Whereas proponents claim that a land market is necessary to attract the foreign investment that Ukrainian agriculture needs to achieve its full economic potential, many Ukrainians believe that agriculture in Ukraine will only become more corrupt and controlled by powerful interests as a result of the new land reform law

market reform is to make bourgeois capital accumulation easier, not for the poors

The law, “On Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine on the Conditions of Turnover of Agricultural Land”, is a crucial plank of the liberalizing agenda championed by President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Western international institutions that support his government. It was passed by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s unicameral legislature, in March 2020 as a condition for the financially imperiled government to receive a US$5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Hostage situation

the government privatized much of Ukraine’s farmland, and distributed certificates that individual workers could use to obtain ownership of a discrete plot of land. However, amid a nationwide economic collapse, many resold their certificates, beginning a process that resulted in the growing concentration of land in the hands of a new oligarchic class.

the creation of a (fascist) middle class to be forces of counter-revolution, this article later mentions post-reform Romania who sold out 40% of their land.

The government and international institutions promoted land reform as a way to “unlock” the full potential of Ukrainian farmland by making the agricultural sector more attractive to international investors.

“unlock your chastity device” :pete:

Ukrainians’ distrust is not without merit. The key argument put forward by promoters of the land reform has been the expected effect on economic growth. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank, lifting the moratorium on land sales would add around 1-2 percent to Ukraine’s annual GDP growth rate for five years. However, this increase is expected to mainly come from “the exit of producers with lower value added and the expansion of producers with higher value added, as the price of land rises.” The World Bank thus explicitly expects the land reform law to push poorer, smaller farmers out of agriculture and help grow larger land holdings.

“It’s actually good that wealth is being concentrated, that means capitalism is working” :obama-drone:

Many small-scale farmers won’t be able to buy much land in the period before 2024, because the land is being sold at high prices, and many smaller farmers are already struggling financially and are in debt. While farmers might hope to benefit from the pre-emption rights that the new law grants to current lessees, this clause can actually promote consolidation of land ownership, since many leaseholders are large agribusinesses. Even when the lessees are small or medium-size farmers, the law allows them to transfer their pre-emption rights to other parties — essentially recreating the 1990s dynamic where landowners resold the certificates distributed in the initial wave of privatization to a nascent clique of oligarchs, who thus amassed control over large quantities of land.

:marx-joker:

Moreover, according to the Ukrainian Rural Development Network, a Kyiv-based civil society and academia organization, “most private agricultural land remains under lease agreements with large commercial farms in coming years,” so that the land may not even be available for individual farmers to purchase before 2024, when they start facing competition from big businesses that will always be able to outbid them.

There are widespread fears that, due to Ukraine’s rampant corruption and weak rule of law, small farmers will have few avenues to assert their rights in the face of increasing competition from agribusiness. For many citizens, the most serious concern with this law is the potential for foreign interests to illegally gain ownership of land, for example through opaque ownership of a Ukrainian company, exploiting the country’s impotent judicial and regulatory systems. Some of the largest land deals in Ukraine in recent years were carried out by foreign corporations that may try to circumvent the new law and obtain title to the land.

Furthermore, according to a legal interpretation of the new law, the prohibition of foreigners owning land does not apply to creditors who acquire land through mortgage foreclosure — so a foreign bank could, potentially, foreclose on a small farmer’s land and sell it at auction, where big businesses would invariably have an advantage.

“Market reform” = Invariably a bourgeois dictatorship