Does cosmic monitoring of land become panacea?
The Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan initiates amendments to the existing by-laws aimed at utilizing the capabilities of space satellites for monitoring agricultural land.
The total area of such land in Kazakhstan is 202 million hectares, 105.3 million hectares are used for agricultural purposes. Many of the land plots used are not being used for a long time or are being used irrationally.
The Land Code provides for the seizure of unused or irrationally used agricultural land from unscrupulous land users. With regard to such land users, the state applies measures of economic impact, increasing the rate of land tax by 10 times from the moment of revealing the fact of violation of the law.
The limited staff of land inspectors, high corruption risks and lack of automation of state control make it ineffective, as there is no coverage of all land plots.
The acute shortage of land and a large number of idle lands cause justified discontent of the population and entrepreneurs wishing to develop agricultural production.
In this regard, the Atameken NCE RK supports the need to strengthen control over unscrupulous land users using digital technologies and methods.
Meanwhile, the mechanism proposed by the authorized body to identify such lands raises many questions and complaints from the business community.
"The issue of efficient use of agricultural land is an important one. At the AIC Committee, we discussed the issue of using space images for monitoring agricultural land. In general, we support the use of advanced methods to identify unused lands. At the same time, it is necessary to develop such a mechanism, under which the land will not be seized from bona fide land users, which will not force them to go to the courts, proving their accuracy. For this purpose, a comprehensive approach is required, and satellite imagery will be one of the tools for monitoring land," Ivan Sauer said.
"The need for a comprehensive approach is that the space images will be one of the tools for land monitoring," Ivan Sauer said.
The Atameken NCE RK has requested that a regulatory impact analysis should be carried out on individual amendments to strengthen the existing criteria for the rational use of agricultural land.
One of them is the obligation of the farmer to keep books on the history of fields and pastures on the geoinformation portal, its services will be chargeable.
"The Atameken NCE RK believes that since the control over the use of agricultural land is a competence of the authorized state bodies, the use of the portal's services within the framework of monitoring the use of land should be free of charge for farmers.
The decision to withdraw land should be made objectively, based on the results of a comprehensive analysis of land use, using different methods and tools, one of which should be a satellite image.
Please, join our Telegram channel to stay up to date on the latest news.
Leave comment:
Comments: