The concept of land consolidation is new in Latvia. Its main tasks are to eliminate land fragmentation and to facilitate farms of optimal size. One of the most important preconditions of land consolidation is forming of optimal size farmland plots in property and use, and land fragmentation, which has a major impact on both the operating conditions and other rural development processes. Land fragmentation affects not only land management, but it also increases transport costs.

Since the year 2000 with the help of the specialists from the Land Consolidation Division of the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, pilot land consolidation projects have been started. Besides the simple territorial readjustment of land parcels, these projects aimed to encourage local initiatives as well as to develop the land consolidation mechanism as an essential tool for the development of the integrated rural development including environment protection, development of infrastructure together with the creation of competitive farms.

Already during the Land Reform, land properties of several land parcels were formed in the rural areas. Another factor that benefits to the fragmentation of farm properties is development of land market because buying or renting land for farm size building, it is not always possible to find adjacent land plot. Consequently, the land fragmentation not only makes land management difficult, but also increases the transport costs. With this rural land tenure system, competitive and efficient agricultural production cannot be discussed, so a large part of rural areas remains untreated.

Implementing the land reform, territories of farms were quite often formed of several - up to 20 - land plots, frequently with disadvantageous borders. With reorganization of production of the farms, rural development and activities of land market, importance and tasks of rational territory organization will grow. Besides, it can be forecasted that, as a result of land rent and further buy-sell and other transactions, many new farmland properties and land uses are going to appear which might not correspond to the requirements of rational territory organization.

In the paper short data on the results of implementation of pilot land consolidation projects in 6 villages of the Republic of Moldova in 2007-2009 are presented. As a result it became possible to accumulate the experience necessary for extension of these works in scales of all country. Simultaneously a number of difficulties and problems have been identified. It will be difficult to realize these works without elimination of them.

This paper deals with agricultural land in Bulgaria and some problems which could impede the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy and the assimilation of financial resources from the EU Structural Funds.

La propiedad de la tierra en Turquía está muy fragmentada, tal y como sucede en los países de Europa central. Este fenómeno impide que el rendimiento llegue a los niveles deseados. La concentración parcelaria implica la redistribución de la propiedad, lo que provoca que los agricultores individuales obtengan menos parcelas, pero más contiguas y compactas y de mayor tamaño.

Land consolidation can be an important tool for increasing agricultural competitiveness and improving rural conditions. Farmers can become more competitive when they decrease fragmentation and increase the size of their farms, and rural communities can benefit when consolidation projects include components to improve local infrastructure and the environment.

In countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the development of arrangements for land consolidation takes place in the wake of the transition to a new private property regime, and in the context of accession to the European Union. The process of institutional change is complex and sensitive to immediate political and economic agendas. It is also determined by other prevailing social, economic and cultural factors.

The policy reforms called for in the
transition from a socialist command economy to a developing
market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a
country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial
focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which
is where one finds the bulk of the population and almost all
the poor. Economic development will typically entail moving
many rural households out of farming into more remunerative

Over the coming decades, land policy and
administration, for urban as well as rural areas, will be
critical for Ethiopia's development. The vast majority
of people making up the Federal Democratic Republic of
Ethiopia's (FDRE) predominantly agricultural economy
live in rural areas. Finally, land policies and
administration can contribute significantly to the
objectives of promoting gender equality and protecting

Albania's radical farmland
distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis
and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it
led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient,
and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to
lay the foundation for greater rural productivity. This
paper uses farm-level data from the 2005 Albania Living
Standards Measurement Survey to explore this quantitatively.