Bulgaria Ends State Control of Farmland

Parliament voted Friday to restore farmland to private owners, ending more than 40 years of Communist management that squandered much of Bulgaria’s agricultural bounty.

The government hopes the new law will stimulate private initiative and thus contribute to a revival of agriculture in Bulgaria, once known as the breadbasket of Eastern Europe but now forced to import food.

Legislators in the 400-seat Grand National Assembly passed the bill after long, often acrimonious debate over who should be given rights to the land that is held by the inefficient collective farms.

The former ruling Communists, who have been renamed Socialists, argued that ownership should go to the farm workers who tilled the collectively held land during the Communist regime. Opposition leaders wanted the land returned to those who owned it before it was seized in the 1940s.

A compromise was reached, and the law was enacted Friday after a paragraph-by-paragraph vote that spanned 20 parliamentary sessions.

According to the compromise, pre-Communist-era landowners will be given back their property after this year’s harvest is complete. Workers who cultivated the collective farms but had no claim to land will be given priority in acquiring any unclaimed land. The law does not make clear how they would obtain the land.

The state, communities and cooperatives also have the right to own land, the law states.

The new law is considered a crucial step in the reform effort under way in the Balkan country of 9 million people.

“Bulgaria is on a new road,” said Petar Dertliev, one of the country’s elder statesmen and chairman of the Social Democratic Party.