Land Committee Head: Moratorium on Land Sales Should Be Extended

The moratorium on farm land sales should be extended for a limited period time, according to Mykola Prysyaznyuk, the chairman of the Land and Agriculture Parliamentary Committee.

“The moratorium should be extended, though not for long. Twenty laws that will set the ‘rules of play’ still need to be passed. And first of all, we need to make an inventory of all lands which, after a division into smaller plots, have lost their agricultural character and have come to be considered areas of development,” Prysyazhnyuk said.

Several laws still need to be passed on state-owned lands and their usage, as well as on the state land cadastre and land acquisition, he added. Several articles of the present Land Code must also be revoked because they allow local authorities to arbitrarily exclude lands from the agricultural stock.

Earlier, UNIAN reported that Ukraine’s law “On the State Budget for 2008” called for an extended moratorium on the sale of farm land until the laws “On the State Land Cadastre” and “On the Market of Land” had been adopted.

The budget law amended the “Transitional Provisions” of the Land Code dealing with the moratorium, replacing the words “before Jan. 1, 2008” with “until the laws of Ukraine ‘On the State Land Cadastre’ and ‘On the Market of Land’ take effect.” These bills should have been prepared and passed over to the Verkhovna Rada in the first quarter of 2008.

During the last eight years, several bills on the land market have been developed by different factions and registered in the parliament.

On April 9, the president of the Ukrainian Realtors Association Oleksandr Bondarenko said that these bills were unlikely to be passed by the current parliament. The remark came after a public discussion of a draft bill “On the Market of Land.”