Owners without Property

The UN predicts that by 2050 Ukraine’s population will have shrunk to 36.2 million. Among the causes of the future demographic crisis, experts point to malnutrition, a problem directly linked to the plight of the country’s agriculture. According to Anton Tretiak, vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Agrarian Sciences, in the 14 years since the land reform began the government has been unable to formulate principles of profitable and environmentally safe use of land. Moreover, after eliminating collective and public ownership of land, the government has failed to find real owners for this land, because it has often been fictitiously transferred into private ownership.

As a result, the introduction of short-term land leases led to the unprecedented phenomenon of unemployment in the countryside, where owners were excluded from the process of land use. The result was lamentable: land prices fell threefold (with the exception of land plots set aside for the construction of industrial facilities — Auth.).

According to Tretiak, the main reason behind this is an insufficient number of laws and enactments that have been given legal force: of the 28 laws required to make the Land Code an effective instrument, only 11 have been passed. Only 30 bylaws have been endorsed out of the required 90 bylaws. According to Leonid Novakovsky, deputy director of the Kyiv Land Relations Institute, we have progressed to the stage where we have fundamental documents, but they do not reveal the specifics of legal relationships in the sphere of land use. Meanwhile, the government, who-se main task is to defend the law, has turned a blind eye to this problem. As a result, nearly every city has territories of expensive misappropriated land, and this problem can be eliminated only by creating an effective agency to manage land use.

Inadequate legislation is not the only cause of the low productivity of Ukraine’s agricultural sector. According to Yaroslav Movchan, department chief at the Ministry of Environmental Protection, we will be doomed to harvest between 20 and 40 hundredweights per hectare while investing significant resources until we establish standards for the use of low-yield lands. Movchan believes that Ukraine has between 5 and 10 million hectares of unusable lands: eroded lands, hillsides, and low-yield lands. It is unprofitable to grow crops on them because only individual crops can be grown on hillsides, while eroded soil takes a long time to regenerate. Meanwhile, one crop of sunflowers dramatically reduces soil fertility, which takes a long time to regenerate. Therefore, it is more efficient to turn such lands into meadows or nature preserves. The latter require special attention. As Movchan put it, 1 dollar invested in a nature preserve returns 100 in the form of population health, raw materials, improved local ecological systems, etc. Moreover, environmentalists claim that people in greener regions live longer, and their quality of life is much higher. However, if the government follows this path, it will inevitably face the problem of creating a compensation fund with money to buy such low- yield lands from their owners. But where to get this money is anyone’s guess.

The lack of funds is the cause of many problems in agriculture, including the problem of land ownership deed issues. According to Mykhailo Laveykin, director of the Lviv-based private company Zemservis, the number of land deeds issued every year is declining. Statistics suggest that the total acreage of land plots unclaimed by village residents is 2.37 million hectares. Because of the unregulated procedure of issuing land deeds, businesses have found themselves at the mercy of the authorities, who lease out economically unprofitable lands that may not be leased for environmental or safety considerations, such as land plots close to railroad tracks or narrow strips of land near forest plantations.

Still, it is possible to find money. So says Anatoliy Yurchenko, department chief at the Land Utilization Institute, who proposes introducing a land tax for the regeneration of land resources and resolving problems related to land management. However, bringing this idea to life requires passing many laws. Meanwhile, cropland acreage in Ukraine will continue to shrink like before.