PLOT OF ONE'S OWN
    By Vasily Uzun

    Russia Profile, Russia
    Oct 31 2006

    Land Reform Shows that Small Farms Can Produce Big Results

    The transition from a socialist-style planned economy to a market
    economy in Russia involved radical changes in land relations. In
    the Soviet era, all land was exclusively the property of the state,
    given for free to those who used it in perpetuity. Changes in the
    way communal farms used land were permitted only with the approval
    of federal and regional authorities.

    The 1990s land reforms sought to improve resource use efficiency
    through privatization of collective-farm land and liberalizing
    the market for land plots. These privatization mechanisms, and
    the subsequent trading of land, did have a positive effect on the
    efficiency of agricultural land usage.

    In the post-Soviet space, the privatization of collective farm land
    was done in a variety of ways, depending on the region. In the Baltic
    States, the land was returned to its former owners; in Armenia,
    the land was allotted to families living in the villages at the time
    of the reforms. In Russia, farm land was allocated to farm members
    in standard parcels. If farm laborers then chose to leave the farm,
    they would receive the same amount of land elsewhere in Russia.

    One of the reasons restitution was technically impossible to carry
    out in Russia in the early 1990s was because citizens did not have
    documents confirming property rights. The idea of giving each family
    a land plot was also considered, but was rejected on the grounds that
    most communal farmers were unprepared to work on their own.

    As a result of the reforms, some 120 million hectares, or 60 percent
    of farm holdings, were divided into shares, and 12 million people
    became landowners. Owners of land shares had the right to use
    their segments to create or expand a farm business or to use them
    as private gardens. Shares could also be sold, rented, given away,
    used as capital, or passed on to descendants.

    Before the reforms, virtually all Russian farmland, some 221 million
    hectares, was used by communal farms. Only about 4 million hectares
    functioned as private gardens. Following the introduction of reforms,
    5 percent of communal farmers, as well as some city dwellers,
    pooled land plots, obtained land from the state redistribution fund
    or rented land parcels from shareholders in a drive to create their
    own agri-businesses. By the start of 2006, this group of people held
    19.5 million hectares of farmland.

    There were huge variations in the ways in which land reform was
    carried out in different parts of the country: many regions were able
    to put off introducing private property for as much as 49 years,
    according to a 2002 law on land trading; most villagers rented out
    their land shares to nascent agribusinesses joint-stock companies
    or cooperatives created from reformed communal farms; agriculture is
    generally loss-making in northern zones, where not all agricultural
    organizations have rental contracts with land-share owners, and
    roughly a quarter of all land parceled out is used by agricultural
    organizations without a signed agreement.

    The method of land privatization adopted in Russia made it possible
    for people who live in rural areas to assume land ownership rights
    on a voluntary basis while allowing major farms to continue working
    by renting land shares. This setup avoided strip farming as well as
    the division of all of Russia into 5-by-10-hectare chunks.

    But Russia's agricultural land privatization system had some obvious
    drawbacks. For example, land shares are not accurately demarcated:
    holders know roughly where their fields are but not the precise
    location; agribusiness managers are able to use shared land without
    signing agreements with the owners and, to this day, 15 years after
    the reforms began, land share owners still do not clearly understand
    their rights and responsibilities.

    The authorities in many post-Soviet countries including Ukraine,
    Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan have already divided
    up their land into plots. But these countries now face the problem
    of consolidating the divided parcels into optimal-sized units. This
    process is also slowly getting underway in Russia, but lacks the
    necessary political or legal infrastructure.

    In recent years, Russia has seen relatively active trade in
    agricultural land. It is being bought up, rented out long-term or
    added to the charter capital of agribusinesses. As of Jan. 1, 2005,
    legal entities in the Moscow Region mainly agribusinesses and other
    investors held more than 300,000 hectares of land, or roughly 25
    percent of farm holdings in the region. Agribusinesses have also taken
    control of most of the agricultural land in the regions around Moscow,
    including Belgorod and Oryol regions.

    Land can be transferred from a share owner to an agribusiness or
    other investor based on buy-sell agreements (as is the practice
    of Inteko holding in Belgorod Region) by absorbing the shares into
    charter capital (a procedure applied by Stoilenskaya Niva, also of
    Belgorod), or by oligarchs buying up the land and property of bankrupt
    agricultural firms. Agribusinesses have been created in Oryol and
    Rostov using long-term agreements for land shares, as well as in
    Stavropol and Krasnodar territories.

    But investors in all regions are pumping money into agriculture and
    creating larger business structures. In cases where sizeable farms
    broke apart due to their inability to deal with competition from
    domestic and foreign producers, rural residents left without jobs
    were obliged to take care of their own gardens. Eventually land
    share owners on such farms expanded their plots, a process that
    has intensified over the last few years. In early 2006, roughly 10
    million hectares of shared land had been added to market gardens,
    and people were farming it themselves.

    It was widely supposed that once land reforms took hold, large
    Western-style organizations would replace collective farms. Although
    such farms have appeared, they make up just 6 percent of gross
    production. However large agribusinesses have developed rapidly,
    and range from 10 to a 100 times the area of former collective farms.

    On the other hand, most production over 50 percent is concentrated
    in private market gardens, most of which comprise less than half a
    hectare of land with one or two cows.

    Although most Russians think farming has neither taken off in Russia
    nor has a future, the dynamics of land redistribution suggest that
    less and less land is being used by major agricultural organizations,
    while the share of family farms in cultivated land is increasing. In
    1990, these farms accounted for less than 2 percent of agricultural
    holdings, but by 1995 this figure was 18 percent and by 2006, it had
    risen to 28 percent.

    In the socialist economy, the state set targets for agricultural
    holdings and new area cultivation regardless of the suitability of
    the plot. For example, land that eroded barely produced any crops,
    yet was included in targets.

    With the transition to a market economy, agricultural producers
    stopped using 22 million hectares of available terrain. Between 1990
    and 2006, the area used by agricultural businesses dropped by 72
    million hectares, or 34 percent, while the proportion used by private
    cultivators and farmers increased from 4 to 54 million hectares
    (more than 13 times).

    Much has been written about the drop in land use by agricultural
    organizations, but few studies have analyzed which lands were abandoned
    and in which regions. Published in 2003, Tatyana Nefyodova's book,
    Fragmentation of Rural Russia, showed that such areas were located
    mostly in the "non-Black Earth periphery," in other words, outside
    Russia's most fertile agricultural region.

    One study examined Russia's administrative districts by looking
    at percentage change in land planted by agricultural organizations
    between 1995 and 2003. Regions with a low bio-climactic potential
    suffered reduced plowed and crop areas and low grain yield.

    Similarly, the higher the yield and bio-climatic potential, the
    smaller the reduction in cultivated land. It also became obvious that
    agricultural organizations reduced the amount of land in use in an
    attempt to produce higher return from their inputs.

    The usage efficiency of agricultural holdings fell until 1998, but has
    risen in recent years. However, this process has taken different forms
    depending on the size of the producer. Agribusinesses have continued
    to reduce the size of their plots while simultaneously boosting gross
    production, leading to an increase in return of 35 percent in 2003
    compared to 1998.

    Despite different tendencies in return rates, family farms are using
    land much more efficiently than agribusinesses. Each hectare used
    by small landholders produces 4.5 times more gross product and 10
    times more added value. Of course, such a difference in efficiency is
    only partially explained by better land quality or by more intensive
    cultivation and greater cattle density per area.

    Besides these factors, another considerable influence is that people
    make unlicensed use of land officially registered to agribusinesses, as
    well as a significant amount of feedstock produced by agribusinesses
    given to rural residents as part of the rental costs for their
    land shares.
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