Legal Aspects of Integrated and Sustainable Development of Rural Areas of Ukraine

Kovalenko T. Legal Aspects of Integrated and Sustainable Development of Rural Areas of Ukraine

This article deals with the concept of «integrated and sustainable rural development»; author researched positive and negative trends of legal regulation of environmental, economic and social components of sustainable and integrated development of rural areas of Ukraine.
Ukrainian agrarian legislation considers to the priorities of the state agrarian policy of Ukraine sustainable and integrated rural development. This assumes organic interrelation of environmental, economic and social components in the development of such areas. A key role in ensuring of sustainable and integrated rural development belongs to legal regulation, which is provided by the requirements of agrarian, land and environmental legislation of Ukraine.
For current legal regulation of environmental, economic and social components of sustainable and integrated rural development conflicts of law, legal gaps, declarative prescriptions, excessive legal regulation and other legal defects are inherent. This negatively affects the implementation of sustainable rural development in Ukraine and requires implementation of special legal mechanisms to minimize the negative impact of mentioned legal defects.
Despite the existence of large number of laws and regulations, designed to ensure the implementation of the environmental component of sustainable and integrated rural development by means of legal protection of land, agrarian landscapes, soils and other natural resources in the process of agricultural production, guarantee quality and safety of agricultural products, efficiency of legal regulation of indicated component is low due to significant legal defects. Over the past 25 years of the formation of national agrarian legislation draft laws, aimed at regulation of soil protection, are not passed. Ukraine has not adopted standards in land protection and restoration of soil fertility. There are no national and regional programs of land use and protection. In environmental and land legislation there are no effective mechanisms to ensure landscape approach as a condition for sustainable land use in the agricultural production.
Large number of regulations is aimed at implementation of economic component of sustainable and integrated rural development. Their goal is to regulate special legal status of agricultural business subjects, to guarantee their state support and to ensure production, processing and marketing of certain agricultural products. However, negative factors are: instability of legal requirements, especially in the field of taxation; uncertainty of further legal destiny of the moratorium on agricultural lands alienation; excessive differentiation of legal regulation of certain types of agricultural production; backlog of legislative regulation of legal status of agrarian relations’ subjects from the needs of practice. Thus, from January 1, 2015 there is a trend to reduce tax exemptions for the subjects of agrarian business. Over last ten years Ukraine has adopted special laws to regulate production of baby food, organic agricultural production, to ensure biosafety in the production, transportation and use of genetically modified organisms. However, analysis of the requirements of these laws shows that the vast majority of them are declarative.
Since 1990 Ukraine adopted more than twenty regulations aimed at implementation the social component of integrated and sustainable rural development. However, their effectiveness is low. Defined in laws measures to overcome crisis in the rural social sphere practically have no mechanisms of implementation.
Keywords: rural areas, integrated development, agricultural law, agricultural activities, agrarian reform, social rural development.