Resumen de Legislative protection of agricultural land
The agricultural land (AL) needs to be protected due to the steady growth of the global population and the demand for the food, living, work and recreation. The legislation in the area of AL protection in Slovakia has had almost 70-year tradition and 5 regulations with various effectivity of protection have been passed. These regulations reflect the social relations, technical advance, legal culture, as well as the experience of lawmakers. The basic characteristics for the land protection were defined by the social relations in the country. The first years are characterized by the collectivization of land, which changed the individual private farmsteads to collective. The alignment of public and private legal interests in the agricultural sector was disrupted by decisions of the Communist party and the scientific view on the concept of land protection conflicted with the political interests. This 40-year period caused a disruption of the relationship between the farmers and the land, which has not been restored up to the present day. The transformational era is characterized by a downfall of big state farms and a transformation to the market economy. The agrarian policy after 1990 was dominated by a conflict between the efforts to restore the private farmsteads from the era before 1950 and the need to preserve the big agricultural companies, which would be adequately competitive in the free market. The last era is linked to the accession of the Slovak Republic to the European Union in 2004. Since this year, the concept of land protection has been synchronized with the scientific, political and legislative perception of land in the international area and the land protection has been a subject of a vast legal regulation. The degree of land protection is a result of multiple laws and lower regulations and decrees and their synergic effect is expected in the practice. The paper analyses 5 regulations which are focused on the AL protection, and its aim is to quantify the legislative protection level between years 1951 and 2020. The value of agricultural land protection index (ALPI) is increasing with time and it reflects the weak and strong aspects of the protection in the context of social, economic, and ecological potential of the land. The analysis monitors 107 directive, control, and economic tools for AL protection. The results are presented in graphs and the relevant information is highlighted and explained. The results show the favourable evolution of the land protection in Slovakia. In the discussion, there is a space for the effectiveness assessment of the observed regulations, for the comparison of the objectives of the individual regulations and the practical results of the effect of these regulations on social relations. The statistics of the land evolution in the observed 70-year period are good indicators for this purpose. Since the analysis shows the negatives of the regulations, it provides new impulses and can be inspiration for the lawmakers. The method used for the regulation assessment or the comparison of regulations can be applied in various fields of science.
