Rice is a strategic commodity within Macedonian agriculture production that has the potential for export and additional income for around 3 500 farming families in Kochani valley, the biggest rice production region in the country.
Among the villages here is Spanchevo, characterized by fertile soil, plentiful water, favourable natural conditions for agricultural production – and fragmented land structures.
Trajce Todosiev (31), a young farmer, owns four hectares of agricultural land and cultivates an additional two, which he leases from other landowners. His six-hectare farm is fragmented into 20 small parcels and scattered in different locations all over areas that, as Trajce notes, are not productive, making farming expensive and leading to the inefficient use of agricultural machinery and natural resources.
In addition to local farming conditions, rice producers in the Kochani region, in general, are strongly influenced by price pressures in foreign markets, dictated by far more competitive producers. Therefore, productivity and cost efficiency is of crucial importance for boosting competitiveness of the small farms and their access to markets.
“The land structure must be improved to meet modern production standards and be able to compete in the European market,” says Zoranco Simijonov (53), who, similarly to Trajce, farms around five hectares of land in Spanchevo that are fragmented into 30 land parcels, often far from each other.
Therefore Trajce and Zoranco took their chance to participate in the land consolidation activities in Spanchevo village, aiming to help 620 agricultural landowners through the restructuring of unfavourable land structures.
Shaping the prospects for better production
Spanchevo is one of the nine areas in North Macedonia where land consolidation is being implemented with support from the EU-FAO MAINLAND project. Here, 276 hectares of land are covered by the programme, broken into over 1 800 land parcels with an average parcel size of only 0.2 hectares. This is aggravated by poor agricultural roads and drainage and irrigation channels.
