The Consequences of Ownership Conflict on Utilization of Agricultural Lands (Case Study: Mahidasht District of Kermanshah County)

Nowadays, one of the challenging issues of agriculture is the ownership problem and impact of the inheritance system on its procedure, performance and productivity. Dividing Agricultural lands between heirs led to fragmentation and smallness of the lands and emerging problems such as loss of agricultural water, lack of efficient use of agricultural machinery, reducing the productivity of labor and capital and so on. In many cases, heirs’ disputes about quantity and quality of their share lead to legal proceedings and entails consequences such as leaving the land uncultivated, lack of willingness to invest and deprivation of bank loans. Considering long process of dealing with legal cases in the judicial system, a considerable part of the agricultural production capacity of the country become inactive or its productivity is deteriorating. Mahidasht district of Kermanshah as study area of this research, involve with the problems arising from juridical litigations over agricultural lands that caused to emerging mentioned problems in the area. This study attempted to answer this fundamental question that what impacts had juridical litigations over ownership of agricultural lands in Mahidasht district on the quality of utilization of agricultural lands.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: Various strategies of rural development each has a different approach to the issue of ownership. Transformation or radical strategy emphasizes on change in socio-economic structures and the redistribution of resources. This strategy believes that rural development depends on revising the ownership system via land reform. In this way, the poor and disadvantaged groups in rural areas can benefit from the facilities and programs of government. In contrast, the improvement strategy does not care about transformation in economic and social structure, and often consider productivity increasing without changing in legal, social and ownership systems. In each of mentioned strategies, the household final ownership of land officially recognizes according to the rules of countries. As a result, in the process of transferring ownership to the next generation a special inheritance system applied that varied in different countries. In the limited and conditional inheritance system all the property is transferred to one of the heirs. The main advantage of this method is to prevent land fragmentation. Another method is to divide the inheritance equally between the children of the deceased. In Islamic inheritance law for the sons and daughters of the deceased is considered a specified share which led to smallness and fragmentation of agricultural lands. Economically, the result of this trend is negative and led to decreasing in production productivity. Meanwhile, the issue is rarely addressed is endless disputes over quality and quantity of heirs’ inheritance share and juridical litigations in this regard, that considering the long duration of investigation of lawsuits in courts, impose additional damage on agriculture’s utilization and productivity.
Present research from the viewpoint of nature and method is descriptive - analytical and in purpose aspect is practical. The main investigated components include income and investment, participation and employment, crop patterns, land management and production process. Study area is 110 villages of Mahidasht District of Kermanshah County. Of this number, 8 villages were selected on the basis of Judgmental sampling. The main criterion for selecting them was having or not juridical litigations over agricultural lands. The statistical sample consists of 200 farmers inhabited in mentioned villages. 100 people of aforesaid farmers due to property disputes resulting from the inheritance system referred to court or the councils for settling the disputes. To compare results, a group of 100 farmers living in the same villages that have no property disputes were studied as control group. The main research tool is questionnaire that its validity is approved by expert panels and its reliability is confirmed by Cronbach's alpha test (alpha = 0.831).
Mann-Whitney test at 99% confidence level indicates that the experimental and control groups in all main component of research include land management, cropping patterns, income and investment and the production process have different performance. In a better statement, the group with ownership conflicts with other heirs, have very low motivation and as a result low productivity from point of view of following principles and standards of professional agriculture. Also, the Kruskal-Wallis test results indicate that between investigated villages from viewpoint of the above-mentioned components, there isn’t a significant difference. This means that the 8 studied villages in relation to the research components have the same situation.
Ownership problem, inheritance system and existing conflicts in this regard, have remarkable impact on process, performance and productivity of the country's agriculture. Dispute and conflict of heirs that often appears in form of legal proceedings, in turn create problems for agriculture and farmers resulting to reducing agricultural production productivity. This study has tried to delineate consequences of farmers’ legal conflicts on production’s core issues in Mahidasht district, Kermanshah County and through better identification of this problem put forward suitable solutions. Since The overall situation of Experimental and control groups with respect to the components of land management, cropping patterns, income and investment and the production process represents a distinct difference between them from the aspect of following proper principles of agricultural production and productivity, it is necessitate taking into account this problem for rural and agricultural development. Therefore, in order to reduce negative impacts of litigations on the production and productivity of agricultural lands, more than anything it seems necessary to revising inheritance system by the jurists and lawyers, on the one hand, and measures such as reducing the bureaucracy and duration in the investigation of such litigations by the judicial authorities, the promotion and development of land consolidation and development of agricultural production cooperatives could be helpful in this regard.