Croatia's national chamber of agriculture HPK warned on Monday that because of the way lease tenders for state-owned farmland are conducted implemented some 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) could remain uncultivated for another "year or two,"an area equal to 15 percent of the country's total farmland. Pročitaj više

Head of HPK, Mladen Jakopovic, told reporters on Monday that lease contracts for state-owned farmland are due to expire soon.

“The biggest problem, apart from the scheduling, is that the law do not say what to do with the land in the legal vacuum when someone’s contract expires and until the next tenant is given that land, which is a long period of six, nine, or even more months,” Jakopovic said.

He added that the situation with granting lease contracts for farmland has become “extremely complicated,” because many municipalities and cities simply haven’t published any tenders, so farmers have been working the land based on contracts even beyond their expiration date.

“Because of this, farmers no longer have legal grounds to work the land they have cultivated until now, and inspectors are now imposing fines because the Farmland Act stipulates that the use of farmland without any legal grounds to do so is illegal,” said Jakopović.

Another problem is that local government units may determine the maximum area of state-owned farmland that can be given to a single farming business on their territory, and some local governments have now decided to limit this amount to 30 hectares (74 hectares) or even less.

Jakopovic said that this sort of rules may lead to bankruptcy of lease holders because their existing businesses cannot survive if their farmland allotted gets reduced to just 10, 20, or 30 percent of what they had before, since the machines and employees they invested in were meant to work larger plots of land.