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Support to land consolidation through FAO training seminar on land banking…

Press release…

Morten Hartvigsen, FAO Land Tenure Officer, emphasises the link between increasing farm size, agricultural production growth and food security, and shares good practices from Europe…

24 January 2025, Ankara – The need to develop larger and more commercially profitable farms is a pressing issue in many countries as it presents significant socioeconomic and environmental challenges, including food insecurity and loss of economic opportunities. This growing concern stems from a number of interlinked factors, including an ageing rural population, out-migration from rural areas, inefficient farm structures and inheritance practices that further fragment land ownership. Among these factors, inefficient farm structures, characterised by low average farm sizes and extreme land fragmentation, are one of the main drivers that make agricultural activities uneconomic.

Morten Hartvigsen

To address the need to enhance farm sizes and provide a solution to economically unviable farm structures, the FAO-Türkiye Partnership Programme is implementing a special project, ‘Improving agricultural land market development to address land abandonment and improve land consolidation procedures’. The initiative aims to strengthen institutional capacity in Azerbaijan, Türkiye and Uzbekistan to develop land banking and other land market measures to facilitate the improvement and expansion of farm structure while ensuring sustainable agricultural land use.

Within the scope of the project activities, a training seminar was held in Ankara on 21 January 2025 to exchange information and views. The event organised under the title of ‘Land banking in support of land consolidation – Good practices from Europe’ brought together land tenure experts from FAO with experts from the General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works and General Directorate of Agricultural Reform.

The seminar started with the opening speech of Sinan Demirbaş, Head of Land Consolidation and In-Field Development Services Department of General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works. Demirbaş emphasised the rationale behind the project with the words ‘As the parcels become larger and costs decrease, people will stay in their villages and continue agricultural production’.

Morten Hartvigsen, FAO Land Tenure Officer and Technical Leader of the project, made a comprehensive presentation underlining the link between enhancing farm size, increasing agricultural production and food security. Hartvigsen outlined FAO’s approach to land consolidation, defining the key concepts involved and sharing good examples from Europe, with particular attention to the experience of multipurpose consolidation in Western Europe.

Land consolidation and land banking are tools used for agricultural development by reducing land fragmentation and enhancing farm size. Land banking facilitates land mobility, enabling farms to grow. In cases where land consolidation includes non-agricultural purposes, land banking can compensate active farmers for land taken out of production. The dynamics of uncultivated land and land markets were explored in the presentation by Maxim Gorgan, who discussed how land consolidation and land banking effectively address idle land and bring it into production sustainably. The seminar concluded with a question-answer and discussion session, which demonstrated the participants’ keen interest and enthusiasm for the topics covered.

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