Land Policy, Unfinished Land Reforms, and the Widespread Malpractice of Short-Term Agricultural Land Leasing. Proclamations and Their Implementation

The aim of land policy in Western European countries has been to address specific agricultural land use problems existing in those countries: — Regulation of land purchase and leasing (Germany, Denmark); — Prevention of excessive concentration of land ownership (Germany, Denmark, France, Spain, Switzerland); — Prevention of excessive fragmentation of land plots (Germany, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Norway); — Retention of population in their places of residence (Norway). The broader goals of land reforms in Russia in the late 20th century were to ensure access to land, and to form and maintain a viable scale of sustainable agricultural land use under private ownership that would ensure a reasonable level of profitability and allow for a decent income. The goals and objectives of land policy proclaimed by Russia in the late 20th century have not been implemented to this day, due to the unfinished land reform. This includes the failure to transform land shares into delineated plots, to identify the owners of land shares within specific contours of multi-contour land plots with the allocation of plots corresponding to their shares and the right to dispose of them at their discretion, and the practice of privatizing lands instead of retaining agricultural lands in state and municipal ownership and providing them primarily for short-term lease. The following practices have become widespread: — Acquisition of agricultural land by land speculators — rentiers — for leasing to agricultural producers, thereby appropriating the land rent that belongs to society, changing the designated purpose of the land, and reselling it at prices hundreds of times higher than the acquisition cost; — Bureaucratic business in granting agricultural lands under various rights, and in changing their designated purpose and permitted use; — Fraud in transactions involving citizens' land shares, resulting in the loss of their rights; — Excessive concentration of land ownership in the hands of individuals; — Insufficient land allocation for peasant (farm) enterprises; — Underdevelopment of the socialization of agricultural land, its perception as social security rather than as an economic asset. In Georgia, agricultural land up to 5 hectares is exempt from land tax, as are families living in the territory of "abandoned" villages, individuals and legal entities for 5 years from the moment of receiving land on lease, and families living on agricultural lands under state resettlement measures for 5 years; — Low tax rate (0.3%) on agricultural land used by producers, which has led to the widespread malpractice of short-term agricultural land leasing, and the provision of state and municipal lands exclusively for lease instead of sale; — Socio-economic underdevelopment and depopulation of rural areas in the Non-Black Earth Region, with the loss of villages and hamlets. Without developing a modern land policy at the federal and regional levels and restoring the land management service and planned agricultural land use lost in 2000–2004, the existing problems of agricultural land use cannot be solved. The article presents the results of auctions for leasing agricultural land plots from state and municipal lands held in 2022 in the Ryazan, Smolensk, Pskov, and Belgorod regions, along with an analysis of these results. Legislative improvements for regulating land relations are proposed.