Agricultural Land Concentration in Estonia and Its Containment Possibilities

Abstract

Land is essential to livelihoods, so it is hard to overstate its strategic significance for well-being and prosperity. It has been detected that farm size greatly influences agricultural sustainability from the viewpoints of the economy, environment, and society. Land concentration is negatively affecting the development of rural communities. Similar to other European countries, Estonia is undergoing agricultural land concentration. One way to stop the further concentration of agricultural land is to set an upper limit to land acquisition (similar to that in Latvia and Lithuania). This paper aimed to determine what kind of regulations concerning agricultural land use and ownership Estonia needs to restrain land concentration. Four sources of data were used for this research: statistical data from Statistics Estonia, the data for the land holdings of agricultural producers from the Estonian Agricultural Registers and Information Board, data from the Land Registry and available literature. The outcome of the study confirmed that Estonia requires policy direction and regulations for the agricultural land market, that would help to lighten the impact of land concentration in rural areas in the long run, similar to several other European countries.