Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Land is an essential natural resource, both for the survival and prosperity of humanity, and for
the maintenance of all global ecosystems. Land fragmentation is the practice of farming a
number of spatially separated plots of owned or rented land by the same farmer and can be
seen as common phenomenon in the Macedonian agriculture as well as in many developing
countries. Land fragmentation can be seen to have negative effect on agricultural productivity,
but it may also provide benefits for farm households. This study was conducted to find out the
influence of land fragmentation measured by the number of plots on the value of vegetable
produced in the Skopje and Southeastern region in Republic of Macedonia. The analysis uses
models such as Cobb-Douglas production function as well as General Linear Model. The
findings of the regression estimations supported the negative and statistically significant
impact of land fragmentation over productivity and profitability of growing vegetables in the
research area. A reduction of the Simpson index increases income from vegetable production
indicating better use of modern agricultural technologies and decreasing the costs of labour.
However, labour showed a positive relationship with output implicating risk diversification
and labour smoothing due to crop diversification. Therefore, appropriate policies such as
creating functioning markets for land, improvements in credits, modern graphical techniques,
etc. which will promote successful land consolidation in the regions where it is an issue, and
where an increase in agricultural production capacity is needed.