Land consolidation is a planned readjustment and rearrangement of fragmented land parcels and their ownership. It is usually applied to form larger and more rational land holdings. Land consolidation can be used to improve rural infrastructure and to implement developmental and environmental policies (improving environmental sustainability and agriculture). [1]
Land consolidation has existed in Europe for many centuries. In France, the first modern land consolidation took place in Rouvres-en-Plaine in 1707. The practice of private land consolidation began to be visible in the Paris Basin during the nineteenth century. Subsequently, it was usually done with the support of the public authorities. A law of 16 June 1824 authorized the exchange of land between individuals in order to fight against the fragmentation of agricultural parcels and to improve productivity. [2] The concept spread more widely in Europe and the USA in the early 20th century. In the Netherlands the first land consolidation was in 1916 when 3659 plots were reduced to 500. In 1919, however, a further attempt to reduce fragmentation broke down against the opposition of one of the owners. This led to the Land Consolidation Act in 1924 which permitted land consolidation to continue without the cooperation of a small number of the owners. [3] In Spain legal provision on land consolidation was not promulgated until December 20, 1952, but it was enthusiastically received by farmers. [4] Similarly, in Germany legislation was passed in the 1950s as part of an overhaul of German agriculture. Land consolidation, known as Flurbereinigung, made possible landscapes being reshaped, for example with respect to construction of access roads. The process particularly benefitted the wine industry. [5]
Following the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries of Europe in 1991, state farms were frequently divided into fragmented parcels. Land was often returned to former owners who, by this time, were elderly, or given in joint ownership to heirs of an original owner. This resulted in a large number of absentee landowners residing in urban areas. In other cases, decollectivization resulted in households receiving several fragmented parcels of different qualities of arable land. Thus the need for consolidation was quickly recognised. [6]
More recently there have been attempts to promote land consolidation in developing countries. Approaches used include increasing the average size of farms into viable commercial units through sale or lease; consolidation to reduce fragmentation of smallholder plots; and cooperative farming, where farmers retain ownership of their land but farm it jointly. China has been particularly active in promoting consolidation, which involves issuance of land certificates that confirm a person’s entitlement to land, thus permitting sale and lease of land rights. To facilitate the process, land transfer service centers have been set up by local governments to collect information on who is looking to lease out; provide potential clients with information on location, area, major land characteristics, and suggested price of land to be leased out; prepare a formal land contract; and be responsible for contract dispute mediation. [7]
In many countries individual smallholders’ land is distributed among many small fragments. This increases production costs by requiring time for farmers to move between fragments and makes use of machinery almost impossible. A response to this is to restructure land holdings while ensuring that farmers retain the same amount of land. In Uttar Pradesh in India a government program led to field boundaries being straightened and land areas as much as possible being reshaped in rectangular form. This improved ease of cultivation, particularly plowing, and lessened disputes due to unclear border demarcations and encroachments. [8] [9] In the Dinh Hoa commune of Vietnam, land consolidation has also been carried out in order to reduce the number of plots owned by individual farm households, thereby increasing the average size of a plot without changing the total farmland area of each household. This is done with the involvement of the local government and the smallholders. The move has resulted in reduced labour costs and increased mechanization, and has also permitted some restructuring of irrigation systems. [10]
Successful consolidation has to overcome competing interests of the farmers. There may be objections regarding the initial inventory of ownership, the boundaries between land, and the value attached to different parcels. Consolidation cannot simply involve re-allocating land while ensuring that everyone gets the same amount, as the quality of the land re-allocated has to be taken into account and an owner should not be worse off after consolidation than before. Consolidation programs should aim at ensuring that an owner’s holding after consolidation is equal in value to the original holding; if the value of the holding is less it may sometimes be necessary to pay financial compensation. However, soil quality is not the only factor in valuation as the value of a parcel can be affected by its position relative to roads, water supply, farm buildings and farmers’ homes, as well as the value of trees or vines already planted on the land. Mediation arrangements to resolve these problems are essential. It is important to include respected farmers in the land valuation teams together with valuation experts. [6]
A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer might own the farmed land or might work as a laborer on land owned by others, but in most developed economies, a farmer is usually a farm owner, while employees of the farm are known as farm workers, or farmhands. However, in other older definitions a farmer was a person who promotes or improves the growth of plants, land or crops or raises animals by labor and attention.
A farm is an area of land that is devoted primarily to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food production. The name is used for specialized units such as arable farms, vegetable farms, fruit farms, dairy, pig and poultry farms, and land used for the production of natural fiber, biofuel and other commodities. It includes ranches, feedlots, orchards, plantations and estates, smallholdings and hobby farms, and includes the farmhouse and agricultural buildings as well as the land. In modern times the term has been extended so as to include such industrial operations as wind farms and fish farms, both of which can operate on land or sea.
Agricultural productivity is measured as the ratio of agricultural outputs to inputs. While individual products are usually measured by weight, which is known as crop yield, varying products make measuring overall agricultural output difficult. Therefore, agricultural productivity is usually measured as the market value of the final output. This productivity can be compared to many different types of inputs such as labour or land. Such comparisons are called partial measures of productivity.
Sustainable agriculture is farming in sustainable ways meeting society's present food and textile needs, without compromising the ability for current or future generations to meet their needs. It can be based on an understanding of ecosystem services. There are many methods to increase the sustainability of agriculture. When developing agriculture within sustainable food systems, it is important to develop flexible business process and farming practices. Agriculture has an enormous environmental footprint, playing a significant role in causing climate change, water scarcity, water pollution, land degradation, deforestation and other processes; it is simultaneously causing environmental changes and being impacted by these changes. Sustainable agriculture consists of environment friendly methods of farming that allow the production of crops or livestock without damage to human or natural systems. It involves preventing adverse effects to soil, water, biodiversity, surrounding or downstream resources—as well as to those working or living on the farm or in neighboring areas. Elements of sustainable agriculture can include permaculture, agroforestry, mixed farming, multiple cropping, and crop rotation.
Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow food crops to meet the needs of themselves and their families on smallholdings. Subsistence agriculturalists target farm output for survival and for mostly local requirements, with little or no surplus. Planting decisions occur principally with an eye toward what the family will need during the coming year, and only secondarily toward market prices. Tony Waters, a professor of sociology, defines "subsistence peasants" as "people who grow what they eat, build their own houses, and live without regularly making purchases in the marketplace."
A latifundium is a very extensive parcel of privately owned land. The latifundia of Roman history were great landed estates specializing in agriculture destined for export: grain, olive oil, or wine. They were characteristic of Magna Graecia and Sicily, Egypt, Northwest Africa and Hispania Baetica. The latifundia were the closest approximation to industrialized agriculture in Antiquity, and their economics depended upon slavery.
Agriculture in Russia is an important part of the economy of the Russian Federation. The agricultural sector survived a severe transition decline in the early 1990s as it struggled to transform from a command economy to a market-oriented system. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, large collective and state farms – the backbone of Soviet agriculture – had to contend with the sudden loss of state-guaranteed marketing and supply channels and a changing legal environment that created pressure for reorganization and restructuring. In less than ten years, livestock inventories declined by half, pulling down demand for feed grains, and the area planted to grains dropped by 25%.
Forestry laws govern activities in designated forest lands, most commonly with respect to forest management and timber harvesting. Forestry laws generally adopt management policies for public forest resources, such as multiple use and sustained yield. Forest management is split between private and public management, with public forests being sovereign property of the State. Forestry laws are now considered an international affair.
A smallholding or smallholder is a small farm operating under a small-scale agriculture model. Definitions vary widely for what constitutes a smallholder or small-scale farm, including factors such as size, food production technique or technology, involvement of family in labor and economic impact. Smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. As a country becomes more affluent, smallholdings may not be self-sufficient, but may be valued for the rural lifestyle. As the sustainable food and local food movements grow in affluent countries, some of these smallholdings are gaining increased economic viability. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in developing countries of the world alone, supporting almost two billion people.
Chak, a Punjabi word, is the land revenue settlement/assessment circle marking a contiguous block of land. Chak word comes from Chakar of mean wheel in Urdu.The wheel was used for Water well. There was one water well in a village at that time and every village number allotted as per water-well wheel. Now the individual chak circles have come to be associated with the name of the village founded within the revenue circle. Chak circles are based on the British Raj era revenue collection system. To enhance the government revenue during the British Raj, new canals were built to bring the barani (rainfed) areas under cultivation by introducing the irrigation to the bangar (upland) areas of Punjab region. Block of contiguous land irrigated by the specific Rajwaha were given a unique chak number each. The migrant farmers were brought in to settle into those newly irrigated areas around the core of new villages [which started out as dhanis]. Those new villages were called by the same name as their corresponding irrigation circle chak number. Government left it to those residents to give "chaks" a proper village name later. In due time, the term "chak" became synonymous with the term "village".
Flurbereinigung is the German word best translated as land consolidation. Unlike the land reforms carried out in the socialist countries of the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany, the idea of Flurbereiningung was not so much to distribute large quasi-feudal holdings to the formerly landless rural workers and/or to Kolkhoz-style cooperatives, but rather to correct the situation where after centuries of equal division of the inheritance of small farmers among their heirs and unregulated sales, most farmers owned many small non-adjacent plots of land, making access and cultivation difficult and inefficient. Two other European countries where this kind of land reform has been carried out are France (remembrement) and the Netherlands (ruilverkaveling).
Agriculture continued to be the mainstay of the economy of Haiti in the late 1980s; it employed approximately 66 percent of the labor force and accounted for about 35 percent of GDP and for 24 percent of exports in 1987. The role of agriculture in the economy has declined severely since the 1950s, when the sector employed 80 percent of the labor force, represented 50 percent of GDP, and contributed 90 percent of exports. Many factors have contributed to this decline. Some of the major ones included the continuing fragmentation of landholdings, low levels of agricultural technology, migration out of rural areas, insecure land tenure, a lack of capital investment, high commodity taxes, the low productivity of undernourished animals, plant diseases, and inadequate infrastructure. Neither the government nor the private sector invested much in rural ventures; in FY 1989 only 5 percent of the national budget went to the Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Rural Development. As Haiti entered the 1990s, however, the main challenge to agriculture was not economic, but ecological. Extreme deforestation, soil erosion, droughts, flooding, and the ravages of other natural disasters had all led to a critical environmental situation.
Four major land reforms have taken place in Romania: in 1864, 1921, 1945 and 1991. The first sought to undo the feudal structure that had persisted after the unification of the Danubian Principalities in 1859; the second, more drastic reform, tried to resolve lingering peasant discontent and create social harmony after the upheaval of World War I and extensive territorial expansion; the third, imposed by a mainly Communist government, did away with the remaining influence of the landed aristocracy but was itself soon undone by collectivisation, which the fourth then unravelled, leading to almost universal private ownership of land today.
The term food system describes the interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture. A food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, distribution and disposal of food and food-related items. It also includes the inputs needed and outputs generated at each of these steps. Food systems fall within agrifood systems, which encompass the entire range of actors and their interlinked value-adding activities in the primary production of food and non-food agricultural products, as well as in food storage, aggregation, post-harvest handling, transportation, processing, distribution, marketing, disposal and consumption. A food system operates within and is influenced by social, political, economic, and environmental contexts. It also requires human resources that provide labor, research and education. Food systems are either conventional or alternative according to their model of food lifespan from origin to plate.
Agriculture in Cyprus constituted the backbone of its economy when it achieved its independence in 1960. It mostly consisted of small farms, and sometimes even subsistence farms. During the 1960s, irrigation projects made possible vegetable and fruit exports; increasingly commercialized farming was able to meet the demands for meat, dairy products, and wine from the British and United Nations troops stationed on the island and from the growing number of tourists.
The problem of land reform in Ethiopia has hampered that country's economic development throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. Attempts to modernize land ownership by giving title either to the peasants who till the soil, or to large-scale farming programs, have been tried under imperial rulers like Emperor Haile Selassie, and under Marxist regimes like the Derg, with mixed results. The present Constitution of Ethiopia, which was put into force January 1995, vests land ownership exclusively "in the State and in the peoples of Ethiopia." The relevant section continues, "Land is a common property of the Nations, Nationalities and Peoples of Ethiopia and shall not be subject to sale or to other means of exchange." Despite these different approaches to land reform, Ethiopia still faces issues of sustainable food self-sufficiency.
Prior to World War II, agriculture in Bulgaria was the leading sector in the Bulgarian economy. In 1939, agriculture contributed 65 percent of Net material product (NMP), and four out of every five Bulgarians were employed in agriculture. The importance and organization of Bulgarian agriculture changed drastically after the war, however. By 1958, the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) had collectivized a high percentage of Bulgarian farms; in the next three decades, the state used various forms of organization to improve productivity, but none succeeded. Meanwhile, private plots remained productive and often alleviated agricultural shortages during the Todor Zhivkov era.
Agrarian reform and land reform have been a recurring theme of enormous consequence in world history. They are often highly political and have been achieved in many countries.
Digital agriculture, sometimes known as smart farming or e-agriculture, is tools that digitally collect, store, analyze, and share electronic data and/or information in agriculture. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has described the digitalization process of agriculture as the digital agricultural revolution. Other definitions, such as those from the United Nations Project Breakthrough, Cornell University, and Purdue University, also emphasize the role of digital technology in the optimization of food systems.
Concentration of land ownership refers to the ownership of land in a particular area by a small number of people or organizations. It is sometimes defined as additional concentration beyond that which produces optimally efficient land use.
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