Since 1990—before the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union—RDI has anticipated and seized opportunities to help countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) break-up collective farms, give former collective farm workers secure and marketable land rights, and support family farming.

RDI has carried out this work in nine of the 15 fifteen FSU countries, contributing most notably to reforms in Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova that have brought new land rights to 30 million families. (Read about RDI's past programs and accomplishments.)
RDI's current work in the FSU includes engagements in the following countries.

Ukraine
Ukraine is a country blessed with highly fertile chernozem, or black soil, and thus has significant agricultural potential. Indeed, before World War I Ukraine was known as the "breadbasket of Europe." But the country suffered through Stalin's brutal collectivization process and resulting famine in which millions died, occupation by the Nazis during World War II, and decades of inefficient and unproductive collective farming. It is this legacy that Ukraine must overcome to become a leader in agriculture once again.

RDI first conducted rural fieldwork in Ukraine in 1992, and since 2000 has been heavily involved in Ukrainian land reform. RDI provided the primary foreign legal advice to Ukrainian law drafters in preparing a groundbreaking Land Code, adopted by the Parliament in late 2001. This new basic law on land, which became effective in January 2002, represents a major step forward for private land ownership. It contains the rules and provisions needed for private parties to own, use, and transfer both agricultural and non-agricultural land, and should make an important contribution to Ukraine's general economic development.

RDI's current work in Ukraine is primarily as foreign legal advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development's Ukraine Land Titling Initiative (ULTI). This project is in the process of converting the agricultural "land share" rights—commonly held ownership shares in the former collective farm enterprises—of over one million rural people into physical parcels of land with legal titles. RDI's primary responsibilities on the project are to:

• Prepare supportive draft laws in conjunction with the project's Ukrainian attorneys for consideration in the Parliament, and provide input and commentary on draft laws prepared by the Government of Ukraine;
• Resolve legal issues related to the project's core activity of surveying land parcels, allocating the parcels to land share owners, and preparing and issuing formal title documents; and
• Develop and help implement an initiative to provide legal assistance to new land owners in five Ukrainian provinces on problems related to the effective exercise of their rights to land.

By mid-2003, with roughly half of the land shares converted into privately owned individual land parcels with title documents, the ULTI enlisted RDI in designing a survey to assess the impacts of the conversion and titling on new landowners. The random sample survey of 800 people was carried out in 160 villages in 8 of Ukraine's 25 provinces. The 800 survey respondents included both land share holders and new landowners (people whose land shares had been converted and titled). The survey results showed that private land ownership is generating increased income and other meaningful benefits for rural dwellers. And in in particular, new landowners who lease their land to agricultural producers report receiving 32% more income per hectare than do those people who have land share rights that have not yet been converted into individual land parcels and titled. Read the full survey report.(PDF)

RDI also helped design and establish a network of legal aid centers under the ULTI project. This network is modeled after legal aid center models developed earlier by RDI in Russia and Moldova.  The centers provide legal and economic information, and legal representation, to new landowners who are seeking to use their land rights in the best way possible to help themselves and their families.  At this point legal aid centers operate in every one of Ukraine’s 25 provinces, and tens of thousands of people have had important legal issues regarding the use and protection of their newfound land rights addressed and resolved in a highly capable and professional manner.

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Russia
RDI began its activities in Russia in 1990
—before the demise of the Soviet Union—and has maintained an active program since. Currently, RDI has two main program initiatives: Improving Land Law and Policy to Support Private Ownership of Farmland; and Legal Aid to Rural Land Owners.

Improving Land Law and Policy to Support Private Ownership of Farmland
World experience shows that farming systems in which land is privately owned, freely traded, and usable as collateral are the most productive and efficient, and deliver the resulting economic benefits to a wide circle of people. By contrast, the Soviet system of gargantuan collective and state farms, under which land was state-owned and centrally controlled, was grossly inefficient and unproductive. No fact illustrates this point better than the inability of the Soviet Union to produce enough food to feed its people in the 1970s and 1980s, despite its ample base of farmland.

For more than a decade, RDI has helped develop and advised on laws supporting private ownership of farmland and a market in such land. These efforts have been carried out in conjunction with leading Russian lawyers, rural policy specialists, and government policy-makers. Legislation that RDI played integral or supporting roles in developing include:

•A 1991 Presidential edict and 1993 law that gave full private ownership to the 26 million rural and urban families who held small land plots. These include dacha plots, gardens plots, and household auxiliary plots used by collective farm families; •Presidential edicts in 1993 and 1996 on farmland transactions and issuance of title documents to collective farm members as "land share" owners; •The 1998 law on registration of legal rights to land and buildings; •The 2001 Land Code, Russia's basic law on land; and •The 2002 farmland sales law which, after an eight-year debate in the Parliament, decisively sanctioned full private ownership of farmland.

RDI's current focus is on making the farmland sales law effective in practice. Specifically, RDI is designing a policy initiative to help convert Russia's 12 million land shares either into individually owned physical land parcels, or into land owned in common on a single field with a few friends or relatives. If successfully implemented, Russia's ordinary rural people should finally become owners of the farmland in a truly meaningful way.

Legal Aid to Rural Land Owners
As Russian land law began to evolve in the early 1990s—especially through the provision of rights which, in theory, allowed individual collective farm members to depart from the collective with their separated share of land and other farm assets, or to lease those land rights to the small number of private farmers who became established in 1991-1993—it became clear to RDI that access to legal advice could be critical to the actual exercise of these rights. The procedures required to actually separate land and assets from the collective farm could be daunting, and collective farm managers might demand lease transactions with the collective itself that were either disadvantageous or not honored.

To make such legal advice accessible in at least some Russian regions, and to test and further develop this idea for broader replication, RDI founded a legal aid center in Vladimir Province in 1996, and a second such center in Samara Province in 1998. Both centers are independent NGOs under Russian law, and are staffed by Russian lawyers. The centers:

1. provide information to rural citizens about their land rights by publishing articles in local newspapers, making presentations on provincial radio, and distributing brochures and booklets;
   
2. provide free legal assistance, ranging from individual consultations to direct representation in negotiations and court proceedings; and
   
3. assist local government bodies in properly interpreting and applying legislation affecting land and economic rights of rural landowners.

The legal aid centers have played significant roles in implementing land reform in their respective provinces. They have increased the level of knowledge about land rights and have helped thousands of people use their land rights. They have also provided a model for providing legal assistance in other former Soviet republics.

Find contact information for the Vladimir legal aid center.

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For more information about RDI’s program in the FSU, contact Leonard Rolfes Jr. at leonardr@rdiland.org

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