Legal Conditions and Data Provision for Land Property Exchange in the Processes of Land Consolidation and Land Compensation in Bulgaria

Abstract

Land consolidation and land compensation require the evaluation of the productivity of the exchanged or recompensed areas. A serious deficiency in land consolidation regulations set by the Agricultural Land Ownership and Use Act, 1991 is the 10% restriction on the difference in the exchanged areas before and after land consolidation. The simultaneous action of the current methodology for equating lands by their quality, together with the legal restrictions of this Act, limits the implementation of land consolidation to only highly productive lands of the 1st to the 3rd land category. The objective of this paper is to suggest a method for extending the implementation of land consolidation to larger areas and to recommend a fairer calculation method in equating lands by their quality. Two approaches to landed property exchange are united. One of them is based on the mean estimates of land productivity per land category (MLPE) (considering the Bulgarian Land Categorization System), the other one – on the detailed land productivity estimates of each landed property (DLPE). The adapted FAO Land Suitability Classification is suggested to identify areas suitable for land consolidation. Regression analysis and expert assessment were used. The data required for GIS processing are specified and systemized. A proposal for the improvement of the legal framework is given.

Energy Efficiency in Agricultural Production—Experience from Land Consolidation in Poland and Finland

“…The problem of excessive land fragmentation affects many countries. One can read in the literature that it occurs, among others, in Bulgaria [57,58], in the Republic of Belarus [59], in Cyprus [60], in the Czech Republic [61], in Estonia [62], in Finland [63,64], in Hungary [65], in Latvia [66], in Lithuania [67], in Slovakia [68], in Spain [69], in The Netherlands [70,71], and in Ukraine [72].…”

The Impact of Purchasing New Agricultural Machinery on Fuel Consumption on Farms

“…The problem of significant agrarian fragmentation currently affects many countries. In their work, Balawejder cited many authors to emphasize that it occurs in Bulgaria [7,8], the Republic of Belarus [9], Cyprus, the Czech Republic [10], Estonia, Finland [11], Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Spain, the Netherlands [12], and Ukraine [13], among others.…”

A land consolidation geoportal as a useful tool in land consolidation projects – A case study of villages in southern Poland

“…The high fragmentation of land plots, especially in southern Poland, calls for urgent land consolidation measures (Balawejder & Leń, 2016;Cienciała et al, 2022;Gniadek et al, 2017;Janus, 2018;Janus & Taszakowski, 2018;Noga et al, 2017;Stręk & Noga, 2019). According to the literature, excessive land fragmentation is a problem that affects many countries, including Bulgaria (Di Falco et al, 2010;Moteva, 2020), in the Republic of Belarus (Hrybau et al, 2022), Cyprus (Demetriou, 2016), Czech Republic (Sklenicka, 2016), Estonia (Jürgenson, 2016), Finland (Hentunen & Konttinen, 2022), Hungary (Cegielska et al, 2018), Latvia (Jankava et al, 2014), Lithuania (Pašakarnis & Maliene, 2010), the Netherlands (Stańczuk-Gałwiaczek et al, 2018), Slovakia (Muchová & Petrovič, 2019), Spain (Touriño et al, 2003), Turkey (Boztoprak et al, 2016), and Ukraine (Martyn et al, 2022).…”