Land Sales Could Breed Corruption

As plans to introduce private land ownership on a wider scale in Uzbekistan get past an initial review by parliamentary committee, NBCentralAsia analysts are warning that the least-well off sections of society could find themselves pushed aside.



A draft of a revised Land Code containing radical changes to the rules governing ownership was approved by parliament’s agriculture committee on February 29. The plan is to simplify the procedures for acquiring and privatising plots of land.



Arzed Latipov of the government committee in charge of land resources told the parliamentary meeting that the Uzbek government had already decided on the initial prices at which land would be sold, varying in accordance to the quality of land and its location.



Latipov said that in time, these controls would be relaxed and the price of land would be left to the market.



NBCentralAsia understands that the changes affect land on which buildings sit, orchards, market gardens and other small plots, and not agricultural land as a whole.



Under the Land Code of 1998, all land in Uzbekistan is owned by the state. Yet other laws concerning land and property allow parcels of land to pass into various forms of private ownership.



Official figures show that of the four million owners of detached houses in Uzbekistan, about half also have ownership rights over the land their properties sit on. In most cases these rights have been acquired free of charge.



A decree signed by President Islam Karimov in summer 2006 required commercial and corporate property owners to acquire the land they occupied. This privatisation was to be at market prices.



The same decree made it legal, starting from January 2008, for individuals to acquire private ownership of land set aside for building residential property.



So far, official sources have not revealed what provision the new Land Code makes for individuals to acquire and privatise residential plots.



But analysts say there is a danger that if land is made available only at high prices close to the market rate, many people such as badly-off families will be automatically excluded from the process.



“Many pensioners and low-income people will find a land privatisation carried out at market prices an insurmountable barrier,” said a commentator in Tashkent.



The going rate for 500 square metres of land in the capital Tashkent is from 120,000 to 180,000 US dollars. Land in the surrounding region sells for about half that price.



Experts are recommending that any changes to the rules should stipulate that the price of a plot of land is assessed not only by quality and location, but also according to the means of the owner whose property sits on it.



One observer from Surkhandarya region in the south of the country said he suspected the authorities had taken up the idea of selling land merely in order to plug holes in the budget.



He also raised concerns that any scheme based broadly on market prices could create new opportunities for enrichment among officials. As he explained, “With their totally corrupt practices, state officials are bound to lay down unattainable conditions [for sales] and overprice the land.”



An independent journalist in the country agreed, saying it was more than possible that officials would have the leeway to assess the sale price of a land plot far above what the owner whose building sits on it can pay.



(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service is resuming, covering only Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the moment.)