Parliamentary majority factions have for the first time favored extending the moratorium on farmable land sales. Until now, this idea was supported by the opposition alone. Agrarian Party (APU) leader Kateryna Vashchuk announced she intended to demand that trade in land remain banned until 2010. Under the Land Code’s transitional provisions, the moratorium comes to an end in 2005. Taking into account the agrarian lobby’s clout and the opposition factions’ numerical strength, the ban is quite likely to be extended.
Ms. Vashchuk thinks this country still lacks the economic and financial prerequisites to have the moratorium lifted. In her view, there still is a great risk that large political-financial groups, assisted by local authorities, will buy all the land from peasants, leaving the latter to play the role of hired workers. Although the parliament has passed a series of land reform-related laws in 2003, Ms. Vashchuk fears that deputies will fail to plug all legislative holes in time to save the countryside from new-style serfdom. The parliamentary agrarian leader also believes that what stands in the way of land sale and purchase is the mysterious “socio-psychological factor.” In all probability, peasants are guilty of being unprepared for the advent of “landlords.” Politically, the APU initiative looks like intervention into the left-wing sector of the rural electorate in the next parliamentary elections.
Meanwhile, the opposition has already mooted a Verkhovna Rada bill to defer the cessation of the moratorium. The bill’s authors — deputies Vasyniuk, Tomych, and Yushchenko — suggest that the ban on selling cultivable land be extended till 2007. It will be noted that the current parliament’s term ends in 2006, so the opposition seems to be oriented precisely to this deadline. Apparently, the Our Ukraine bloc hopes to see this country’s topmost political leadership, including that of parliament, completely changed in a three years’ time, which will inevitably create new business favorites. Hence the opposition is not interested in having the land sale ban lifted before that time, fearing that land might be appropriated by “alien” politico-financial groups. If we look back on OU’s initiative to impose a moratorium on privatizing strategic businesses before the elections, the land sales moratorium quite fits in with the idea of deferring property repartition “until better times.” Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz also came out for keeping the moratorium intact.
By all accounts, the opposition and its temporary ally, the Agrarian Party, will find such opponents (in the land question) as the SDPU(O) faction, which actively lobbied for adoption of the Land Code, and liberal cabinet ministers. Among those who insist that the moratorium be lifted ahead of time is Economy Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky. In his view, the most recent agricultural crises were provoked, not in the last respect, by the absence of full-fledged market relations in this sector. The State Committee for Land also favors lifting the ban. The committee’s experts calculated long ago that, if land is allowed to be bought and sold, the agrarian sector could receive UAH 110 billion in investment. This means, above all, bank borrowing using land as collateral, a thing very difficult to do today.
What can be decisive in this situation is the President’s standpoint. In the long run, it is he who will have to either sign or veto the law on extending the moratorium. That such a law can be passed in the near future if the Agrarian faction does not change its position is a foregone conclusion. Earlier, the president referred to the moratorium in rejecting the terms, considering it a factor that slows rural reforms.
Should those who favor extending the moratorium manage to put this idea into practice, they will hardly prevent the coming of real land owners, but the latter will establish a shadow land sale market instead of a legal one.
