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Most transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe face enormous challenges in developing a viable land structure. Due to restitution processes and socially engaged policies of privatization, wide spread land fragmentation is present. The situation in Armenia is comparable with many other countries in the region. Privatization was mainly done in the 1990s but continues until now as state and public land still represent a relatively large share of agricultural land. Figures of Armenia over the last 20 years illustrate minimal change in average farm and plot size. This outline is based on review and analysis of available data and a visit to Armenia in June 2017. It aims to contribute to selecting the policy options and setting the preconditions in Armenia needed to get a well-functioning rural land market to enlarge farms and to reduce fragmentation. As shown in this report, experience in the region is still limited which made it necessary and relevant to refer to experience in Western European countries. Options are not limited to land consolidation but include improved management of state land, land banking, agricultural lease regulation and some other supporting measures. The analysis conducted for this report draws on data collected from the Agricultural Census data of 2014 and data from the Real property cadastre. Qualitative data are based on several reports, presentations and interviews with experts and policy makers listed in the annex. Although further analysis is needed, it is clear that the current situation provides a serious risk for the agricultural sector which jeopardises the impact of any support to the sector. While Western European countries could organically adapt and support the sector to changing market conditions since the 1950s, the situation in Armenia (and other countries in the region) requires a set of measures which is unprecedented in its scale and intensity to speed up this process.

Capacity Building --- Farm Size --- Legal Framework --- Rural Development --- Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction

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Increased levels and volatility of food prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to broad-based development in the long term. Based on a historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and their impact, this paper identifies factors underlying the dominance of owner-operated farm structures and ways in which these may change with development. The amount of land that could potentially be available for expansion and the level of productivity in exploiting available land resources are used to establish a country-level typology. The authors highlight that an assessment of the advantages of large operations, together with information on endowments, can provide input into strategy formulation at the country level. A review of recent cases of land acquisition reinforces the importance of the policy framework in determining outcomes. It suggests that transparency and contract enforcement, recognition of local land rights and ways in which they can be exercised, attention to employment effects and technical viability, and mechanisms to re-allocate land from unsuccessful ventures to more productive entrepreneurs are key areas warranting the attention of policy makers.

Agribusiness --- Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems --- Agriculture --- Banks & Banking Reform --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Factor Endowments --- Farm Size --- Labor Policies --- Land Tenure --- Rural Development Knowledge & Information Systems --- Africa

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Increased levels and volatility of food prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to broad-based development in the long term. Based on a historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and their impact, this paper identifies factors underlying the dominance of owner-operated farm structures and ways in which these may change with development. The amount of land that could potentially be available for expansion and the level of productivity in exploiting available land resources are used to establish a country-level typology. The authors highlight that an assessment of the advantages of large operations, together with information on endowments, can provide input into strategy formulation at the country level. A review of recent cases of land acquisition reinforces the importance of the policy framework in determining outcomes. It suggests that transparency and contract enforcement, recognition of local land rights and ways in which they can be exercised, attention to employment effects and technical viability, and mechanisms to re-allocate land from unsuccessful ventures to more productive entrepreneurs are key areas warranting the attention of policy makers.

Agribusiness --- Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems --- Agriculture --- Banks & Banking Reform --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Factor Endowments --- Farm Size --- Labor Policies --- Land Tenure --- Rural Development Knowledge & Information Systems --- Africa

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Agricultural techniques --- Agronomy --- Farms, Size of --- Agriculture --- Economic aspects --- 631.1.017 --- 332.2 --- 347.23 --- (430) --- Farm size --- Size of farms --- Farming --- Husbandry --- Farms, Size of - Germany (West) --- Agriculture - Economic aspects - Germany (West)

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In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale-a premise supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases. This paper explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach, when policy would be better served with studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings. Using a model of endogenous technology choice, the authors explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data. Since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data, improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates. However, the analysis finds that the inverse productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data, despite obvious shortcomings with some components. It also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities.

Agriculture --- Climate Change and Agriculture --- Crops & Crop Management Systems --- Economic Theory & Research --- Farm size --- Inverse productivity --- Labor Policies --- Rural Development --- Rural Development Knowledge & Information Systems --- Smallholders --- Technology choice --- Sub-Saharan Africa