 I don't hear anybody. Hello. We are waiting for all the participants to enter the virtual room. Okay, good. Let's wait one more minute and then we will begin. Good afternoon. It's my great pleasure to welcome all of you to this webinar on land consolidation with the focus on legislation and on the new FAO legal guide and its application at the country level. This webinar is co-hosted by FAO, FIG, International Federation of Surveyors and the Land Portal Foundation. My name is Morten Hartbees and I'm land tenure officer at the FAO regional office for Europe and Central Asia, and I'm the facilitator of the webinar today. This webinar will discuss land consolidation and land consolidation legislation and how to apply it in different countries. The FAO will introduce the new legal guide on land consolidation published earlier this week. The guide was prepared based on the outcome of a study of good European practice on land consolidation legislation. In this webinar, we also want to support the application of the voluntary guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Kenya, VDT, and highlight that land consolidation can contribute to achieving a number of the sustainable development goals and targets. As you may know, this webinar replaces two sessions of the FID Working Week 2020 in Amsterdam in May, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 situation. One session was on land consolidation legislation and the other on the role of land consolidation and other land management instruments in developing agricultural land. This webinar is being recorded in the video as well as the key messages will be available later in land portals website. In the event page of this webinar, we have posted a series of background documents, including the guide itself. We also have three open blogs and short interview clips all on land consolidation. It's a great source of information and I encourage you to visit this page. I'm very pleased to see that we already now have 360 participants in the webinar today. I hope that you will leave this webinar with a lot of insight and ideas for your work. After the welcome words, we will have first a presentation on the need for land consolidation to set the scene by Frank van Hals, RVO in the Netherlands. After that, my colleague, Margaret Wieter, FAO legal officer from the Development Law Service in Rome, will introduce the new FAO legal guide on land consolidation. And in the sequence, we will have a panel discussion with panelists sharing their experiences from North Macedonia, from the Netherlands and also from other countries. I will introduce our presenters and panelists before their slots. After the first hour and a half, we will open the discussion and give room to the participants to pose questions. Please use the questions feature on your screen to ask questions to the panelists. We will ensure that your questions are addressed in turn during the open discussion that follows. Of course, due to the time limitations of the event, we will only be able to answer some of your questions while others will be answered and written on the land portal after the webinar. Now I will pass the floor to the two colleagues for the welcoming words. First to Raimund Jede, regional program leader of the FAO regional office for Europe and Central Asia. And then to Mariah Lopsma, chair of FID commission 8. Raimund please, you are muted. Not my dude. Yeah, okay, it's now fine. Okay, very good. Thank you. Thank you Morten for this introduction and passing on on the floor. So, good afternoon, colleagues and particularly good afternoon to the participants on the zoom but of course I would also like to welcome you, of course on behalf of FAO but FAO also in the region, also on the YouTube transmission and I hope we will have a very interesting discussion and presentation on this important area of land consolidation. So, I think it's also quite important to mention this kind of webinar is the first of its kind in the region in this format, I mean we are talking about land consolidation. And of course, since a longer time but doing it in this kind of format and having such a widespread direction is something which is also new, because land consolidation has been already for a long time, been an area of work in FAO and just also to tell you that in the 50s and 60s FAO has already provided assistance in the region at that time the region was certainly very different but in countries like Turkey or Greece or even Spain and Cyprus and in the 50s. So, back at the first decade of FAO's organization in this area, one of the reports concluded that excessive fragmentation or uneconomically small holding may prevent the farmers from using their time to best advantage a modern means of production or mechanization so this is something which nowadays has not really changed and the problems are still relevant. And with the transition of the centrally planned economies, starting at the beginning of the 90s. In Eastern Europe, CS, Central Asia and the Western Balkans and the relevant land reform approaches. This issue is still evident and I think it requires attention. Of course, the modalities of land consolidation compared to the 50s and its emphasis. I think we can also say has changed because environmental issues and sustainable management of natural resources has received nowadays a stronger emphasis, compared to also the earlier times where there was maybe more focus on some of the economic issues. Fu FAO continues to support the development of land consolidation instruments and programs in the regions and we can in principle tell there are three main pillars. The first one is the technical guidelines and the normative work, including this new legal guide on land consolidation, which is also presented today and which we just also released. I think I can everybody recommend. It's a very interesting document to look at and I think it's going to be quite important. Also for the coming years. The second one is field projects in the program countries of the regions since already 2002. We have done in this region, more than 11 countries related to land consolidation. And the third pillar, which I think is equally important is the land net so the informal network of land tenure professionals who are interested in land consolidation, land banking and land market development. Since 2002 we have already done 21 of these workshops, and which really has in that sense, a very important tradition. This feeds into the overall priorities of the region, which we are currently having and one of them, of course, is the support to smallholders and family farms as one of the four priorities for the organization in Europe and Central Asia. The management of the small farms into competitive family farms in a sustainable manner, being economically viable but also addressing the natural resource management in a sustainable manner is a key objective for the land consolidation work, which we are doing in the region. With small and fragmented farm structures, which are hindering the development of the agriculture sector need to be addressed since such viable farm structures is really a precondition for many other development initiatives in the rural areas. One thing what we nowadays also need to highlight, of course, is the implications of the COVID crisis we cannot neglect. Of course, the impact of the COVID crisis into the European and Central Asia. The impact of food value chains is maybe not of the same severity as we can see it maybe in other regions, but we can already take out of this that it really has reemphasized the issue of keeping food value chains open, addressing and paying security and particular to strengthen the importance of local food production, as well as improving the resilience of smallholders and their competitiveness of the sector. Land consolidation is one of the essential tools which can really contribute to achieving the 2030 agenda. And the sustainable development goals, just to mention as an example, the ambitious target under SDG 23, where it's really emphasized to doubling the agricultural productivity and the income of the small scale food producers by 2013. The other area, and this shows again also how, let's say, cross-sectoral and how also multi-dimensional land consolidation is an SDG target under SDG 1 on the equal rights to land and other natural resources, as well as also under SDG 5, for example, gender equality. So these are important issues we need to take into consideration. With this, I would like to conclude. I'm welcoming you again very much to this seminar today, and I wish you an interesting discussion and debate and looking forward to the results. Thank you very much. Over to you, Morten. Thank you very much. The floor is yours. Thank you, Morten. On behalf of FIG, the International Federation of Surveyors, I am pleased to welcome you to this webinar. Normally, FIG organizes a yearly conference, the FIG working week. But as mentioned before, this year, unfortunately, it could not go on. But this webinar is a very good alternative, I think. For those not familiar with FIG, let me first briefly introduce the organization. FIG is the International Organization representing the interests of surveyors worldwide. And currently we have members from over 120 countries, and we aim to provide an international forum for discussion and development aiming to promote professional practice and standards. Well, the field of surveying is broadly interpreted. Roughly FIG covers topics from positioning, tenure, land administration, geo information, land use management, valuation and real estate. As chair of commission 8, I am responsible for and be presenting the professional field of spatial planning and development. As you know, many areas across the world face severe challenges posed by climate change, urbanization and a growing population to mention just a few developments. And for a sustainable development, it is needed to manage the use of the land. And some land use functions go well together whereas others hamper each other. And to optimize the land use, various land policy instruments are available. For example, some countries have a zoning plan assigning land use functions to a location including the rights and restrictions per land use type that prevail in that area. Also, there are more active instruments that directly intervene in the land rights that people or organizations hold. And land consolidation is such an instrument that actively arranges the spatial allocation of land rights and land uses. And compared to other land policy instruments, a key advantage of land consolidation is that it is a powerful instrument to look at the optimization of land use in a comprehensive way. And looking at having a comprehensive view, smart solutions can be found that will benefit multiple land use functions in the area and provide thereby a sustainable development, environmentally, economically, but also socially. Many different forms of land consolidation exist. The underpinning principle is the same, namely the reallocation of land rights. And therefore it is important to acknowledge the tenure system and land administration in place. safeguards need to build in for land right holders, how to determine all legitimate land right holders in the area, especially when there is no reliable land administration. They need to ensure a participatory approach. What rights do people have if they disagree with certain decisions or to what extent can they voice their opinion in the whole process. Having a profound legal framework for land consolidation in place to support land consolidation practice is very important to provide safeguards for all stakeholders involved. And therefore the legal framework as developed by FAO and partners is very important, I believe. And also provide guidance for governments, agencies, surveyors and other stakeholders involved for the implementation of land consolidation. And this webinar is an excellent opportunity to learn more about it, more about it. And, well, I wish you a fruitful meeting and make use of the possibility to question that post questions in the end, but first listen to the rest of the presentations. Thank you. I think I'm going to start with a question that I like to ask. Land consolidation is as we have just heard a well proven land management instrument with more than 100 years of tradition in some countries in Western Europe. The traditional objective has been to support a cultural development by reducing land fragmentation and facilitating on a purely voluntary basis, the increase of holding and farm sizes, sometimes integrated also with the improvement of the local and cultural infrastructure. And this land consolidation has in Western Europe developed into a multi-purpose instrument, where the objectives in addition to the traditional and cultural development objectives are also to implement nature restoration projects, projects related to large scale infrastructure, and more and more also used for climate change, the adaptation and mitigation. And in these public initiated projects allowing the landowners and the farmers to be compensated in other land and in this way, preventing the farm structures to be destroyed. In Central and Eastern Europe land consolidation came back on the political agenda after the political changes around 1990, in particular because many countries had implemented land reforms that had led to farm structures with excessive land fragmentation and small farm sizes. FAO has supported, as it was already mentioned, 11 member countries in Europe and Central Asia with different aspects of introduction of land consolidation improvements and building up of national land consolidation programs. In each country the development of sound and operational land consolidation legislation is a cornerstone and we have a long felt the need for legal guide on land consolidation and finally we have it. It's also important for me to say already now that we should not only see only land consolidation as a technical instrument and we should focus on the policy side before we begin to develop land consolidation legislation and detailed procedures. We should be clear what we want to achieve with land consolidation. Some have in the past seen land consolidation in some countries that had negative impact such as loss of biodiversity. Others are worried that land consolidation may lead to land concentration. However, we promote land consolidation as an instrument that should lead to the development of small farms into commercial family farms. And when it's applied in a multi-purpose approach as an instrument that can enhance nature and environmental values and support climate change adaptation and mitigation. Now, before we move to our first presentation, we are very curious to know a bit about our participants. We created a quick poll with the two questions that we would show one at the time. I would like to ask all of our participants to click now on the hyperlink post in the chat and select the answer for the first question. The first question is which region are you based and we will have the answer in a few seconds. The answers we see that one fourth of the participants are from sub-Saharan Africa and we have also around half of the participants from Europe and Central Asia and the rest of the participants spread over the rest of the regions. Let's now move to the second question where we are asking what sector do you represent if we could have the, yes, we have it on the screen again. If we wait again a few seconds and then we will have the results. We have now almost an equal representation from colleagues that are working in government and colleagues that are working in international organization and from universities and knowledge institutions 23, 22 and 24%. Thank you very much for your participation in the poll. We will let me now call Frank van Holst for his presentation. Frank is the Program Manager on International Territorial Development at RVO Netherlands Enterprise Agency. Frank will set the scene for the discussion today by presenting the need for land conservation instruments. Frank, please. Thank you, Morten. You still see the polling result in the screen, but I will start nevertheless with my presentation. I will do that to address a few questions. First of all, what is land fragmentation and why is it a problem. Land fragmentation is about small holdings. It's about small properties and it's about small parcels. It's about the size and the shape of the parcels about the spatial distribution of these these parcels and about accessibility. And of course, about small farms. It has a direct effect on the production costs. It's difficult to adopt innovations and to apply new technology. Spaces lost along field boundaries and irrigation is, for example, difficult to apply. The impact of that is that small farms remain to be subsistence farming or have limited participation in markets and value change. So investment in knowledge acquisition and eventually marketization and land abandonment. But I want to state clearly that land fragmentation is not always a problem. There are certainly areas, for example, mountains areas with diverse production systems in which farmers have different parcels in different places with different microclimates and spreading the risks for these farmers. So it's not always a problem and land relations certainly not always needed. So where does land preservation occur about the study about a legal guide is about Europe and it is land fragmentation is widely spread across Europe. Do you still see the polling result in the screen as well because I still it's still blocking my screen but maybe it's just me. Okay. It's widespread in Central and Eastern Europe, and it's historically going partly it has was too little policy intervention. It's also caused by land restitution and by land privatization, for example, socially equitable forms of land privatization. But it's certainly not only a problem in in Europe from my own experience mentioned two examples, Egypt, with an average farm size below one hectare and with many over 60% of the farms between one and two hectares have more than one parcel two, three, four, sometimes five parcels. Vietnam also has a little average farm size. There's almost 9 million farm farms in Vietnam on average two to three parcels for farms. And I'm sure it's maybe we can put many other countries on the list. I know also from traveling around the different regions. What but what if we don't do anything. And we just expect this land fragmentation and fragmentation to be solved by, for example, an active land market. So what if we don't do anything with with like land consolidation. Unfortunately, land markets have little capacity to repair such major deficiencies in land structures. They are far from free. They're far from perfect. They're highly segmented and sometimes troubled by high transaction costs and bureaucratic loads of transactions. The mobility rates. Let's say the percentage of land that changes hands every year it comes really about 4%. If we talk about an example of Armenia for example, 860 collective and state farms were divided in more than 300,000 small holdings in 1993. 20 years later the farm size which is around one and a half hectare barely changed. The probability this let's say the percentage that changes owner every year in Armenia is now 1.6% looking at a few years and a time range of a few years. So if I would buy 1.6% of land every every year, how many years will it take until I double my size. I use the calculator and it is 44 years so you can imagine that it's difficult for such jumps to be made to to to be solved by land market functioning. So we need extra incentives and land conservation combined with other instruments can speed up this process. Let me show you an example, kindly making use of images provided by GIZ. This is an area in Serbia. It's a fragmented area, as you will see. When land conservation conservation will start it's typically project based highly participatory and led by a public authority, you will start a planning process and you will design new infrastructure and eventually, you will come up with a new allocation structure. Ideally, this would lead to less parcels as you've seen in the picture but nevertheless this is already a big achievement and a nice example explaining how land conservation works. Land conservation now if you look at Central Eastern Europe, it's it's highly highly getting the attention, the brown areas are areas where land conservation already is based on programs and financing and in operation. I think areas are countries where activities are going on to launch to introduce land conservation so making the legislative framework doing pilots doing experiments. So how are we doing this I want also to re-emphasize like Morton already said in his opening statement is it's not for the big players it's not for the big investors. It's for small and medium sized farms who want to become economically viable family farms. Land conservation certainly can contribute to a number of sustainable development goals. There's of course the goals one and two, no poverty and zero hunger by let's say increasing the productivity of agriculture, but certainly also gender equality. Number five has great potential in collaboration because by highly involving female landowners also in the process and by ensuring that parcels after the process have dual registration so on male and female names. We can also contribute to sustainable development goal five. To make the decent jobs and economic development is obvious and sustainable development goal 15 living on the land is also having good potential. It's about terrestrial ecosystems it's about avoiding land degradation and proper land use management. To show you an example this is a picture of my daughters. Three weeks ago they were canoeing in an area on a stream which was canalized in the 1960s but now completely restored creating room via land conservation project, creating new nature and we were looking at beavers in the evening Kingfisher birds in the daytime. So also land conservation can contribute to that. Okay, last but not least, for anyone who wants to engage in land conservation, don't try to solve everything by yourself. There is a network that is a rich pool of experience already. So, join, join that international networks, join your international peers and start working with us. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much Frank Frank explained quite well, why many countries have a need for land consolidation. I will now call my colleague, Margaret leader FAO legal officer to briefly present the new FAO legal guide on land consolidation. Margaret the floor is yours. Good evening. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you might be. In my presentation I'm going to, I'm going to very quickly talk about why we need non consolidation law, and obviously a bit more about the legal guide and what is in it, and end up with some of the, some of the questions that we found interesting from a legal perspective. So my office just a few words. I work in the FAO legal office and Rome headquarters, and I'm part of the development law branch which basically means that we are there to help our members states in revising and reviewing the legislation state legislation. We have that information in, in our next on national legislation. I'm going to take research. We like this to be connected so that our research of particular cases that built on our practical experience and they also. We also use them then in our technical assistance. And finally, we support the development of international instruments and applications such as the voluntary guidance or governance of tenure, where we took a very active part in preparing them, and now in promoting them in national legislation. I'm very proud to launch the legal guide. This legal guide is the is the result of a number of years of work in preparation. We started by doing a comparative legal study of a number of countries to see what we're doing what type of legislation they they had in place and what are the similarities and differences. So we took that and changed it into a guide to make it more useful, more accessible to two countries, and anybody who's interested to use it. I want to mention the, but this is a guide that is not just a legal guide is by the name. It's also technical. The authors, there are six authors myself and two other lawyers, Thomas Versinskas and Christina meet his are so well we'll both be speaking in the panel later on, and three technical people, more than heart and heart makes on our host. I'm a host to just spoke and Maxim Gorkin who is behind the scenes assistant with this webinar. It's available online in the file legal office page and also in the, in the regional office for Europe page. And finally, we have discussed this guide in previous workshops of the land net the informal network, both in in last year in Santiago, the Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in Spain, and the year before that in Skopje, North Macedonia. We reviewed all the recommendations and received lots of comments, we also then had an extensive external review. Many of you reviewers are here today and I'd really just like to thank everybody who who provided comments who participated in the workshops, who provided information for the for the country case studies. It was really really a group effort. Now, why would you need a long consultation law, why do we need this guide, more than mentioned that we that we have found this from our project countries and that is that is very much the case. In our projects we normally start with a pilot of a long consultation, where we try to see what happens under their existing law without any specific provisions on long consultation. And invariably we get stuck. We cannot undertake long consultation there are all sorts of issues that come up. And we see that there is a need for a legal framework. Of course there is a specifically strong need for legal framework if we are doing anything that is not strictly voluntary. So there have to be safeguards and have to be appeals but even if it's a voluntary approach, we think that is a need for a stronger legal framework to have clear procedures, clear safeguards, clear roles for everybody, and make sure that the process is participatory and that everybody is at the better off, or at least as well off, as it says in the voluntary guidance of governance of tenure. Now, what you see now on the screen is a definition of long consultation. This is a new definition that we have been the authors have been together. And we are very, very proud of this is how we understand long consultation and this is. This is how it is presented in the in the in the guide. The picture shows a little bit more the scope. So the gray areas on either side on one hand expropriation on the other side, voluntary land exchanges by individual farmers without any, any facilitation or any, any intervention just market transactions we do not consider that to be land consolidation at all. It's just a market functioning and fine with that can happen. And also the expropriation is not, is not part of, of this guide what we do cover is the voluntary approach, the majority based approach, and also in our case studies, we have the mandatory approach. Now in a voluntary approach each and every land donor agrees explicitly to the land that goes in and the land that comes out. The majority based there is a scope for really redrawing of all borders, as long as a qualified majority agrees to it. We recommend that there's not just a simple majority but a qualified majority that is based both on the number of farmers and the control of the area so there's a minimum area that they control for for for this to be legally adopted. There is a mandatory approach that is used in some some Western European countries but we do not particularly recommend at least not for countries that are starting out. This is an approach where you also have a consultation some participation and you try to make everybody happy but there is no opportunity to vote there only opportunities to appeal if you're very unhappy. A little bit more about the legal guide. You can see that there's sort of an outline that is listed there. I'm not going to talk about that you can look at ourselves. The, some of the important things is that we try to always have a discussion about a particular issue. Then we back deducted some country examples of the end of recommendations, the key recommendations are then put together in a list at the end of each section. We try in the structure to follow the logic of land consolidation and the logic of land consolidation law if you like law would be structured very much along these lines. To talk about the first the objective principles and then the then the different phases after the institution stakeholders rights and responsibilities and end up with with the legal recourse monitoring valuation etc. I just want to talk about the three phases of land consolidation very briefly. The first phase is feasibility phase and it's very important to make sure that you don't start spending a lot of money on a land consolidation that is not necessary, that is not wanted, or that might do harm. So therefore the feasibility phase consists of interviewing all the landowners, talking to stakeholders such as the local local authorities and finding out if land consolidation would be something that would help that community in that area. If it is found to be feasible we move on to the real opening phase where the land consolidation plan are really tries to plan solutions that everybody is happy with and that make everybody at least as well as before. And the final phase once the plan has been adopted. And we recommend this to be adopted as an administrative act that can then be submitted to registration. The registration implementation phase includes the, the, the survey and works on any, any public infrastructure that might be might be needed. Now, I'm getting towards the end, but this is something that I just want to mention very briefly, I realize that not everybody is a lawyer in this in this in this building. So one of the issues we considered was the constitutionality of mandatory and majority based land consolidation and also where it would be compatible with the voluntary guidance and governance of tenure, because they only mentioned voluntary approaches. Now we did think about the long and hard, and we found that with safeguards with participation. There are good public public good grounds and public interest grounds for making the amendments to the property rights, and therefore it will be justified. But it needs to be a law underneath the compensation if any rights are diminished. The second issue was about recognizing of legitimate tenure rights, which includes socially legitimate tenure rights. And that, that was, that was an issue that we that confused us for a long time before we settled on how to how to solve it. And the equality was another issue that we discussed at length how to deal with in in practice and in theory, and also how that would be compatible with many of the other things that we are doing in consultation which includes interacting the the information as in the disaster making sure that everything is correct, making sure that everything's up to date, because in many countries we deal with a lot of informality. There's informal transactions that haven't been registered, and we thought about the gender implications of that. Finally, the safeguards that would be necessary to ensure that everybody's right was protected, but at the same time, without sacrificing the efficiency of the process in a way you have to find procedures that work and can help the process to be as smooth as possible, while ensuring that everybody's right is protected, that everybody is consulted, everybody is heard, which is very important. You don't want this to take years and years, you want this to have a beginning and an end, and you want it to be as efficient as effective and as cheap as possible. And with that, I thank you very much for your attention. And look forward to the rest of the of the seminar. Let me just try to stop. Thank you very much. This was a very quick introduction to the guide. I will encourage all of you to explore the guide more in detail by visiting the FA website and also the event website that created by land portal. We are also engaging in the three blocks that we have opened as I mentioned in the introduction. With this introduction, let me let us now move to our panel discussion on country experiences for land consolidation and the latest solution. I will first introduce the members of the panel. This is Kierl Georgievski, Kierl is the head of the land consolidation department in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Economy in North Macedonia. We also have Margaret Vida, FAO legal officer that we just met. We have Frank van Halst from RVO in the Netherlands. We also heard the presentation of Frank. And we have also new faces, Christina Mitzic-Astova, FAO team leader and legal consultant in North Macedonia. And finally, Thomas Vasinskas, FAO international legal consultant. This first turn to North Macedonia where FAO is currently implementing the EU funded mainland land consolidation project. And I will begin with Kierl. Kierl, how is the situation in North Macedonia related to farm structures, land fragmentation and land abandonment? And what is the policy of the government? Good afternoon to all participants. Something about the situation in North Macedonia related to farm structure. More than 50% of all agricultural holdings are utilizing less than 3 hectares of agricultural land and more than 70 less than 5 hectares. As much as one third of the total variable land is abandoned and the reasons for such situation include excessive land fragmentation and small holding sites. Low profitability in agricultural production and out-migration. North Macedonia supported by international partners has been striving to improve the situation through formulation of the relevant land policy. It encompasses introduction of land consolidation and harmonization of different land management instruments in the national legal framework. The technical support from FAO, financial from EU through the mainland project, we are currently successfully implementing the national land consolidation program comprised of more than 10 land consolidation projects, national light. We have come a long way in the past decade from the socialist reform to post socialist mitigation policies like restitution to introduction of full flagged democratic land policy instruments. The process of preparation and testing the land consolidation including the legislation has been long, but successful in our case. From preparation of the strategy on land consolidation to introduction of new legislation and its improvement and harmonization with other relevant national laws. It requires a lot of dedication and hard work and not least continued political support. Thank you Mark. Thank you Kirill. Christina, you are leading the process in North Macedonia of adjusting the legal framework together with Kirill and his team in the ministry. Based on your experience with working on the FAO land consolidation projects in North Macedonia, can you tell us more about the process and the constraints encountered in drafting the legislation on land consolidation. Thank you Morten. Greetings to all participants. First of all, I'm personally very proud that I have been part of the team who was preparing the land consolidation legislation in North Macedonia. The law on land consolidation in North Macedonia was adopted in 2013. Its preparation was based rather on theoretical knowledge of the issue than to any practical experience as land consolidation has never been implemented in the country before. It should also be noted that the legislation was prepared without any international technical support. Starting from 2014, the testing of the legislation through implementation of two pilot land consolidation projects was initiated with technical support from FAO. The piloting of the land consolidation showed numerous constraints and as a result, the implementation process was blocked. Through a thorough analysis which was done with the help of FAO, all the reasons causing such situation were identified. The issues included constraints related on one side, constraints related to property rights on the field, but also the length and the complexity of the administrative procedure was identified as one of the reasons for the blockage of the implementation of the process. As a continuation of the activities and in order to resolve the situation through the EU funded mainland project, FAO has supported the first major round of improvements to the legal framework, to the law on land consolidation. And the amendments were adopted in May 2018. This was a major step towards implementation of land consolidation in the country and provided the solid legal ground for continuation of the implementation of the national land consolidation program. As a result, since 2018, one majority based and one voluntary land consolidation projects are in the final stages of implementation, while eight more, as my colleague Kiril mentioned, are ongoing. However, we as a team, FAO, together with the colleagues from the lead agency from the ministry, we are constantly working on the improvements of the legislation now based on the experiences from the field through the implementation of much more land consolidation projects. Introduction of multi-purpose land consolidation, full inclusion of the state owned land, agricultural land into the process, fine tuning of some of the procedures are only some of the topics that we are currently discussing and which are open for adjustment in the next round of amendments which is expected by the end of this year. Setting up the legislation to implement this important structural reform is hard yet rewarding job. Particularly because more than 5000 participants farmers are expected to benefit from the from land consolidation in the next few few years through the through the mainland project. This of course extends to the member of their families as well. So the burden is heavy, but we are determined to succeed. In case of North Macedonia, the connection with the guide is dual. On one side, we are benefiting from it while preparing while drafting the national legislation. But also the experiences and the constraints identified in the implementation of land consolidation projects in North Macedonia was taken into consideration and incorporated into the recommendations of the guide. What I can say also is that I'm proud that North Macedonia was one of the case studies for the guide. So thank you more than over to you. Thank you very much, Christina. Let us now turn to some of the other countries that are in the process of introducing land conservation instruments and also building up national land conservation programs. Thomas, you have been involved as international legal consultant in FAO land consolidation project. From your experience with working on these FAO projects in different countries. What can you say about the different land consolidation approaches and how they affect the property rights. Yeah, thank you more than and hello to all the participants it's a pleasure to see so many people participating and being interested in land consolidation. So actually, as regards a little bit theoretical approach, we have identified three basic models of land consolidation, and you can see all the analysis in our legal guide. The three models are the voluntary land consolidation approach, majority based and statutory land consolidation. And in voluntary land consolidation participants of a project they actually participate with their own pollution and there is no voting on the land consolidation plan usually. In majority based land consolidation, there is a qualified majority of landowners who vote in favor or against some landowners may vote against the land consolidation. In statutory land consolidation, there is a huge of course participatory and process and consultations with landowners, but there is no voting on the land consolidation plan at the end. So these were basic three, three forms that we have identified and different countries may choose different approaches how to implement land consolidation. If for a whole variety of reasons, social, political or legal aspects etc. So for example, as my colleague mentioned, colleagues mentioned before in North Macedonia, it's a voluntary and majority based land consolidation approaches which are applied. The same probably model will be applied in Azerbaijan in the future. And for example, if you're in here is applying only voluntary approach as probably will be the case in Armenia where we work as well. So actually the choice is based on the analysis of the situation in the country and experience from the pilot project that helps a lot. And as it was mentioned, any system of land consolidation must be accompanied with the efficient system of safeguard. And the key idea in all this actually is that there should be a win-win solution. That land consolidation should ensure that all its participants are as well after the project as before. And land consolidation is a public purpose instrument. So different safeguards must be combined to ensure that the process doesn't interfere with doesn't violate tenure rights or there is no negative impact on environment etc etc. So majority based land consolidation, since there is a voting of a qualified majority on the land consolidation plan, it requires probably more safeguards than voluntary land consolidation for example. But it allows more efficient reallotment of parcels within the project area, but it also requires to have stronger safeguards because a part of people, a part of landowners maybe will be against voting against the plan. But still it will be implemented. So actually to this system of safeguards, it's well elaborated in many European countries. But countries who are introducing land consolidation together with the local experts, our FAO team, we analyze the situation and we see what are the issues, what are the problems. And we then fine tune this mechanism of safeguards to ensure that it doesn't fail. And all this analysis we do allows us to identify the key points and decide where to put the emphasis in this system of safeguards. For example, we can look at the level of corruption in the country or a level of informality on the land market etc etc. And then we see what would be the best option in terms of safeguards to be applied. Thank you Thomas. Now let me turn to Frank. Frank, could you tell us about why land consolidation is important for sustainable development in the Netherlands? Yes, Morten. Land consolidation is already applied for 100 years in the Netherlands. And after World War II, the main emphasis was on agricultural restructuring, including the infrastructure needed, drainage systems and rural road systems. And in the 1970s and 80s, well actually in the 1980s I started working myself when I still had the original color of my hair and then already the emphasis was also on landscape protection. So we already had quite some projects there with landscape plans and so on in the project. From the 1990s onwards, a lot of emphasis was put on ecological network, restoring the biodiversity values in parts of the country. And nowadays it's used as a kind of overall zoning instrument. I mean on top of all these other issues we have been doing over the last 100 years. We look at energy, transition, we look at zoning for nitrogen buffering of farms closely located to nature areas or reducing risks for spreading of diseases of zoonosis, let's say by proper zoning. So all these different objectives can be part of nowadays land consolidation. So it's been developed from typically agricultural restructuring instrument to a broad land use management system in the Netherlands. Thank you. Thank you Frank. And now, Margaret, you have a long experience with human rights gender equality and women's empowerment. Could you tell us about the legislative and practical steps that the legal guide proposes and on these issues and tell us about your experiences in applying this. Yes, let me just start by saying that women's rights are human rights so therefore there is it's not two separate issues it's one of the same. Let us acknowledge that this is, we don't need to focus even on the region of Eastern Europe. Gender issues are important in every region, and there are difficulties for women to assert their rights or to enjoy the rights or to have rights in many countries. All over the world. Now generally speaking in, in Central Eastern Europe, the legal framework is not too bad it's not too bad it it generally recognizes equal rights for men and women. But then it may not have the type of detailed protections that you'd like to see, for instance, like we have reflected in the SDG legal indicator on women's land rights. You know it's a custodian for there are six proxies there that we want to see in in in its relation generally. And not all counties in the region score full points, let's say, but even if they do, then we still have the social attitudes problem. That is also, it is, it is integral to rural communities to be a little bit old fashioned if you like. And there's a lot of conservative communities all over the world, and I found a number of them in Eastern Central Europe, from the western part of those countries to the eastern part. I remember once we had, we had a long discussion with government authorities, the local authorities with our own legal consultants about gender issues. And everybody said no, but there is no, there are no gender issues. Women have equal rights to men. They are, they are, they are full the rise of fully protected rest assured. So we went to the community workshop, and we see not a single woman participating not a single woman, but they have brought us cake, which I think is just a classic sample of women being told another place and not to get into into into men's business of property rights. In the guide we recommend, as Frank mentioned already to have dual protection, joint, joint registration of, of the rights for the two spouses after lung consolidation, but we also really try to make sure through the legal frameworks that women are fully participating. I think the participation of women and hearing the voices is, is really important, like we learned in that cake workshop. So there's not, it's not just the legislation, it's also just the practical guidance that long planners, lung consolidation planners need to have to try to make sure that women are heard. If they need to be heard separately, then so be it. If you need to hire women to go and speak to women, then so be it. Okay, I'm going to stop here. I'm going to, I'm going to get to, I'm getting too excited. Thanks a lot, Margaret. Now, this completes the first round of questions and answers from the panel. And before we now go back to the panelists for another round of questions I would like again to encourage all of you to write your questions to the panel using the question feature and so I will ask as many of your questions to the panelists as possible and we will also afterwards answer the questions that we don't have the time for. So please write your, if you have any questions for a specific member of the panel. While you formulate your questions and comments, let us begin the second round again with Kirill and hear more about the experience. Kirill, what can you advise the colleagues around the world who are planning to introduce land consolidation in their respective countries. Land consolidation is a complex but very beneficial process. It tackles the root causes of the problem where it comes to improvement of the agricultural production, the land and its structure. You cannot plan anything as a country in terms of improvement of the agricultural sector if the main resources are maintained and the assets to the agricultural infrastructure is limited. Land consolidation can also serve as a multi-purpose instrument and in combination with other available mechanism and the country can achieve much more than just improvement of the agricultural structure. Land consolidation can be used to also prevent the negative effect of the construction of big infrastructure project such as highways. We are currently implementing two such projects that combine land consolidation with construction of big infrastructure project. We can aid the preservation of cultural heritage cities and the natural restoration. There are many possibilities. For us in North Macedonia, the perception of the land consolidation instrument is that it is a big sea of opportunities that are yet to be tested implemented and benefits enjoying from it. We are just beginning this process that has been implemented for decades in some countries. So my advice to the professionals around the world is don't give up on the first step. Try your best to incorporate the land consolidation instruments into the existing national framework using the existing solution as much as possible. For the situation where there is not possible, don't hesitate to think out of the box and don't feel discouraged to introduce new solutions that fit best the national context. Also, I think that the new FAO legal guide will make the process easier and efficient. Thank you. Thank you again, Kiril. And now let's continue with Christina. Could you let us know what are the main areas that you felt were most important when drafting the land consolidation legislation in North Macedonia? Thank you, Morten. Well, there are many aspects that need to be taken into consideration when drafting the legislation on land consolidation. What I would let's say specifically mention is the distinction between the two approaches, the majority based and the voluntary land consolidation, because this topic is crucial when the legislation is prepared. The two approaches have their own specificities and differences, and this needs to be taken into account when the articles of the law are drafted. Furthermore, the proper regulation to achieve the at least as well off principle should be a cornerstone of the law. My colleagues already mentioned what this principle is, and there are a lot of things, a lot of issues that needs to be regulated in terms to properly implement at least as well off principle. This partially includes monetary compensations as well if necessary. The third issue that I would like to point out is the regulation of the three generic phases of the land consolidation, which needs to be well elaborated as these phases of the land consolidation process are interlinked. If one makes an oversight in one of the phases in terms of regulation, this might influence the whole process and most probably there will be a price to pay. The land consolidation projects might not end up with success because of the legal provisions. Another important point is that the process is heavily dependent of the will of the participants, mainly landowners. They vote to accept the reallotment proposal plan or proposals, and this means that the inclusion and the participation of the landowners in the land consolidation process needs to be secured in the law. The bodies they establish, the decision making processes process, they take the way of inviting them and informing them, everything needs to be incorporated within the legal framework. This makes land consolidation more complicated to regulate than let's say processes that are fully state imposed like expropriation. Furthermore, from a legal point of view, the land consolidation process, especially the majority based approach needs fine balancing. On one side, the private ownership is a constitutionally guaranteed right. It must be protected accordingly in all national laws, including the laws regulating land consolidation. On the other side, the legal remedies that will secure this right to private ownership must not prolong the land consolidation process endlessly because it will become impossible to be finalized to be implemented in full. And land consolidation is considered or should be considered as a public interest. So this fine balancing is very important when preparing the land consolidation related legislation. As a last point, one of the major issues is to try to find a way to treat the outcome of the land consolidation process, the reallotment plan. As a single plan when it comes to the registration into the property registers. This is crucial for smooth and effective and financially viable registration of the new situation that comes after land consolidation process in the property register. So that would be, those are the main points that come to my mind for this occasion. Over to you, Morten. Thank you, Christina. Now for Thomas, you already have some practical experiences with the application of the guide in FAO project. Could you shortly tell us about your experiences in applying the guide? What are the key challenges of transferring the advice from the guide into legal practice? Thank you, Morten. Actually, we could see already from a map of Frank that some of the Central and Eastern European countries are running their land consolidation programs already. And some of them are interested in introducing this instrument and as we saw now the example of North Macedonia, Azerbaijan, we're working in Armenia. So actually, there's a whole preparatory work for that because we have a guide that's great. Now we have to find ways how to implement or transfer this know-how and experience into the field, into practice. So before starting any discussion with national experts or starting drafting laws or whatever, there is a need for analysis to be performed. And pilot projects are implemented so they help a lot to have a whole picture actually what is the problem I think in the country, what kind of, what approaches of land consolidation maybe could be applied there, etc. So this results in a document like a discussion paper where we cover policy issues first. So before we start doing technical work, we must have a clear vision what we want to achieve with land consolidation in a specific country. So in such document, we would analyze and describe objectives of land consolidation principles, approaches possible to be applied. We would analyze the institutional framework, for example, sources of funding, analyze all phases of land consolidation projects, monitoring evaluation, etc. So once we have these questions, we then discuss with local stakeholders and with FAO team national experts, etc., etc. And once we have these policy issues solved or we have a direction where to go, the technical work starts and actually from my experience, I noticed that lawyers are sometimes very hard to be persuaded. So, and they have a tendency to say that this is not possible because and this is not possible because of that. And from my experience, I see that if there is a political bill, then most of the legal, legal technical issues may be solved. So first, what we negotiate is that we will not concentrate on a phrase, something is not possible, but we will concentrate on a question how this is possible, how we can implement this. Of course, copying and pasting mechanisms, you know, from land consolidation advanced systems into a specific country doesn't mean that you will succeed with land consolidation there, because everything has to be adapted to the local situation, as I was already mentioning about system of safeguards. It must be fine tuned to fit the needs and specificity of the issues in a certain country. So then having this approach, then we can start dealing with technical details and pilot project experiences and land consolidation planners who already did the work in the field. That helps a lot to persuade national lawyers and persuade them that yes, this might be a problem in the field and this might be an issue also, etc, etc. So this is a whole process of transferring this knowledge, written knowledge into the field, into the practice. Thank you, Morten. Thank you, Thomas for this. And I think it's important to say also that the legal guide that we have now published does not replace the need for technical assistance that remains the same. And also the need to test the procedures in pilot projects also remain the same. So but it will of course be a tool to set a more clear roadmap towards the full operational land consolidation program that is the vision at the beginning of the process where we start introduction of land consolidation in a new country. Now let me turn to Margaret again, Margaret, the voluntary guidance and tenure always talk about respect for and protection of legitimate tenure rights. What is that? And how can the principle be applied also in land consolidation? Indeed in the VGT, this concept of legitimate tenure rights is really a breakthrough. It is such an important concept because it includes both rights that are already recognized by law and those that are not yet recognized by law, but should be recognized by law. For instance, those that are socially legitimate. For example, customer rights in many parts of the world are not recognized properly yet by law and they should be. Now in the land consolidation law, we struggled with this quite a lot. And we thought, okay, how if there were some rights that are legitimate but not legally recognized, how could they be legally recognized through a land consolidation process. And we concluded that they cannot because land consolidation law is designed to address only land consolidation. And the reason for that to be a broader legal land reform is not to be the general framework of the country of how land rights are organized or how property rights are dealt with on the market, etc. We consider, given that this is a sui generis legislation, if you like, which means that it's a leg specialist, it's a law that has a ring narrow scope. It's just there to help us make land consolidation happen. It is not the right place to provide this legal recognition if it doesn't already exist. So in the guide we decided instead to work with the rights that are capable of being registered. That is rights that are already recognized by the law. I think we would, this is where we're based on the Eastern European and Central Asia experience where there have been land reforms that have been cadastral set up. There have been tightening programs etc. So at least the basis is there. But we would look to adapt this for counties that have not yet done so. Let's say if in Uganda they may not have registered all individualized rights or community rights, that matter. And they would have to think through how would their land consolidation look like and how would they take account of custom rights, which by the way I recognize by law there. I'm just taking an example of customer rights that may not be registered but are registrable. In other countries they still have to undertake the fundamental reform to recognize customer rights in some way. Okay, so in the guide we talk about just rights that are capable of being registered as the standard for what we want to include. And that includes rights that have not yet been formalized, that may be on the basis of informal transactions or maybe because of inheritance. We would like to process to make sure these rights get registered and we have a number of ways that we suggest how this could happen, but no one solution. Thank you Morten. Thank you Margaret. Now that we are at the final question in the second round of the first session of the final discussion. So Frank, from your international experience what is crucial when setting up a land consolidation instrument in a new country. Yes, well from working in a number of countries I would like to mention five points. First of all, and it's been said before, learn from field experience. You can't plan this from behind your desk. Start with the kind of pilots to see the reality, even when you don't have an instrument yet, try to analyze, see what the problems are and see if land consolidation could help in the area. And the second point is that you should create a broad support for land preservation and the way of doing that is to create a land conservation strategy, and involving different societal actors in this process and also then you can determine the proper target groups in the target areas in your strategy. For example, the point already made, it's not typically for the big players on the market, it's for small farmers. And the third point, make a simple law and test this law in practice, again in pilots, and arrange many of the details in secondary legislation in implementation manuals, implementation regulations, so keep the basic law simple. The last point is to pay attention to capacity development. When I talk about this, I always need thinking of Biljana. Biljana is a person in North Macedonia, we recruited in the pilot area of Agri and she was not very experienced when she started but I think in short time she was an indispensable factor in the whole process by linking to people by creating personal contact by working in the field, not from behind the desk, not always in the area and creating rapport with many of the people. And now you're interested in who Biljana is, check page 57 of the legal guidelines, it's the lady in red in the photo, but promise that you will read the rest of the legal guide as well. So be flexible, work participatory and be determined. Thank you Martin. Thanks a lot Frank. I think you wrapped up very nicely the first two rounds of the panel discussion. We are now ready to ask some of the good questions and I am very happy to see that we already have received many questions from the participants. And if, if, but you can still ask more questions if you did not send us your questions already. Now, quickly switch to the first question. So we have the first question. This is from David Cereba from Kenya. And related also a question from Krishna Patrak. And this is a question for Frank. Is it appropriate to integrate land consolidation with other equally similar instruments like land banking or expropriation? How would you do that in practice? That's a good question. I think in the guide chapter 10 talking about how we have a section on land banking and in fact, I think land banking is very much supportive of land consolidation. Our strong advice also is to set up a land banking instrument when you set up a land preservation program because land banking is the function where you buy land on the market, you buy land in the project area, you temporarily manage that and you include that in the process by either using the land for infrastructural improvements or for enlarging up the farms in the area, which is of course very, very much needed. Land banking is done in different ways, but I think definitely land banking is a very good combination of land preservation. Expropriation is also sometimes done for very specific purposes, but I think that should not be the first focus when you try to combine smartly different instruments. I think setting up a good land bank will help tremendously. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, you could say that a key difference between land consolidation and expropriation is that the land consolidation will allow to compensate the farmers in land while in expropriation, they're usually compensated in monetary funds. So we do not destroy the farm structures when we use land consolidation as an integrated part of the project implementation. Now we have a question, and this is a question for Thomas, and it's from Altrae Bingo from the European coordination here at Campasina. How would FAO guarantee the participation and the protection of the small farmers, farmer communities? How small farms on the ground would benefit from the land consolidation process? What is the decision making process and how we can be sure that the consequences were understood and signed by the smallholders with a good understanding? I think this is an important question. Thomas. Yeah, thank you for this very important question because of course in my practice I have seen many practical situations, you know, when people have no, they have no funds or they have no capacity or whatever. For example, to get an efficient legal advice. So of course, we must ensure safeguards which would protect the most vulnerable people in the area so that the process is safe regarding the tenure right. Regarding communities actually, so this is why I was talking about safeguard system and where to put emphasis on that. This is why we look for example at the level of corruption, for example, and can judiciary branch will be efficient in protecting such rights. Who is the witness, for example, of signatures? What is the process of signing and voting, etc., etc. So there are many aspects actually which we discussed in the guide how to protect the most vulnerable and all of course landowners and not to allow the process to be abused because we know that the land is the most precious resource for people who live on it. You know, so there is no question about about a weak safeguarding system, although the safeguarding system shouldn't kill the process itself. If we have 10 years of litigation, you know, you will never arrive to a result impact. Protecting communities, you know, actually, I think when consolation participates also in the process of, I don't know, stating of the fact what is the situation in a certain community. My family also has land in the village, you know, which we inherited or actually we received after the very restitution in Lithuania. But many people do not live in the community. They left the village or etc., etc. And many parcels might be just left abandoned. This creates a huge problem and for people who wish to work the land as well, because if they are there and they do not have efficient mechanism how to access this land. There is too much of bureaucracy or various, I don't know, corruption level is high and you cannot buy land or people are emigrated in other continents. That creates problems and actually how to solve these problems. We try to answer these questions in the legal guide. So also please look at the page that Frank indicated and other pages as well. You should find an answer. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas. We have a question for Christina. It's about inheritance and how to deal with this in land consolidation, because inheritance practices are causing land consolidation. After 30 years, the family members multiply three to four times. How to deal with inheritance? What are the real experiences from North Macedonia? Thank you, Morten. Well, the situation with dealing with inheritance in land consolidation has two sides. First of all, you might encounter situations where one parcel because of the division or inheritance lines, one parcel is co-owned by many, many landowners and none of them or most of them are not even involved in the agricultural production or living in the region. And on the other side, we in North Macedonia have experienced situations where the inheritance proceedings were never followed up. So the registered landowner is deceased for many, many years and the inheritance proceedings were not even open, not to mention finished. So when you have many landowners on one parcel and the inheritance proceedings are finished, let's say, then the approach is to include all co-owners into the land consolidation process. As I already mentioned, many of the co-owners do not even live in the area nor are involved in the agricultural production. So the approach is to check in the specific phases of land consolidation, especially in the feasibility and in the reallotment phase, whether these people are interested to sell, let's say, their property or part of their property through the land consolidation process. This will provide for more available land for the farmers that are actually working on the land within the land consolidation area. For situations where the inheritance proceedings were never finished, this means that we don't have a living owner who can participate and vote and agree on the plan. So in North Macedonia, we have introduced one specific mechanism where this situation is dealt through temporary representation, either by the hairs of the landowner or the deceased landowners or by the civil servants with experience in land management. This means that we are protecting the rights of the future hairs who have not finished their inheritance procedures through temporary representation within the land consolidation process. These temporary representatives have the same rights as other landowners who are participating in the process, meaning that they could appeal, they can vote, etc. In case the inheritance proceedings are finished during the land consolidation process, this of course terminates the temporary representation and the new owner, the new registered owner can take over his responsibilities and of course, and enjoy his rights in the land consolidation process. Thank you. Thank you, Christina. We have a number of questions all about land consolidation in a tenure system where you have customary rights. And how could the question is in their different questions, but they are more or less the same but focusing on how could land consolidation be applied in such systems. Would you like to ask maybe both Frank and Margaret to provide comments on this issue? Frank, would you go first? It's been a long term wish of me to try it out in an area with the customary rights system. What you need, for example, in Vietnam, it doesn't have customary, well, it has customary right but not prevailing, let's say, it has land use, it doesn't have land ownership. Still, we are introducing it there or the Vietnamese are introducing because the rights of the people having these use rights are well protected. They can hand them over to others, they can be inherited, they can be mortgaged and so on. So you have, let's say, well protected rights. So if as soon as you have that, you can start planning and reallocating these rights in the same participatory process. In the same way I look towards it in customary rights system, if there is a way, let's say, if there are forms that these are legitimate rights which are protected somehow, you could see if you can adapt your system and to see if you can reallocate these legitimate rights, even though they are not, let's say, formally put in the land register or a national disaster. So as long as you keep it very participatory and probably voluntary, I would say in this case then I don't see a problem. Thank you, Frank. Margaret, something you want to add? Yes, like I mentioned earlier, if a right is capable of being recognized as a partially or specific place and is recognized by the national law, then there is no real reason why we couldn't combine a first registration process with land consolidation. So if there was a registration process going on, that this be already implemented with a land consolidation objective so that we avoid the fragmentation that may come. It will only be done with the participation of everybody who has rights and has claims to really see what would be the best solution for them individually. Would it like to have an orchard or vineyard or arable land or grazing land? Is grazing land better used in the commons or as individual passes? Those are questions that we would ask the owners and holders of the rights however they were defined. Thank you. We have an ongoing discussion in Georgia that I could mention here that where we are discussing how to combine the systematic first registration with land consolidation so that you do not first register all the land parcels and then start to consolidate them afterwards. It should be possible to combine these processes and I think a lot of money that would otherwise go into registration costs could be used on land consolidation and you would immediately take the next step and not wait what many countries have done now for 20 years before you were introduced in the land consolidation. We have a question also about the environmental impact which is also a very important discussion. I don't know who will answer this question but the question is if we have carried out studies on environmental impact in land consolidation and let's say how this should be dealt with when we're doing land consolidation. Margaret would want to reply. Margaret please. Yes, in the legal guide we are very careful of the environmental impact. So in the feasibility phase which is the first phase of land consolidation, the feasibility reports should already assess potential negative impact and seek to mitigate them or that would influence the feasibility of the whole project. Meaning that if the feasibility studies would show that there are massively negative environmental impacts that would be the result then the land consolidation is simply not feasible. On the other hand it could potentially be designed in such a way that could be beneficial and could have good side effects and that is how we would like to see it. Now in the reallotment phase once we have the solution mapped out, there is mandatory environmental screening that we recommend. This is already in most European countries legislation that there should be a screening that is formally undertaken and has some formal steps. And if the results of the screening so indicates a full environmental impact assessment must take place. This does not need to be regulated in the land consolidation law if such environmental legislation is already in place but if not then it should be there. Thank you. Thank you. I think very clear. Our question is also about how is the relationship between land consolidation and the land policy in the country. The question is here. Does the implementation of consolidation need modification in the existing land policy and the second question. Does it help to have a national land use law for land consolidation. Christina please. Of course, considering the fact that land consolidation is one of the instruments that could be used in the overall land policy. This means that first of all the policy needs to be defined the land policy needs to be defined. It is comprised of several interlinked instruments and everything. All these instruments need to be adjusted in order to function an interlinked in order in order to function well and to have an effect. In terms of improving the the general situation with the with the land such instruments include but I have not limited to of course we already mentioned land consolidation. Land banking then market regulation in certain situations and etc. Of course in some countries that that own let's say massive amount of public or state owned land the management instruments for state owned land should be part of this overall land land policy. So if I understand well the the the second question. The answer to the first question is yes the by introducing land consolidation, the overall legal framework regulating land issues should be looked at and synchronized. The answer to the second question is land consolidation law could function as a single standing instrument in case other instruments or other land policy instruments are not introduced yet in the in the country. Thank you. I have a question for I think for Thomas. And also question quite similar from a bit of Billy. What type of land rights are given to people after the land consolidation. Always the same type of rights that they had before the land consolidation or some changes could also be introduced. From these rights to ownership rights and customary customary rights to formal rights or visa versa. Any reflections or good practices. Thomas please. So, thank you for the question. Actually, as I have mentioned already land consolidation is a you know as a radio which shows a little bit of the situation and the legal real situation in the in the in the area of the project area. What are the issues or what which land is used which is not used what are the legal problems related to certain parcels etc etc. So of course the result then is different at the end you know maybe some people will will be willing to sell their land during land consolidation. Some others will be will be willing to to buy more or some other people will be willing to consolidate their parcels so that they could work land in one place instead of instead of having 10 parcels and covering 50 kilometers per day with a tractor to reach you know different different parcels. So yes, of course there are changes in in the form of rights but everything is a result of huge negotiating process, which is this process is facilitated by the land consolidation planner who knows very well the area of the problem the problems and the legislative framework. So at the end the structure is much more much more efficient and people must have a win-win situation. This is why land consolidation is a such a tool instrument which allows for everyone to benefit from it. You know, and like in Azerbaijan our colleagues have calculated distances, which must be covered with a tractor before land consolidation before reallotment and after, and it is a very impressive difference you know, which makes life easier afterwards. So, in terms of legal legal aspects, yes, of course, rights change, you know, but it depends on on the will of participants and on the land consolidation plan which is approved later on in voluntary land consolidation by all all agree as I mentioned majority based land consolidation, the qualified majority of land owners. So, thank you. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, we can put many different things into the land consolidation part at the same time, different objectives. So it becomes multipurpose but also different types of rights consolidating maybe first the ownership rights and then on top of that also the lease rights. This could also lead to the consolidation of landowners who may want to perform a cooperative or work together in other ways so the different instruments can easily be combined. We have a question now which is a bit more in the same direction about the mandatory or and voluntary majority based approaches. And the question is, if we could say a bit more about the experiences that we have what is successful and what is less successful. And I think we have experiences where we could say something about voluntary land consolidation and majority based land consolidation. Since we do not recommend as we mentioned already by Margaret in the introduction, the mandatory land consolidation. So, maybe Christina you could say a few words on how we have the experiences from North Macedonia where we did one of each approach pilot. Over to you. Thank you Morton. Well, as we already mentioned the two approaches have different specificities. You cannot say that this one is better than that one. Of course, it depends from the situation from the land structure and principally from the will or interest of the participants for bigger areas where not all landowners are interested into land consolidation process. I would say that the voluntary approach would make a bigger impact for areas that are more compact let's say and that need huge improvements into the infrastructure into the agricultural infrastructure. And where the interest of the landowners is quite high, I would say that majority based approach would be more most suitable. In any case, all these issues are should be analyzed in the feasibility phase where all these aspects can be are taken into consideration so the recommendation about the which approach is more suitable should come out from the analysis done in the in the feasibility phase. I don't know colleagues if you if you have anything to add any of the other panelists want to add something. No, I think it was also quite clear. So, it depends on the on the local situation I think that is, that is the answer. And I could just add that there are countries like the Netherlands or Germany which also have a range of land consolidation mechanisms, both voluntary and statutory or majority based. So, this range of instruments allows them to better as Christina said evaluate the situation in the feasibility phase and select the tool which is the most efficient. Let's continue now a bit in the same direction of the relationship between land consolidation and ownership rights and these rights. We have a question here that says, is it possible to consolidate and this is a question from Andre Popov in Ukraine. Is it possible to consolidate the land use, but not the land ownership. Who would have an opinion on that. Yeah, I can compliment. Yeah, I can give an example in the Netherlands lease rights are well protected. And let's say if you have a longer term lease rights, a farmer would let's say count on having these lease rights for many years. So his farm business model is based also on the fact that, for example, 40 or 50% of his land is leased. And that's the reason why in Dutch law these lease rights are even given more weight in making the reallocation than the ownership rights. At the end we will look then in the reallocation of what is the best for this farmer to have his land, how his land will be located. But it requires of course that this is well protected lease not kind of one year lease or short term lease because you can't plan with that. And you also can't set up a kind of register where you, you start from having a kind of list of acknowledged rights in the project. Thank you. Christina do you want to compliment. I would just emphasize something that Frank already mentioned in in many countries, the register system for registration of leases of long term leases is not that strong. So my my country included so in these cases, the answer is yes, it is possible to to consolidate use rights. Because the owner has a saying into into the whole story. This means that both the owner and the list holder should agree in principle how the consulate that the allotment will be done. Even in cases where the user has is using land for from more than one owner. The parcels could be consolidated, bearing in next to each other bearing in my mind that the owners have have to agree on this. Thank you. We have a question for here now. Let me see where is it again here. What is the competitive size of a family farm in in your country. The farm size is about 2.8 8 hectares and competitive farm probably will be from 10 to 20 hectares. I think that the 20 hectares farm will be sufficient for production for very sustainable production. Yes, I think you're absolutely right. It depends also very much on the type of production. You can have a viable economic viable farm with a small area if you have specialized the high value production while if you're producing weed or sunflower then of course you need to have hundreds of hectares to be fully profitable. Let's see what more questions we have. We still have 12 more minutes to go. We have a questions from Laura German from the University of Georgia. It's for Frank. And it's also a similar questions from the fairy Adam. And the question relates to land fragmentation. The strategic positive role of of that land fragmentation plays in household livelihoods strategies, meaning different soil qualities and micro climatic zones and land consolidation be advanced, meaning taking into consideration local livelihoods, as opposed to national strategic interests. And why do you consolidate land, especially in places where scattered small holder plots are proven to be more adaptive and resilient than large holdings. Yeah, we're not doing that. We're not consolidating such such areas as I mentioned in my presentation land consolidation is not the solution to all all situations. Indeed, there are such areas and probably many areas around the world where there is this diverse system of production where people spread their risk by having different parcels and different crops and and you you can't just say okay we're going to bulldozer that way and we're going to make big plus that that would be against all the principles we have ourselves in terms of environmental and sustainable sustainability. The process and I think that's very clear to mention very important to mention is is very participatory. And if, let's say any government strategy should not be enforcing in this, this in this way because you would never create a support in the area. You would purely voluntary land preservation so you need, you need the consent of all people or you have the majority based system where usually also you need the 70% of all the people saying yes well in these areas you would never also achieve such such support it would never be useful or feasible to implement land consolidation in such areas and I also it's not, it's not the intention I think should not be the intention also to do that in these areas. I will agree it should be driven by the local needs somehow and this is very important that these are considered thoroughly in the feasibility phase of the project. We have time I think for two more questions and let's have a question for Margaret now. This is a question from Solomon and from Westworth. And it's about the definition of land consolidation. They say that the definition of land consolidation is limited to rural areas and excluding the urban areas. Why is that. And the second question is, when parcels of land pooled together for the redevelopment in urban areas. Will that also qualify as land consolidation. Would you want to reply? Yeah, well, first of all, we work in rural areas. Our mandate is agriculture. So therefore our work on land consolidation is for agricultural areas is for rural areas. Now, if you have a situation where a where a peri urban area is about to be redeveloped and will be will be will be changed into into a building site or whatnot. Of course, all the all the rights holders will have to be recognized and compensated. I don't think a long consolidation is what is needed there. It may be the result that some person will acquire last practical but I would also like to see that all landowners are fully compensated. And this is part of of an organized development, as opposed to a land grabbing by by big, big company or development companies to keep people out and start building a building a houses for the rich I mean that is not what what land consolidation is about. It is not the purpose. And, and I don't think it is it is a tool that will be particularly useful I think if there is redevelopment from from rural to urban, and of course that is happening everywhere would like to stop it but it's not not likely to be to be stopped. Then the compensation methods would probably be be be more viable. Thank you. Thank you, Margaret. Yeah, I think this urban land consolidation is what is usually referred to as land readjustment and there are different procedures also practices in some countries where that say the profit from this urban development is equally shared between those who are the landowners in these areas and these are also very important instruments also when we talk about the equality and and safe rights but this is not the purpose of the legal guide that we have prepared. We have now one last question this is from Gettrace Pasacanis in the train and it says that land consolidation may last 10 or 20 years. So it may lose its significance to change the legal acts. So have you foreseen ability to stop land consolidation project implementation, as is no longer feasible. You mentioned that in Germany there is such an option. I don't know who would want to respond to this. I'm sure what what what do you mean I mean. Also in the Netherlands in the early days we have very large scale projects which lasted many years. We have stopped doing that because the process would take too long so we're doing smaller projects now. It's if the question is about that or just let's say if you at a certain point if you think there's not too much support for land consolidation whether you could stop the program I think of course you can stop the program. But also as I mentioned before I think we've been doing in this for 100 years in the Netherlands and the Germans have been doing this for 100 years in Danish and there are many more countries which have long traditions each time. And the objectives are updated, and if necessary the approaches and the legal frameworks are updated so I see more let's say a need to keep that that principle high then and then to say okay we're going to stop the process. I think I would also say that we should not implement projects that take 10 or 20 years at all. So, and the feasibility phase is what is is installed to reveal whether this project is feasible and if it's feasible and has the sufficient support and the sufficient funding and based on the objectives that are set in place for a specific land consolidation program in the country then it should be implemented as quickly as possible. And this is this balance that we were discussing in the presentation I think it was Margaret who was mentioning the balance and also Frank between having a land consolidation that requires or ensures that we have the safeguards in place and that the tenure rights are protected. But on the other hand that we also have a land consolidation legislation that is implementable that we have a system that is operational in practice and that we don't get blocked. This is the process that we have been through in North Macedonia where we have unblocked the process and will have a second round now of legal amendments as Christina mentioned before. I think we have three minutes left so I will not take more questions to the panel, but I will go to the closing remark. Let me just find my note. Yeah we're coming now to the end of this webinar and I have personally found it very interesting. I will not try to wrap up the whole discussion one more time I think we have we have touched upon many of the important aspects and the guide is so much more than what is has been visible in the discussion today. And that is important so I will strongly encourage you to look into the guide but also I will look very much forward to the application of the guide at the country level. This is what it's developed to support the countries, both those countries that are introducing land consolidation for the first time, but we also see countries that after some years of implementation have a need to go back and look into the legal framework and see that there are things that do not fully function and in this situation, I think they can also find some inspiration from the guide. So, we have heard a lot about the experiences from different European countries, but we are also very curious to know more about the experiences from other parts of the world. Do contact us to share these experiences. Use the blocks that I have mentioned a couple of times also to mention experiences and to continue the discussion after we finish now in in a couple of minutes. Personally, I see a big need to share experiences on land consolidation and the related instruments that also mentioned land banking development of cultural land markets and share these experiences across the different regions. We can learn a lot from each other between the different regions of the world and we have not talked so much about land consolidation experiences from Asia. Frank mentioned Vietnam, but they are also very good examples and experiences in Asia, in China, in Japan, South Korea as well, where they also have a long tradition for land consolidation. So, thank you very much for your participation today and many thanks as well to our presenters and to the panelists. We will make available the results of the webinar, the video will be uploaded to the event website. There will also be the key messages published in land portal. And in the event page of the webinar, you will, as mentioned, find a series of publications that we made available as background documents, three blocks. And also, we have these short video clips about land consolidation, where we have different people from, we have farmers, we have people from government, we have different colleagues who have say some very interesting words. So, look into these video clips as well and please continue the discussion on the blocks furthermore. So, with this, I want to close the webinar for today and thank again all of you for your active participation. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye. Goodbye.