The Rearrangement of the Leasehold Agreements as an Alternative to the Land Consolidation
Siim Maasikamae, Evelin Jorgenson and Kristiin Sikk
Land reform created a large number of small landed properties in Estonia?s rural areas. Many people became landowners through land restitution. These new land owners had no farming capacity. Quite often, the new landowners lived in cities, not on the plots they owned, and they lacked necessary machinery and knowledge of farming. Today many land owners don?t use their land, and the people who use the land do not own it. Moreover, small farms are often not efficient, so such small farmers stop farming. Those farmers will not sell their land to its users because of different reasons, including the low price of land. The decrease in the number of small farms and the increase of large landholdings was observed in Estonia over the last decade. The above-mentioned circumstances have led to a situation where many farmers and agricultural companies don?t own the land they use; instead, they lease it. It is quite common that the parcels of one producer are located between the parcels of other users, and it can be said that the land use regions of different producers overlap. The high ratio of leasehold land in Estonian agriculture leads to the need for new approaches in order to improve the structure of landholdings. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new approach or method that can assist in improving the land use structure in agriculture by rearranging leasehold agreements. The main components of the system for the rearrangement of leasehold relations are described. Land consolidation has been considered a main tool for improving the spatial structure of landholdings. However, land owners who don?t use their land are not interested in land consolidation, which means it is almost impossible to implement land consolidation for agricultural landholdings. The rearrangement of leasehold relations by swapping leased plots can be an appropriate tool for this purpose. Finally, a comparison of land consolidation and the leasehold agreement rearrangement system is presented.
Event: Symposium on Land Consolidation and Readjustment for Sustainable Development
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