Effects of institutional changes on land use: agricultural land abandonment during the transition from state-command to market-driven economies in post-Soviet Eastern Europe

By Alexander V. Prishchepov, Volker C. Radeloff, Matthias Baumann, Tobias Kuemmerle, Daniel Müller. 2012

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Institutional settings play a key role in shaping land cover and land use. Our goal was to understand the effects of institutional changes on agricultural land abandonment in different countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after the collapse of socialism. We studied ∼273 800 km2 (eight Landsat footprints) within one agro-ecological zone stretching across Poland, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and European Russia. Multi-seasonal Landsat TM/ETM + satellite images centered on 1990 (the end of socialism) and 2000 (one decade after the end of socialism) were used to classify agricultural land abandonment using support vector machines. The results revealed marked differences in the abandonment rates between countries. The highest rates of land abandonment were observed in Latvia (42% of all agricultural land in 1990 was abandoned by 2000), followed by Russia (31%), Lithuania (28%), Poland (14%) and Belarus (13%). Cross-border comparisons revealed striking differences; for example, in the Belarus–Russia cross-border area there was a great difference between the rates of abandonment of the two countries (10% versus 47% of abandonment). Our results highlight the importance of institutions and policies for land-use trajectories and demonstrate that radically different combinations of institutional change of strong institutions during the transition can reduce the rate of agricultural land abandonment (e.g., in Belarus and in Poland). Inversely, our results demonstrate higher abandonment rates for countries where the institutions that regulate land use changed and where the institutions took more time to establish (e.g., Latvia, Lithuania and Russia). Better knowledge regarding the effects of such broad-scale change is essential for understanding land-use change and for designing effective land-use policies. This information is particularly relevant for Northern Eurasia, where rapid land-use change offers vast opportunities for carbon balance and biodiversity, and for increasing agricultural production on previously cultivated lands.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4aebbe8f5c2c2dda72c863e680fea512c5cf1bab

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Citations in the corpus

Mapping cropland-use intensity across Europe using MODIS NDVI time series (2016, background): “…fallow frequencies there are possibly a legacy of the breakdown of socialism and the subsequent restructuring of agricultural sectors (Fischer et al 2000, EU 2005), leading to widespread farmland dis-intensification and abandonment (Rey Benayas 2007, Kuemmerle et al 2011, Prishchepov et al 2012).”
Comparing the determinants of cropland abandonment in Albania and Romania using boosted regression trees (2013, background): “…studies demonstrated that the diverging pathways of postsocialist cropland abandonment in similar natural settings can be attributed to differences in political and institutional characteristics (Alix-Garcia et al., 2012; Hostert et al., 2011; Kuemmerle et al., 2008; Prishchepov et al., 2012).”
Trade-offs of European agricultural abandonment (2017, background): “Agricultural abandonment is an important land use process in many world regions and one of the dominant land use change processes in Europe (Grau and Aide 2008; Prishchepov et al., 2012; Keenleyside and Tucker 2010).”
Estimating the world's potentially available cropland using a bottom-up approach (2013, unknown): “With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, large-scale land abandonment occurred because of the removal of subsidies to agricultural cooperatives, inefﬁcient production systems, and increased competition with other regions or countries (Prishchepov et al., 2012).”
Typology and distribution of small farms in Europe: Towards a better picture (2018, background): “The regions belonging to this cluster are scattered throughout Europe, most notably in Croatia, Greece, Sweden, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, western Lithuania, central Bulgaria, northern Slovakia, central-southern mountainous Austria and north-western Spain (Fig.”
Regime shifts limit the predictability of land-system change (2014, background): “For instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused rapid and widespread land abandonment in many parts of Eastern Europe (Prishchepov et al., 2012) and land reforms in China and Vietnam resulted in the rapid increase of agricultural productivity and reforestation of former agricultural land…”