Quasi-ownership of citizens on land shares. Loss of institutions ensuring rational use and protection of agricultural lands. Inefficiency of land administration and land relations regulation. Degradation of agricultural lands

Abstract

In the late 80s and early 90s, everyone realized the inefficiency of the centralized model of economic system, which led to an empty budget, public debts, and the collapse of the economy, which, in turn, caused the collapse of the country. The unwillingness to change the paradigm of centralized management of the economy to market economy with the minimum necessary state regulation in the interests of society forced revolutionary changes to be carried out within a timeframe that required a longer transition time from a planned economy to a market one. State support for land reform actually finished in 2000 with the abolition of the State Committee of the Russian Federation for Land Policy, the termination of the Federal Target Program "Development of Land Reform in the Russian Federation for 1999-2002" and the liquidation of the land service represented by 75 state survey institutes for land management (Giprozems of the RosNIizemproekt association) in 2000-2004. The continuation of spontaneous land transformations by the «invisible hand of the market» with the purchase of undervalued agricultural land by land speculators using these lands for their own purposes, the seizure of land shares of rural residents, the formation of hundreds of thousands and million hectares of land holdings, the widespread excessive use of soil fertility, uncompleted cadastre with disputed borders and a gray market for short-term leases of agricultural land moved to «land scarcity among land abundance». The paper contains these facts and proposes the measures to rationalize agricultural land use in our country.