Serbian Parliament has adopted the changes and supplements to the Law on Agricultural Land that will limit the rights of EU citizens when it comes to buying land in Serbia.
A total of 132 MPs voted in favour of the amendments, and 13 voted against. The parliamentary Agriculture Committee reviewed all 47 amendments yesterday, and accepted only three. According to the one of the amendments, the EU citizens are not going to be allowed to buy land located in the 10-km-areas near state border.
Another amendment, proposed by Marjan Risticevic and accepted by the Serbian government, stipulates that the law should come into the force on 1st September. The amendments to the law are supposed to prevent full liberalization of trading in agricultural land and they are adopted to counteract the measures stipulated in the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU (SAA), which is also supposed to come into force on 1st September, according to which Serbian and EU citizens will enjoy the same rights when it comes to procuring agricultural land.
For days, the opposition MPs have been saying that debating about the amendments made no sense because foreigners had already been allowed to buy land and own arable land by registering a company in Serbia and acquiring much more land than stipulated in the SAA.
“This is not a nonsensical debate. We had it because the farmers wanted us to have it. The government treats this issue as a priority, and, in this way, we can determine everything that hasn’t been regulated in the SAA”, the Agricultural Minister, Branislav Nedimovic says.
(Vecernje Novosti, 28.09.2017)
http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/ekonomija/aktuelno.239.html:683032-Kraj-granice-nema-prodaje
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