The opposition loses the plot in the mountains

Edi Rama’s visit to Theth, a year after illegal buildings there were demolished, and the return of the debate over the Mountains Package have exposed just how little Albanian politics understands farming and rural life.

The casual nonsense spoken about the package is enough to explain why rural Albania has been left to drift for 35 years.

The language of this debate reveals the opposition’s deepest problem. It no longer focuses on Albania’s real problems. Instead, it is driven by the obsessions and prejudices of the fools who represent it in public.

The main problem facing rural Albania is land ownership. Law 7501, together with the unresolved status of land still treated as village property, has blocked economic development and left the countryside unable to contribute fully to the economy. Nobody can farm efficiently when fields are divided into plots of 500 square metres. Nor can mountain tourism develop when a visitor may suddenly be stopped by an armed man saying: “Do not cross my grandfather’s land.”

Solve that deadlock and you solve the central problem of rural Albania. The current government has no clear plan for dealing with this national blight. It has offered only partial fixes.

The Mountains Package should be criticised as one of those partial fixes, not presented as a complete answer. It offers descendants of former villagers a chance to return and develop businesses there. The government’s offer is simple: they may operate a business, but they receive neither ownership nor permanent legal security. It is an improvement, but it is not a lasting solution. The fragmentation of farmland remains unresolved.

A bold government would propose a fundamental reform of agricultural land ownership. It would finally end the legal limbo created by Law 7501, which has left large areas without clear title.

The so-called AMTP documents, and the repeated extensions of their validity, merely prolong the decline of Albanian agriculture.

The state needs to draw a line under the current system. Every holder of an AMTP document or land certificate should be required to put that property into productive agricultural use. Ownership should carry an obligation to make the land work for the wider economy. The reform would need to be deep and unconventional, because Albania’s current system of land ownership was itself created in an unconventional way. The state should ensure that every usable piece of farmland is worked rather than abandoned.

Instead of criticising Rama for avoiding radical reform and settling for patchwork measures, the opposition calls the Mountains Package radical simply because it wants to attack something it has not read. The package should be criticised for being too limited. It mainly encourages small family businesses and offers little long-term legal certainty.

You cannot complain that villages are emptying while opposing measures that might bring people back. Nor can you support agricultural development while defending the continued fragmentation of farmland and the endless extension of AMTP documents, which only prolongs the sector’s decline.

This shows what Albania has lost over the past 35 years. Governments have failed to develop a clear vision for agriculture and land ownership. But the country has also failed to produce an opposition with a serious alternative.

I can understand a small group of Marxists talking nonsense about land and farmers. But when the country’s largest opposition party, which claims to be right-wing, treats the possibility of major investors entering rural areas as its main concern, it becomes clear that the opposition itself has gone off into the wilderness.

The real problem is that rural Albania still cannot persuade farmers to return. It cannot persuade young women to build a life there. Villages are full of unmarried men who will eventually leave, elderly parents left behind, and uncultivated fields because each family has only a tiny plot with uncertain legal status.

Meanwhile, Albania’s opposition on Facebook and Instagram worries that major investors might one day decide to put money into the countryside. When that day comes, let us know. It will mean rural Albania—and perhaps Albania itself—has finally been given a chance.

Originally published in Albanian as: Kur mendimi opozitar "merr malet"