The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture organized a workshop to present the findings and recommendations from a prepared assessment report and policy recommendations related to land administration, land market development and land reform in Uzbekistan. The workshop was held as part of implementation of the FAO project “Enhancing agricultural land market development to address land abandonment and improve land consolidation procedures” funded from the FAO-Türkiye Partnership Programme on Food and Agriculture (FTPP II). The event brought together national and international experts who discussed the report findings and recommendations related to the security of land rights, allocation of land to farmers land market development and land reform.
The FAO regional project aims to support the introduction of a land banking instrument in connection with an ongoing land consolidation programme in Türkiye and a planned programme in Azerbaijan, and assess the need for land market development and the feasibility of land management instruments in Uzbekistan. The project aims to support the development of institutional capacity on land tenure security, allocation of land to farmers and other land market development measures and instruments to ensure a more sustainable use of agricultural land.
The three project countries, Türkiye, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan have different land tenure systems and land policies but share a common objective: to ensure the efficient and sustainable use of agricultural land.
Speaking about the results of the project, Morten Hartvigsen, FAO Land Tenure Officer, highlighted the importance of ensuring that farmers have secure tenure rights as this is a precondition for investments in farms as well as for sustainable use of the agricultural land.He also emphasized the importance of ensuring that smallholders, young farmers and women farmers have access to agricultural land.
The project has also enabled establishment of a well-functioning regional collaboration mechanism through knowledge exchange and capacity development between Türkiye and the two partner countries: Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. Good regional land policy practices were disseminated and shared with the hundred participants from 30 countries at the regional LANDNET workshop organized in Istanbul in September 2023, where also experts from Uzbekistan participated.
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