Agricultural Land Market in Ukraine: Challenges of Trade Liberalization and Future Land Policy Reforms

Abstract

After over 20 years of a strict moratorium on the turnover of agricultural land in Ukraine, an official market for this type of land has recently been established. The purpose of this study was to examine the functioning of the fundamental elements of this market from the moment of its introduction on 1 July 2021 until today, as well as to understand the possible directions for its further development. The analysis of the agricultural land market and the visualization of the obtained results were carried out using the PostgreSQL database, Python and SQL programming languages, and the QGIS and Metabase tools. It was found that the volume of the agricultural land market remains insignificant, as the total area of sold land during this period made up only 0.7% of the arable land area of Ukraine. Prices for land plots remained at the level of their normative monetary value and are still relatively low, which indicates the significant undercapitalization of agricultural land as a production factor. The stability of agricultural land prices under the influence of various factors also indicates their relative virtuality, which, taking into account the further lifting of restrictions on the size of land plots to be sold as of 1 January 2024, requires the use of appropriate land policy instruments in order to fully utilize the multipurpose role of land in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, which should be based on a human-rights-based approach to rural development, food security, and land policy.