Development of land consolidation in the Netherlands from project objective to project instrument
Damen, Jack
Throughout the 20th century, land consolidation either on a voluntary or a legal basis, has been going on in The Netherlands. History also shows that consolidation was rarely an isolated activity, but was from the beginning connected with land reclamation and water management activities. Only after the Second World War, land consolidation grew considerably in importance in The Netherlands and became particularly in the 60ties and early 70ties an instrument for farm restructuring and enlargement. Illustrative are the figures for the total area under implementation, which was only 36,000 ha at the end of 1945, while from 1960-1969 annually over 50,000 ha were taken on, which then decreased again in the 70ties to an average of 41,000 ha per year. Although after the war land consolidation was also applied in a few larger disaster areas (e.g. flood disaster 1953), the consolidation instrument usually concerns areas between 2,000 and 10,000 ha. During the early years after the war, land consolidation, was also a labor-intensive activity to provide extra employment opportunities for the many unemployed, but as this problem was largely solved in the mid fifties, the state investments for consolidation works were critically analyzed on rate of return for the national economy. This analysis resulted in 1958 in a multi-annual land consolidation and related works plan, in which a regional priority ranking was presented, whereby the investment impact ratio was one of the determining factors. State investments per ha for the decade to come were budgeted on Euro 900 1,100.
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