44% of agricultural land in Russia are still not used

The agricultural census conducted in 2016 showed that the total area of unused farmland in Russia according to the last year data was 97.2 million hectares equaling 44% of all agricultural land of the country. This is specified in the December review of the economic situation, prepared by the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) together with Gaidar Institution and All-Russian Foreign Trade Academy. “The census results indicate that, compared with the common evaluation of the total abandoned agricultural land (about 40 million hectares), this figure is underestimated by almost 2.5 times,” the study states.
It states that the census revealed huge areas registered as arable land according to the official statistics of the Russian State Register (RSR), but in fact have not been plowed for a long time and turned into fallow land. Thus, agricultural organizations do not use 31% of the land assigned to them, and households - more than 80%. Farmers, on the contrary, use 33% more farmland than assigned to them according to RSR. “The census revealed that farmers use 43.3 million hectares of land, not 28.8 million as RSR reported earlier; and conversely, also according to the RSR data, 77.3 million hectares of land are assigned to the private households, while census takers detected only 14.3 million hectares," experts estimated.

In total, 142.2 million hectares of agricultural land were assigned to farms of all categories participating in the census of 2016. Those who did not participate in the census were assigned 50.7 million hectares, which considered as unused land as the result of comparison of data obtained with Russian Statistics Committee (RSC) reporting. In addition, in accordance with the census results, out of 142.2 million hectares, only 124.8 million are used, so, another 17.4 million hectares of land are abandoned. In addition, 29.1 million hectares of agricultural lands which were never assigned to agricultural producers still stay unused.

According to RSR data as of January 1st, 2017, Russian territory includes 222 million hectares of agricultural land, 122.7 million of which are classified as arable land, 24 million as hayfields, 68.5 million as pastures, 1.9 million as perennial plantations and 4.9 million hectares are presented by fallow lands. “Preliminary results of the All-Russian Agricultural Census-2016 in some cases force to change the existing mind about agricultural lands. They should also be supplemented by the expert conclusions of regulatory and supervisory authorities,” the authors of the study infer.

Previously, the total square of unused agricultural land in the country was estimated at 40 million hectares. “Such figures can be obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture, which is currently trying to implement a monitoring system. 40.5 million hectares of land were identified as unused according to the results of the last census (organised in 2006) and even only from among those lands that were already assigned to agricultural producers. Furthermore many available lands are not assigned to anybody. Ministry documents contain different estimates from different years - for example, both 40 million hectares and 56 million hectares,” Natalia Shagaida, director of the RANEPA Center for Agricultural Policy, told to the "Agroinvestor".

In most regions, arable land area was declining until 2007, before reached the minimum that was subsequently passed, said in September the head of the Economic Forecasting Center of the Gazprombank, Daria Snitko, at the VI industry business conference named "Russian Crop Production" - 2017/18, organized by the "Agroinvestor" magazine. After that, the areas began to increase gradually. “A number of regions, by the way have already reached fairly high rates in the use of arable land. As examples, we can mention the Altai Territory, Rostov Region and, of course, Krasnodar Territory. Some of the precedents even show that the sown arable land area is greater than the arable land area recorded in rewritten arable resources,” Snitko noted.

Earlier, the head of the Agriculture Ministry Alexander Tkachev, repeatedly expressed the need to restore order in registering of unused agricultural land resources. In July 2016 a federal law that improved land acquisition procedure came into force in Russia. In particular, the period after which land parcel can be withdrawn from the owner in case if it is not used for agricultural production purpose was reduced from five to three years. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, in 2016 it was decided to withdraw 10,000 hectares of unused land, that is four times more than in 2015. The region with the largest amount of seized land was the Moscow region - land owners lost here 2.58 thousand hectares of unused land. A year earlier, the Ministry of Agriculture announced the preparation of a draft law on the formation of the state agricultural land register, that will help to intensify measures in order to put land resources in circulation.
However, according to Shagaida, it is probably will not be necessary to be much concerned about the issue of involving unused lands in circulation. “Anyway, most of the lands that provide economic benefits are currently in use. Of course, potential for involvement is still available, but it is incommensurable with the total unused land area. The realistic and economically feasible algorithm of unused agricultural land reduction due to the expanded dropping of crops, according to our estimates, should be about 5% of the actual one over the next two-three years and up to 13% by 2025,” the expert said.

Source: agroinvestor.ru