Abstract
The chapter examines the outcomes of 20 years of land reform in the Russian Federation’s agriculture. The landownership structure is assessed, the risks voiced at the beginning of the reform are re-evaluated and new risks related to the development of landownership are highlighted. Russia’s land policy has gone through several stages since the beginning of reform: from clearly formulated policies and procedures in the early 1990s to a set of administrative activities entrusted to disjointed land authorities at the present time. Despite institutional difficulties, the land market appears to be emerging in Russia; land has become transferable, it is actively redistributed between peasant farms and corporate farms and it is reallocated to new users. In the absence of an institution that controls and manages the country’s land resources, the land policy is unable to respond to new challenges that arise in the course of the ongoing land reform.
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Notes
- 1.
By conventional producers we mean individual and corporate farms created in the process of restructuring of former kolkhozes and sovkhozes without capital inflow from investors in other sectors. Capital inflows from other sectors typically create agro-holdings, non-conventional farming structures also called ‘new agricultural operators’.
- 2.
This is an ad hoc term that we use in the absence of an accepted equivalent in English. The concept of zoning in the sense of specifying the allowed uses for a particular region has not been implemented so far in Russia. An alternative translation could be ‘agriculturally targeted land’. The unofficial English translation of the Land Code uses the term ‘agricultural-purpose land’ (Land Code English 2001, Chap. XIV).
- 3.
We use the term ‘household plots’ to designate an aggregate of 11 groups of individual land users according to the Rosreestr classification, all of which are physical bodies. This aggregate does not include the so-called individual entrepreneurs (about 3 % of agricultural land in the individual sector), which are physical bodies but are nevertheless combined with peasant farms for statistical purposes.
- 4.
Political unrest limits the use of agricultural land in Chechnya. In Kaluga Oblast, some agricultural land in the southern districts is partly unusable as a result of radioactive contamination due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident (Kaluga 1987).
- 5.
- 6.
A unitary enterprise, according to the Russian Civil Code, is a legal body that does not have ownership rights to the assets that it controls.
- 7.
A state organisation created to oversee transfer of agricultural land to construction uses (Russian Federation 2008). The law stipulates (art. 15) that the right of permanent use in state-owned agricultural land can be revoked at the discretion of the state, without any of the causes specified in the Land Code (art. 45, part 2) for such action. The law makes no mention of compensation of the affected user (for lost investments or lost income) or provision of an alternative plot.
- 8.
Foreign physical and legal bodies may not own agriculturally zoned land.
- 9.
Judgment of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation No 1911-O, 4 October 2012.
- 10.
Justice M. I. Kleandrov, in a dissenting opinion, argued that experience shows that in such cases the user has no chance to protect his or her interest and that the provision should be recognised as contradicting international law and declared unconstitutional.
- 11.
The government created a new unified rights and transactions register—the EGRP—in 1998 without transferring the relevant information from previous registers.
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Shagaida, N., Lerman, Z. (2017). Land Policy in Russia: New Challenges. In: Gomez y Paloma, S., Mary, S., Langrell, S., Ciaian, P. (eds) The Eurasian Wheat Belt and Food Security. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33239-0_3
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