Cyprus Land Use and Tenure
Grape harvest
Courtesy Embassy of Cyprus, Washington
Three categories of landownership existed in Cyprus
during the
Ottoman period: private, state, and communal. This
division
continued to characterize landholding in the Greek Cypriot
area in
1990. Most land was privately owned. The largest private
landowner
was the Church of Cyprus, whose holdings before the
Turkish
invasion included an estimated 5.8 percent of the island's
arable
land.
Unrestricted legal ownership of private land dated only
from
1946, when the British administration enacted a new land
law that
superseded the land code in effect under the Ottomans, in
which all
agricultural land belonged to the state. Those who worked
the land
were in effect hereditary tenants, whose right to the land
was
usufructuary. Land could be transmitted from father to
son, but
could not be disposed of otherwise without official
permission.
The Immovable Property (Tenure, Registration, and
Valuation)
Law of 1946 established the present-day legal basis for
landholding. All former state lands that had been properly
acquired
by individuals were declared to be private property;
private
property as defined in the former Ottoman land code also
continued
to be private property. Communal land remained the
property of
villages or towns, and all unoccupied and vacant land not
lawfully
held (most forest land, for example) became state land.
Both Greek and Turkish inheritance practices required
the
division of an estate among the surviving heirs. At the
time of the
1946 law, fragmentation of land was already great, many
holdings
did not have access roads, and owners frequently possessed
varying
numbers of plots that might be separated by distances of
several
kilometers.
Despite the 1946 law, however, fragmentation of plots
continued. The 1946 census showed 60,179 holdings
averaging 7.2
hectares. By 1960 the number of holdings had risen to
69,445, an
increase of 15.4 percent, and the average holding had
decreased to
6.2 hectares. By 1974 the average holding was an estimated
5
hectares. Holdings were seldom a single piece of land;
most
consisted of small plots, an average of ten per holding in
1960. In
some villages, the average number of plots was 40, and
extremes of
100 plots held by a single farmer were reported.
The government enacted the Land Consolidation Law of
1969 to
resolve the problem of land tenure. The law established
the Central
Land Consolidation Authority, with the power to buy and
also
acquire compulsorily land and other property, which it
could sell
or use for land consolidation. The authority's board
included
members of several ministries and departments and also
representatives of the farmers. At the village level,
committees of
government representatives and local farmers coordinated
and
supervised the local program.
Land consolidation consisted of merging fragmented
holdings.
Dual and multiple holdings were to be eliminated, and
plots smaller
than the minimums listed in the 1946 land law were to be
expropriated. Government-owned land could be used to
enlarge
holdings; recipients could purchase the land at current
market
prices, paying in installments at low interest rates. A
farmerowner who lost land in the redistribution process was to
receive
land having the same value as his former holding. The land
consolidation program also involved the construction of a
service
road network to connect all plots to larger roads.
By the end of 1988, twenty-eight land consolidation
projects
had been completed, and thirty-one projects were underway.
Where
projects had been completed, minute plots were almost
completely
eliminated, the average size of plots increased by 100
percent, and
the number of plots declined by about 70 percent.
Data as of January 1991
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