The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is raising the alarm and forecasts a new global crisis because farm produce prices reached an all-time high in December 2010. Ukraine, the world’s largest owner of fertile black earth, must find a proper response to these challenges as soon as possible – this country can help reduce food shortages in the world and cash in as well.
It is important to do everything in good time. Parliamentary hearings on land problems, scheduled for March 23, are nine weeks away. It is at the initiative of “public servants” that the hearings, originally scheduled for March 2, were postponed last Friday for three weeks. A trifle? No one knows… Sometimes a day is as much as a year.
So last Friday is sure to leave an imprint – though not necessarily a negative one. On that day President Viktor Yanukovych said, addressing a session of the Economic Reforms Committee’s board, that the continuation of land reform is one of the government’s topmost priorities. He thinks that this country’s agro-industrial complex should become “a point of growth” as early as this year.
Mykola Kaliuzhny, deputy chair of the Land Resources State Agency, has given a detailed explanation of the government’s intentions. At a briefing for journalists coupled with a phone-in open conference, he began to prepare public opinion for a resolute step which the government has at last dared to take – to lift the notorious moratorium on agricultural land sales which many enterprising, albeit not so moral, people have dodged on numerous occasions.
“A law on the land market has already been drawn up, and we are ready to submit it to the Cabinet of Ministers. I think this law will be passed in the first quarter of 2011,” Kaliuzhny said. He also hopes that parliament will pass in the first half of this year a bill on the state land cadastre – under the law, the moratorium on agricultural land sales cannot be lifted without the latter. According to Kaliuzhny, this document will come into force on January 1, 2012. The passage of these laws will allow Ukraine to resume selling agricultural lands from January 1, 2012, onwards.
Kaliuzhny forecasts that even this year Ukraine can earn at least three billion hryvnias by selling non-agricultural lands because the law on land market and land sales, which took effect last November, will begin to work.
And what benefit will this country reap from putting its agricultural resources on the market? Naturally, no one can give any specific figures right now, but it is clear that Ukraine will reap a considerable benefit from investments because until now credits were mostly given to farmers under a guarantee of produce and fixed assets rather than of leased land. The State Mortgage Agrarian Bank is supposed to take care of funding the rural economy by issuing cheap (at about 10 percent) loans.
Who may become the new owner of land? As it follows from Kaliuzhny’s statements, this right will be given to all Ukrainian individuals and legal entities by way of auctions and competitions. The lawmakers are supposed to rule out land speculation and thwart attempts to establish a large monopolistic entities. First of all, there will be a ban on land acquisition by foreigners and, all the more so, non-resident companies. The new law also sets the maximum size of a land plot in the hands of one owner.
Will the farmer be adequately protected or will he find himself oppressed by tycoons? Asked about this by The Day, Kaliuzhny said there was no dearth of protective measures. At the same time, he noted that there are a lot of law firms in Ukraine which have learned to work by resorting to all kinds of unlawful schemes.
