Land consolidation is a well-proven land management instrument, which has traditionally been used for agricultural development with a main objective of reducing land fragmentation and increasing holding and farm sizes. Some European countries have a land consolidation tradition that goes back a hundred years or more.
This presentation was given at the Webinar "Land Consolidation Legislation: FAO Legal Guide and Its Application at the Country Level" on 18 June 2020. It sets the scene on the need for land consolidation by explaining the problem it addresses, namely, land fragmentation.
This presentation was given at the Webinar "Land Consolidation Legislation: FAO Legal Guide and Its Application at the Country Level" on 18 June 2020. It explores the content of the new FAO Legal Guide on Land Consolidation, as well as the context that led to the development of this guide.
The Republic of Azerbaijan implemented during the late 1990s a land reform, which distributed the state owned agricultural land to the rural population but also led to excessive land fragmentation and small farm sizes.
In the Shaanxi province, small and scattered plots impede an increase in the efficiency of apple production. Developing a moderate operation scale is a proper tool to solve inefficiencies in apple production, as it enables improving the factor allocation efficiency, resulting in higher yields, higher profit, or lower production costs.
In many African countries and especially in the highlands of Ethiopia—the investigation site of this paper—agricultural land is highly fragmented. Small and scattered parcels impede a necessary increase in agricultural efficiency. Land consolidation is a proper tool to solve inefficiencies in agricultural production, as it enables consolidating plots based on the consent of landholders.
Most countries in Western Europe have a long tradition for implementing land consolidation projects. In Central and Eastern Europe, land reforms from 1990 on in most countries resulted in farm structures characterized by excessive land fragmentation and small average farm sizes. Most CEE countries have introduced land consolidation instruments to address the structural problems.
Shortly after the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded in 1945, the organization had started to support member countries addressing structural problems in agriculture with land fragmentation and small holding and farm sizes through the development of land consolidation instruments (Binns, 1950).
Most transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) face enormous challenges in developing a viable land structure, requiring a set of measures which is unprecedented in its scale and intensity to speed up this process.
Declining size of the farm holdings in most high agricultural potential areas as a result of continuous land fragmentation is currently a major policy concern in Kenya. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of land fragmentation and agro-ecological zones (AEZs) on food security and farm efficiency in Kenya.
