One of the reasons for the Maidan Revolution was to open the sale of Ukrainian land to foreigners—it's much too good for the Ukes to keep to themselves—but that step, required by the IMF as a condition of any further loans to replace the loans that were stolen and laundered (just what was Templeton up to with the Ukrainian sovereign debt bets?), that step needs a referendum and enabling legislation.
But this phase, also required by the IMF, is the starting point.
First up, from Radio Free Europe via Farmlandgrab, August 22:
HRYSHCHYNTSI, Ukraine -- For small farmers in Ukraine, a traditional “breadbasket” that boasts some of the world’s richest soil, there’s something new under the sun this summer: They can sell their land if they want to.Liliya Sytnyk doesn’t.Like many of her neighbors in this village of 600 residents in the central Cherkasy region 125 kilometers (77 miles) south of Kyiv, an area known as the Sunflower Belt, she plans to hold onto her inherited land -- despite new legislation that took effect on July 1, ending a two-decade moratorium on the sale and purchase of a total of 42.7 million hectares (103 million acres) of fertile farmland in Ukraine.“I would rather transfer ownership to my children and grandchildren,” said Sytnyk, 61, a subsistence farmer who leases 1 hectare to a nearby poultry producer that is the biggest in the country. “This is our heritage, our wealth.”Lyudmyla Borkinets, who grows what she and her husband need to live off and leases about five hectares to the same poultry giant, also has no plans to sell.But she hopes that buyers in the area will be small-scale farmers whose activity could help generate a thriving local micro-economy complete with local seed and fertilizer providers, and on a wider scale, help stem the demise of the country’s rural communities.Borkinets, 63, said that the “big farms” -- those that cultivate more than 20,000 hectares -- “don’t register their companies in the communities in which they farm, so their tax money doesn’t go toward improving our villages.” And, she added, “their trucks damage our roads and they don’t contribute to repairing them or build new ones.”Her hopes for thriving rural communities fit in with one of the aims of the reform that has been years in the making: to create incentive in what, until July 1, was one of a handful of countries left in the world that had not allowed the sale of agricultural land.Lower Yields
Since 2001, some 7 million farmland owners in Ukraine had been unable to use their property as collateral to purchase or lease machinery, buy quality seeds, store grain in silos, and invest in new technologies.The status quo has been a huge disincentive to farming operations, reform advocates say, discouraging investment and keeping Ukraine’s agricultural yields substantially lower than those in the European Union and the United States.Barred from buying and selling, many Ukrainians who became owners of their land in the mid-1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, have had little choice but to rely on subsistence farming while leasing whatever was left to bigger farming operations.In the past, such leases have usually fetched an average of about $150 per hectare yearly, said Denys Bashlyk, who heads the Land Club, a consultancy that facilitates the purchase or lease of farmland as a source of residual income....
Although Ukraine has large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the world, the wealth of its agriculture sector has long remained largely out of reach of the country’s farmers. In the country known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” agriculture has been dominated by oligarchs and multinational corporations since the privatization of state-owned land following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For the past thirty years, no government has been able to meaningfully challenge that status quo.
Will this change, now that a controversial law to create a land market entered into effect on July 1, 2021?
Whereas proponents claim(link is external) that a land market is necessary to attract the foreign investment that Ukrainian agriculture needs to achieve its full economic potential, many(link is external) Ukrainians(link is external) believe(link is external) that agriculture in Ukraine will only become more corrupt and controlled by powerful interests as a result of the new land reform law(link is external).
The law, “On Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine on the Conditions of Turnover of Agricultural Land” (Law 552-IX), is a crucial plank of the liberalizing agenda championed by President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Western international institutions that support his government. It was passed by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s unicameral legislature, in March 2020 as a condition for the financially imperiled government to receive a US$5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)....
....MUCH MORE, including links to some of their earlier reporting.
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