Abandoned farmland in Armenia will be given over to farmers ready to work on them

Abandoned lands throughout Armenia will soon be rented from their owners and given to farmers interested in developing their business and in enlarging their farms.

This will positively affect both rural residents and the development of agribusiness in general.

• Farming classes introduced in ordinary schools

• Armenia’s potato queendom – a female-dominated industry

There are many abandoned land plots across the country, whose owners either have long been outside the borders of Armenia, or are not interested in farming land.

In Armenia, there are only 513,000 hectares of agricultural land, of which, 389,000 hectares are farm plots. About half of this land is poorly processed and irrigated.

“We will not take this land, but we will take it for rent and transfer it to those who are ready to work on it. And we will pay the owner a rent, the size of which will be set by regions and categories of land”, PM Pashinyan says.

Nikol Pashinyan emphasized that this process should be carried out absolutely transparently, and discussions should be open to all parties, and stressed the importance of compromise in this difficult endeavor.

“We need to find a compromise that takes into account the interests of farmers, business and the state, so as not to help one at the expense of the other. But difficult decisions cannot be made here.”

Will owners of abandoned lands be punished?

The problem of abandoned farm and has been discussed since the summer of 2019. In July, at a meeting in the government, Deputy Economy Minister Artak Kamalyan announced land reforms that would punish owners of abandoned plots.

He pointed out the main reasons why farmlands in Armenia go uncultivated:

• lack of funds

• lack of irrigation water

• low profitability

• lack of agricultural machinery in the field.

To solve these problems, reforms in the Land Code are planned for 2020-22, and per which the owners of unused farmland may face sanctions.