Legal conditions and data provision for land property exchange in the processes of land consolidation and land compensation in bulgaria

Abstract

Land consolidation and land compensation require the evaluation of the productivity of the exchanged or recompensed areas. A serious deficiency in land consolidation regulations set by the Agricultural Land Ownership and Use Act, 1991 is the 10% restriction on the difference in the exchanged areas before and after land consolidation. The simultaneous action of the current method-ology for equating lands by their quality, together with the legal restrictions of this Act, limits the implementation of land consolidation to only highly productive lands of the 1st to the 3rd land category. The objective of this paper is to suggest a method for extending the implementation of land consolidation to larger areas and to recommend a fairer calculation method in equating lands by their quality. Two approaches to landed property exchange are unit-ed. One of them is based on the mean estimates of land productivity per land category (MLPE) (considering the Bulgarian Land Categorization System), the other one – on the detailed land productivity estimates of each landed property (DLPE). The adapted FAO Land Suitability Classification is suggested to identify areas suitable for land consolidation. Regression analysis and expert assessment were used. The data required for GIS processing are specified and systemized. A proposal for the improvement of the legal framework is given.