Already during the Land Reform, land properties of several land parcels were formed in the rural areas. Another factor that benefits to the fragmentation of farm properties is development of land market because buying or renting land for farm size building, it is not always possible to find adjacent land plot. Consequently, the land fragmentation not only makes land management difficult, but also increases the transport costs. With this rural land tenure system, competitive and efficient agricultural production cannot be discussed, so a large part of rural areas remains untreated. It was found that there is a strong correlation between the area of land parcels and their management - the smaller the area of a land parcel by the agricultural land, the greater the chance that it would not be managed, and vice versa, the greater the area, the more it is cultivated, that is, managed. Land consolidation is performed as the farm land use optimization activities in other countries. Land consolidation can be one of the efficient means for rural development, it can encourage formation of competitive agricultural production structure, giving farmers the opportunity to create holdings with a small number, but bigger size and better-shaped land plots. Thus, more income and opportunities to expand types of farming are created.

Abstract. Land is a non-renewable resource with limited availability and, therefore, a very important issue is the preservation of useful properties of land and comprehensive and sustainable land use. The process of land and soil degradation (decline of properties) leading to the formation of degraded land have been observed due to the influence of various economic activities and environmental conditions. The Land Management Law has already specified that degraded land is an area of destroyed or damaged land surface or abandoned territory of building sites, mineral extraction, economic or military activity. The expert opinion on degraded land is that it could be a polluted area, abandoned building sites, old greenhouse territories, Soviet-period farms and workshops, as well as non-recultivated mineral deposit sites and dumping grounds. The research concluded that currently it is useful to distinguish three types of degraded land: abandoned building sites, an abandoned mineral extraction area and an abandoned agricultural and forestry activity area. The Analytic Hierarchy Process developed by American mathematician T.L.Saaty was applied for choosing criteria for each type of degraded land to identify the views of experts on the mutual influence of land degradation determination criteria. The results of the expert evaluations showed that the most important criteria for the determination of abandoned building sites and agricultural and forestry activities were "dump-site" and "abandoned military territory or object".