“Who owns agricultural land” is never an easy question. The many land reforms, the lost cadastral records, small disputes and vast property transformations make ownership difficult to untangle. In countries with recent histories of conflict, the answer is further complicated by issues of refugee return and restitutions—drawn out processes that have the power to reshape both landscapes and the people living in them.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the difficulty of the question acquires a new dimension with the many governance levels at play: demarcating the rights and obligations of the state, entities, and cantons is not an easy task. The complex governance system consists of two entities (Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Federation is further divided into 10 cantons with significant autonomy. And on top of this structure sits the Office of the High Representative (OHR) which has extensive powers (including adopting binding decisions and removing public officials) but is accountable to the international community, rather than the domestic public. This multi-layer governance makes land-use planning and reporting difficult: there is no centralised land authority that would collect and distribute data, and even though cantons should be reporting on land use to the Federation, this is often not the case.
Agricultural land in BiH: a disappearing resource?
Bosnia and Herzegovina has a high level of employment in agriculture (8.2%, ca. double the EU average). If we add the wide-spread practice of semi-subsistence farming for personal use, the number grows even higher. Despite this high level of reliance on agriculture and having almost 50% of the total territory covered by agricultural land, the percentage of high-quality land in BiH is quite low.
This is a consequence of both natural features (with many mountainous forest areas) and a history of developmental policy that prioritised industry and other raw materials. But agricultural land is also disappearing due to both war-time legacies of landmines and soil pollution, and the post-war corrupt spatial planning that sacrifices high-quality agricultural land to non-transparent development projects.
Many communities retreated to subsistence farming as a means of surviving the 1992-1995 war. After the war, large swathes of land were covered in mines. BiH is still dealing with demining large surfaces and supporting victims of mines, 85% of whom are agricultural workers. Since 1992, BiH has also lost agricultural land to more than landmines. On the one hand, the wide-spread depopulation of rural areas (due to war violence and more recent migrations) has led to land abandonment, resulting in derelict and permanently lost agricultural land. In 2000-2018, for example, over 2500ha of pastures have been converted to low forest and shrub vegetation.
On the other hand, the increased urbanisation and development also led to agricultural land being turned into discontinuous urban areas, industrial and business zones, and minerals exploitation sites. A good example is the largest infrastructural project, the development of the Corridor Vc motorway, that has been fraught with land expropriation, land speculation, and lawsuits and complaints of the local population. In most extreme cases, even high quality irrigated agricultural land has been lost to murky development plans.
In addition to state projects, agricultural land is also threatened by private investments. For example, the development of solar energy occurs through illegally changing the use of agricultural land; and the possible development of lithium mining is happening in a fertile area. Soil erosion due to other projects—like dams and tunnels—has also led to disappearance of agricultural land. Overall, what is at stake in current economic development is not only the control of agricultural land, but its existence.
Land in a layer of conflicts
Governance of agricultural land is also a highly politicised question. Even more so in areas with histories of conflict. In BiH, the political meaning of land far transcends economic considerations. Some of these debates have a longer history: more than one million hectares that were redistributed during the Yugoslav agrarian reforms are still awaiting restitution legislation.
Many of these parcels were the property of religious organisations and communities, who still hope to retain use rights and ownership. Because many of these institutions also have an ethnic dimension, the issue of restitution implies highly political and contentious discussions. It also means that the price of agricultural land fluctuates wildly, as it is not determined only by the quality of the soil, but by the socio-economic contexts of the specific plots.
This was especially obvious during the refugee return efforts following the 1992-1995 war. More than half of the BiH population was displaced during the war, and the entities became almost ethnically homogenous. Annex 7 of the Dayton agreement sought to allow refugees to return to their homes (thus working against the results of the war-time ethnic cleansing), but it also allowed for compensation of property in the case of people not returning. This compensation was the favoured option of nationalist who sought to retain to ethnic homogeneity achieved through war-time violence.
To discourage return, nationalist elites who controlled municipal land started distributing land allocations in their own territories to dissuade people from returning elsewhere. In Herzegovina, for example, Croatian nationalists used agricultural land to give out 1500 house-building plots to ethnically Croatian refugees. The practice was also widespread in RS, where elites wanted to keep Serb refugees from returning to Croatian and Bosniak majority territories.
A good example of the many layers of political engineering through agricultural land comes from Doboj: during socialism, communist authorities expropriated agricultural land for a furniture factory, but the remaining land was left with the villagers through assigning them use rights. But after Bosniak villagers were displaced during the war, the municipality allocated this land to displaced Serbs who were refugees from the Federation, and they started to build houses there.
The practice of land allocations was eventually banned by the OHR and regulated through individually applied for ‘waivers.’ This was in line with the more general view of international actors in BiH who favoured a policy of minority return. But despite this policy, any return was made difficult by the neoliberal reforms that that accompanied post-war transformations: a house or a plot of land is not enough for life or (re)production. Besides refugee return, agricultural land was also crucial for economic recovery. This meant both dealing with war-time pollution and landmines, but also with the economic transformation that we will return to.
Constitutional Court Decisions
The control of state and ‘abandoned’ land is still a contentious issue. In 2019, RS passed legislation that ‘state’ agricultural land is ownership of the RS entity, rather than the BiH federal state. The Article 53 of the Law, which stipulates that ‘agricultural land that is by its nature a public good, i.e. the state property, by force of law becomes the property of the Republika Srpska,’ was contentious. Minority representatives in RS complained loudly and the issue was discussed at the Constitutional Court.
In short, state agricultural land—just like the incredibly valuable Bosnian forests—is a site of competing claims. It is difficult to untangle which property is owned by Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, RS, and Brčko District, and their respective rights of ownership and management of State Property. In 2020, the constitutional court decided that agricultural land was automatically the property of the central Bosnian state rather than Republika Srpska, prompting RS to call for RS judges to leave the Constitutional Court and increase its calls for secession. This is important not only for arable land, but also for forest land that is a key natural resource.
This issue is a long-standing problem. To prevent the sale and re-purposing of state property (including agricultural land), the OHR declared a ‘the temporary prohibition of disposal of state property’ in 2003.
The problem arose during the first cadastral reform in RS, when ‘unclaimed’ land (e.g., parcels left behind by refugees in the 1990s, growing urbanisation, and subsequent waves of migration) and formerly socially owned land (that had been used by state agricultural enterprises) was registered as the ownership of RS. In other words, it was an attack on private land left behind by displaced persons, and on state land used by agricultural enterprises.
The temporary prohibition was supposed to be in force until the making of ‘State-level legislation regulating the rights of ownership and management of State Property, adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina.’ 20 years later, this has still not happened. In short, the Federation Government and the Republika Srpska Government do not have jurisdiction to dispose of state property.
The decisions are upheld in the Constitutional Court. In July 2024, the Court annulled decisions by the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Government regarding the repurposing of state land in the Vareš area (selling forest land to a mining company), and by the Republika Srpska authorities concerning the sale on Jahorina via auction (felling and selling forest land for real estate development).
Post-war privatisations or land grabs?
Despite the many limitations in the disposal of state agricultural land, the large state agricultural companies that leased huge tracts of socially owned land had to be transformed into private property. This is where the most dramatic changes in ownership structures of agricultural land happened: the war, alongside the transformation from Yugoslav-style self-management to a market economy profoundly changed agricultural land ownership.
Privatisation in BiH started during former Yugoslavia, when workers were allowed to buy discounted company shares but without the possibility to trade them. The war halted this first attempt while the workers’ shares had only been partly recognised in subsequent privatisation cycles. Already in 1993 and 1994, parliaments of the warring sides in BiH transformed what was known as ‘socially owned’ to ‘state’ property, which paved the way for postwar privatisation processes.
After the war ended, BiH went through voucher and tender privatisation in what can roughly be called two waves of postwar privatization in 1997 and 2006. The initial wave was USAID-guided voucher privatisation monitored closely by the international community, but research has found that it ‘contributed to the consolidation of economic power in the hands of the few by enabling those with the means, connections, and resources to engage in active secondary trading of vouchers’. The results of the first wave are generally considered dubious.
The final and ongoing wave of privatisations was organized through bids and public tenders and included the sale of strategic companies like telecommunications, electrical companies, and refineries.
The literature on privatisation also adds that, in preparation for privatisation, there was no company restructuring or job systematisation, which drove down the value of the companies and lead to asset-stripping and consequent closure of companies. The agricultural sector was privatised under similar circumstances.
This can be illustrated with the example of the agricultural enterprise in Nova Topola that is now known as Farmland. It used to operate as a part of the agri-industrial combine ‘Mladen Stojanović’, and it has become a case study in the failures of privatization and systemic corruption in Republika Srpska. Privatised under questionable conditions, the company came under the control of Dragan Vasiljević and his Wyoming company, whose mismanagement and fraudulent activities stripped it of its assets and left the enterprise in ruins.
Vasiljević is accused of exploiting Farmland for personal gain by siphoning its resources without investing into the company or repaying its debts. In other words, he was using its resources, including thousands of hectares of valuable agricultural land, while neglecting investments and operational sustainability. The result was not only the financial collapse of the company but also the devastation of local agricultural production and the livelihoods of those who depended on it.
Despite its bankruptcy, the government of Republika Srpska has continued to engage in transactions involving Farmland’s land, sparking allegations of further corruption and misuse of public funds. This story highlights the broader systemic issues of governance, land ownership, and accountability in post-socialist economies, but it is far from being unique. Privatisations, as well as issuing concession, are processes fraught with legal, economic, and political crimes.
The future of agricultural land in BiH
Discussion of agriculture in Yugoslav successor states bring together two themes that are not always easy to hold together. On the one hand, these discussions revolve around natural resources and ways of both using and protecting land and ecosystems which thrive on it. On the other hand, they are also shaped by painful histories of privatisation and de-industrialisation that has ruined large agricultural enterprises without empowering small holders to take their place. They are connected in a the continuation of war-time logics of environmental violence and economic and social dispossession.
As new pressures on natural resources in BiH develop—including lithium mining—the fight to protect and use agricultural land in ways that ensure environmental, social, and economic wellbeing for people living on it becomes urgent.
Katarina Kušić and Z.V.
An abridged version of this text was published by Arc2020.
Funding note:
This report was created with the support of the Land Matrix. It was partially funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101060995. The text benefitted greatly from the generous review of Dr Melisa Ljuša, University of Sarajevo.