Although the purchasing price of farming land in Croatia inched up in 2021 it was still the lowest in the EU, state news platform Hina said on Tuesday, citing data compiled by the European statistics service Eurostat.

Eurostat reported that in 2021 the price of farming land was the most expensive in Luxembourg, coming in at €47,290. This is almost 13 times more than in Croatia, where a hectare cost an average of €3,661 last year, and was the cheapest in the EU. However, its price increased by 6.4 percent compared to 2020.

The closest to Croatia in terms of the price of arable land in 2021 was Slovakia, where a hectare cost an average of €3,977. Since the mid-2010s, the price of farming land has increased the most in Romania, where the price has almost quadrupled to €7,601.

The Czech Republic followed with the price more than doubling between 2015 and 2021, at €10,592, and the price also increased strongly in Estonia and Luxembourg, by slightly more than 70 percent, in the same period.

In Croatia, the price of a hectare of farming land increased by 34.3 percent from 2015 to 2021, according to Eurostat data. Prices also increased in most other EU countries as well, although to a lesser degree, and a slight drop was recorded only in Denmark, of some 3 percent.

Hina did not offer any explanation for these developments.