It is proposed to allow the transfer of agricultural land to other categories only with the consent of the Ministry of Agriculture
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The State Duma proposes to limit the ability of regional authorities to transfer agricultural land to other categories – a bill introduced by deputies proposes to establish a “two keys” system, making such decisions possible only with the consent of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation. The innovation is explained by the desire to prevent a further reduction in the area of agricultural land and reduce the number of abuses by regional authorities. The Ministry of Agriculture supported the idea, calling the proposed approach “balanced.”
On Friday, a group of State Duma deputies, including Vice Speaker of the House Alexei Gordeev and head of the Committee on Agrarian Issues Vladimir Kashin, introduced a bill tightening the approach to the transfer of agricultural land to other categories. As noted in the explanatory note to the project, the initiative is aimed at preventing a further reduction in the area of agricultural land – between 1990 and 2022 it decreased by 1.6 times (from 638 million hectares to 379 million hectares).
The bill provides for the introduction of the principle of “two keys” – to eliminate the possibility of abuse by regions in relation to agricultural lands that are in regional or municipal ownership, in the ownership of individuals and legal entities, as well as areas for which state property is not distributed. Regions will be able to transfer such agricultural land to other categories only with the consent of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation.
It should be noted that the government regularly raises the issue of protecting agricultural land from disposal – Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko called the procedure for transferring land from one category to another “opaque, containing corruption-related factors.”
However, basically, proposals to tighten the procedure did not apply to all agricultural land, but to particularly valuable ones, in particular, agricultural land, which can now be transferred to other categories in exceptional cases. For example, in 2023, the introduction of a ban on the transfer of especially valuable agricultural land to other categories for mining was discussed. The Ministry of Agriculture then explained that the reduction in agricultural land was due precisely to their transfer to other categories and that a significant part of such decisions were made by regional bodies. In 2021, the regions allowed the transfer to other categories of 7 thousand agricultural plots with an area of 87 thousand hectares, of which more than 35 thousand hectares are farmland.
The Ministry of Agriculture supported the idea of the bill, calling the proposed approach “balanced.” “This will ensure the preservation of productive agricultural lands as the main means of production in agriculture,” the department told Kommersant.
Chief Researcher at the Center for Agricultural Policy at RANEPA Vasily Uzun explains that the severity of the problem is due to the fact that construction on agricultural lands, even private ones, was initially prohibited or limited – if these lands are transferred to other categories that allow it, then the price of the plot increases by tens , and near big cities – hundreds of times. “And business is ready to do anything to persuade officials to carry out this transfer – it is usually very difficult for them to resist such a temptation,” he says. However, the expert was skeptical about the “two keys” system. “It is difficult to imagine that officials from Moscow will be able to understand the regional problem – those who want to carry out the translation for them will also come up with compelling justifications for its need,” says Vasily Uzun.
As Larisa Soldatova, associate professor of the Department of Public Law at the Faculty of Law of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, notes, the existing restrictions on transfer do not apply to all agricultural land, but to their most valuable part – farmland, in particular, arable land, pastures and vineyards. The Ministry of Agriculture is primarily responsible for their preservation. The proposed changes, she says, “should be regarded as a logical distribution of decision-making powers aimed at creating an effective agricultural land management system.”
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