fig congress 2018 - FAO support to land consolidation in Europe and Central Asia during 2000-2018. Lessons learned and way forward
Morten Hartvigsen
Shortly after The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded in 1945, the organization had started to support member countries addressing structural problems with land fragmentation and small farm sizes through development of land consolidation instruments. In the late 1990s, land fragmentation and land consolidation re-appeared on the agenda, this time in the context of Central and Eastern Europe where land reforms from the beginning of transition in 1990 had led to excessive land fragmentation and small farm sizes in most of the countries. FAO began around 2000 to document and address problems in this area. The objective of this paper is to present the FAO experiences of supporting member countries related to land consolidation, but also to reflect on the lessons learned and the way forward. Supporting smallholders and family farms is one of four priorities for FAO in Europe and Central Asia, confirmed by the FAO Regional Conference in 2016. FAO established in the region in 2014 the Regional Initiative on Empowering Smallholders and Family Farms for Improved Rural Livelihood and Poverty Reduction. The regional land consolidation programme is part of the Regional Initiative. Most governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe have from the early 1990s and onwards recognized the need to address these structural problems hampering development of agriculture and rural development. This has led to the introduction of land consolidation instruments. FAO has played a leading role in supporting introduction of land consolidation and in the development of national land consolidation programmes. The FAO regional land consolidation programme has three main pillars: i) technical guidelines, ii) field projects in the programme countries and iii) the informal network of land tenure professionals interested in land consolidation, land banking, land market development etc. (LANDNET). FAO has so far implemented field projects in 11 countries in the region. Since the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security were adopted in May 2012, the Guidelines have served as the a reference to improve governance of tenure, including through land consolidation, based on international best practice. The experiences from many countries in the region show that it is often a long and not always straightforward process to develop a fully operational national land consolidation programme and also more complex than anticipated 10-15 years ago. There is in general a need to mainstream and accelerate the development in many countries and also to ensure an integrated broader support from civil society organizations such as farmers organizations and academia.
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