By Dr Katarina Kušić and Z. V.
“Who owns agricultural land” is never an easy question. In post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, multi-layer governance adds another dimension of complexity. Farmland is disappearing as landscapes—and the people living in them—are reshaped by drawn out processes of refugee return and restitutions, and new forms of extractivism. Dr Katarina Kušić and Z. V. explain how the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 continues to cast a shadow over land use.
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is a country where semi-subsistence farming is widely practised and some 8.2% of the population is employed in agriculture—double the EU average. Yet the percentage of high-quality agricultural land available is quite low. Much of the natural landscape is made up of mountains and forests. Moreover, development policy has historically prioritised industry and extraction of raw materials.
Now agricultural land is disappearing, due to a legacy of landmines and soil pollution from the 1992-1995 war, as well as post-war corruption in spatial planning. BiH is still de-mining large swathes of land, and 85% of mine victims are agricultural workers. Rural depopulation due to war violence and more recent migrations has left agricultural land derelict or permanently lost. In 2000-2018, for example, over 2500 ha of pastures were converted to low forest and shrub vegetation. High-quality agricultural land has been sacrificed to increased urbanisation and opaque development projects.
Examples of these losses abound. The largest infrastructure project in BiH, the Corridor Vc motorway, has been fraught with land expropriation, land speculation, and lawsuits and complaints from the local population. Under private investment, solar energy is developed thanks to illegal land use changes, and lithium mining threatens a fertile area. More land has been lost to soil erosion caused by the construction of dams and tunnels.
What is at stake is not only the control of agricultural land, but its very existence.
Complex governance
In BiH, the complex governance system consists of two entities (Republika Srpska, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Federation is further divided into 10 cantons with significant autonomy. On top of this structure sits the Office of the High Representative (OHR) which has extensive powers and is accountable to the international community.
There is no centralised land authority to collect data on land use or planning, and even though cantons should be reporting on land use to the Federation, this is often not the case.
Legacy of ethnic cleansing
In BiH, land is a highly politicised question with a long history. More than one million hectares of land redistributed during the Yugoslav agrarian reforms still awaits restitution. Because much of it belonged to religious institutions, restitution takes on an ethnic dimension. It also means that the price of agricultural land fluctuates wildly, determined not only by the quality of the soil, but by the socio-economic context.
This was especially obvious during the refugee return efforts after the 1990s war. More than half of the population had been displaced, and both the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina were made into almost ethnically homogeneous spaces through war-time violence. International actors in BiH favoured a policy of minority return to address this legacy of ethnic cleansing. Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords allowed for refugees to return to their homes. But it also allowed for compensation to people not returning—a tool that was appropriated by nationalists to preserve ethnic homogeneity.
Nationalist elites in both entities began to allocate municipal land that was under their control. For example, Croatian nationalists distributed agricultural land as 1500 house-building plots to ethnically Croatian refugees in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The practice was also widespread in Republika Srpska, where elites wanted to keep Serb refugees from returning to Croatian and Bosniak majority territories. The practice of land allocations was eventually banned by the OHR and regulated through individually applied for ‘waivers.’
Additionally, return was made difficult by post-war neoliberal reforms: a house or a plot of land is not enough for life or (re)production. Agricultural land was crucial for economic recovery, and this meant dealing with war-time pollution and landmines, but also with the economic transformation that transformed forms of ownership.
Competing claims
Like Bosnia’s precious forests, state agricultural land is a site of competing claims.
Under the first cadastral reform that started in 1996, the Republika Srpska government claimed ownership of ‘unclaimed’ land left behind by displaced persons, as well as ‘socially owned’ land that had been used by state agricultural enterprises.
This attack on private and state land prompted the OHR to declare, in 2003, a “temporary prohibition” on the sale and re-purposing of agricultural land and other state property. Twenty years later, the temporary prohibition remains in force, pending the adoption of legislation by the BiH parliament. This means that neither the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina authority nor the Republika Srpska authority have jurisdiction to dispose of state property.
In 2019, the Republika Srpska government passed legislation claiming ownership of ‘state’ agricultural land. The contentious Article 53 refers to “agricultural land that is by its nature a public good, i.e. state property”. The following year, the constitutional court struck down this claim, ruling that agricultural land was automatically the property of the central Bosnian state. In response, the Republika Srpska government called for its judges to leave the Constitutional Court, and stepped up calls for secession. This is important not only for arable land, but also for forest land that is a key natural resource.
In July 2024, the Court annulled decisions by the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina government regarding the sale of state forest to a mining company in the Vareš area, and by the Republika Srpska authorities concerning the felling and sale of forest land for development in Jahorina.
Post-war privatisation or land grab?
The most dramatic changes have come with post-war privatisation. In the former Yugoslavia, large state agricultural companies leased huge tracts of ‘socially owned’ land. During property transformation that removed the category of ‘social property’, this land was designated ‘state’ land and paved the way for privatisation.
Before the war, workers had been allowed to buy discounted company shares (although not to trade them). These were only partly recognised under privatisation.
The first wave of privatisation came in 1997 through a voucher and tender system. Guided by USAID and monitored closely by the international community, this privatisation nonetheless led to consolidation of power among elites.
In a second and ongoing wave of privatisation, beginning in 2006, strategic assets (telecommunications and electrical companies, refineries) were sold off through bids and public tenders.
Like other industries, the agricultural sector had little preparation for privatisation, which led to devaluation, asset-stripping and closures of companies—as catalogued in the Land Matrix database of large-scale land acquisitions. Farmland is one such case study in the failures of privatisation and systemic corruption in Republika Srpska, highlighting broader systemic issues of governance, land ownership, and accountability in post-socialist economies.
Beyond the sale of agricultural land, the issuance of concessions on state-owned land is another process fraught with legal, economic, and political crimes.
Future prospects
The continuation of the war-time logic of environmental violence and economic and social dispossession connects two disparate themes. On the one hand we see the importance of natural resources, and ways of using and protecting land and the ecosystems that thrive on it. On the other hand, we are led to examine painful histories of privatisation and de-industrialisation that have ruined large agricultural enterprises without empowering smallholders to take their place. As new pressures mount on natural resources in BiH—including lithium mining—the fight to protect and use agricultural land in ways that ensure environmental, social, and economic wellbeing for the people living on it becomes urgent.
Funding note:
This report was created with the support of the Land Matrix. It was partially funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101060995. The text benefited greatly from the generous review of Dr Melisa Ljuša, University of Sarajevo.
More
Access to Land: Looking to Europe to Secure Local Farmland? Part 1
Access to Land: More Resilient Agriculture – Without Any EU Legislation? (Part 2)
