The main tasks of land consolidation are to eliminate land fragmentation and to facilitate farms of optimal size. One of the most important preconditions of land consolidation is forming of optimal size farmland plots in property and use, and land fragmentation, which has a major impact on both the operating conditions and other rural development processes. Land fragmentation bothers not only land management, but also increases transport costs. During the land reform in the rural areas, land plots in ownership and rented land plots are developed per several land units.

The current state of agricultural production space is the outcome of centuries of human activity, as conditioned by socio-economic, legal, and political factors. The characteristic features of the spatial layout of land, which has been shaped in this historical process in the rural areas of southern and south-eastern Poland, are farms divided into a large number of parcels, lack of access to parcels, irregular shapes of parcels, and their scattering in space.

Agricultural transport roads play an important role not only from the point of view of individual farm holdings, but also the general development of rural areas. Roads constitute an element of the technical infrastructure indispensable for communication and transport; they play a role in shaping the rural landscape, and the routes they follow affect the forms and size of agricultural land and forest areas found within the area covered by a given road system. The existing public road network does not always provide access to all fields.

In the article is analysed the role of GIS technologies, their connection to the land geographical space, components and tasks of GIS, their role in observation of the state control over land use and protection of agricultural land, as well as ways to improve the system of state control through the introduction of GIS technologies.

The purpose of this research is to analyse the situation of policy documents and basic laws (constitutions), related to the rational use of rural land and fertile soil as an important natural resource. The analysis has shown affinity of common laws of different countries in relation to the preservation and improvement of agricultural land and to the provision of necessary infrastructure conducive to the development of agriculture. Based on the analysis of legal framework, the main directions and principles of land management and land use planning in agricultural areas were concluded.

The value of land dominates the financial structure of most American agriculturalproduction firms, and land values are an important factor in long-term agricultural planning andrisk management. As the primary source of collateral for farm loans, farmland values havesignificant implications for both producers as well as bankers financing agricultural loans. TheFederal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Survey of Agricultural Credit Conditions is an expertopinion survey in which agricultural bankers provide land value forecasts.

The article presents the Lithuanian forest land change in the period of more than a hundred years. The causes leading to forest land use change are analysed in the article. The beginning of forestry in Lithuania can be traced back to Sigismund Augustus times starting from 1557, when Wallach reform was launched. However, over time forest land and its use evolved for a variety of political, social and economic factors. In 1795 the state-owned forests in Lithuania amounted to 35% of the total area of forests; other forests were owned by landlords, churches and kulak farms.

The article analyses the changes of agricultural production development and the demand of rural planning in the post-reform period. The main aim of the research is to identify the problems of land use and the formation of farms as the territorial-production structures in Lithuania as well as to analyse the possibilities of finding solutions to them. Tendencies of the decrease of the number of rural residents and farms were determined, the regulation of which is possible by improving working and living conditions in rural areas by means of public support measures.

Land degradation is a topical issue not only in Latvia, but also in Europe. Even the real estate additional tax rate of 1.5% does not prevent agricultural land from overgrowing, and there is no other legal mechanism to control it. One of the mechanisms of prevention of land degradation process is reconstruction of drainage systems, change of worthless agricultural land (less than 25 points) to forest land or improvement and return of agricultural land (more than 25 points) to economic production.

Large-scale agricultural land investments in Africa are often considered solely from the land perspective. Yet land, water and other natural resources are closely interlinked in agricultural production and in sustaining rural livelihoods. Such investments involving irrigation will potentially have implications for water availability and utilization by other users, making it imperative to regard water as an economic rather than a free good.