Nepriklausomoje Lietuvoje atliktų žemės ūkio paskirties žemės pertvarkymo darbų lyginamoji analizė

Abstract

With the continuing land reform (on a country scale) one of the main tasks was to suitably re-manage agricultural territories while taking into account the technical level of production and economic factors of farming. Agricultural policy, tasks and achieved results of the land reforms carried out during the period of the restoration of ownership rights to land and during the interwar were compared in the article. The changes of land relations of the reforms were analysed from the point of view of the rational use of agrarian territories by applying the following evaluation criteria: the way that the land users were supplied with land and the way that land use of farms was formed in the land management process. Laws, some other legal and methodological material as well as statistical data were used for the research. Due to the different goals of political forces and the land reforms implemented, their results differ as well: during the period from 1919 to 1940 the area of the peasants’ private land had decreased by more than 516 thousand ha, and at the end of the 1991-2010 period economic structures had used only 81.7% of the land owned by large farms at the beginning of the land reform or less by 610 thousand ha. In addition, only 45% of the used lands are purchased by farms on ownership rights. The average size of the agricultural land plot decreased from 7.8 ha in 1937 to 2.8 ha in 2011. In order to create favourable conditions for agricultural activity of land users, we suggest improving directions and laws of the agricultural policy while planning financial support to farms purchasing land existing within the limits of their perspective land use as well as to those who started using abandoned lands.