Functions of rural areas are influenced, among others, by historical conditions of social development, such as: the intensity of population growth, the insufficient level of produced crops and the permanent food shortages. Such approach to rural areas contributed to development of less useful areas, characterised by the low production potential, for agricultural purposes. Besides, those areas are also characterised by the intensive fragmentation of arable lands and directing the agricultural production to meet own demands of farmers. Professional publications include many proposals concerning definitions of marginal lands with reference to problematic areas. It mainly depends on the field of research, the authors and the approach to the discussed issues. The objective of this paper is to review the terminology and characteristics of marginal areas and problematic areas. As a result, the original definition of agricultural problematic areas will be proposed by the authors; this is important in Poland, in particular, when those issues are considered from the perspective of increasing the size of problematic areas and agricultural development in those areas.
Development of the Polish agriculture and its production abilities are spatially diversified. At present, in Poland agricultural areas may be distinguished which may successfully compete with the agriculture in the European Union countries. However, areas where private farms run their businesses on the verge of profitability or below also exist in Poland. Those areas are called agricultural problematic areas (OPR), depression areas, areas not useful for agricultural purposes, marginal lands etc. It is estimated that OPR covers over 60-70% of our country.Land consolidation is the process which improves the spatial structure of rural areas, including problematic areas. When this geodetic process is performed it is possible to interpret specific features of selected agricultural problematic areas and to propose alternative and the most effective ways of development of the discussed areas. As a result of those agricultural-and-development operations rural areas are becoming competitive and improve the living conditions. However, they are performed on a very small scale, in recent years this area is about 5900 hectares per year.
The main priorities of the common agricultural policies of the European Union (EU) are improvement of the quality of life in rural areas for their inhabitants as well as the optimum utilisation of rural resources. The most efficient tools to improve the management conditions and utilise the potential of land are land consolidation works aimed at creating more favourable management conditions in agriculture and forestry through improving the territorial structure of farms, forests and forestland; the reasonable configuration of land, aligning the limits of real properties with the system of irrigation; and drainage facilities, roads and terrain. The development of agriculture in Poland and its production capacity are considerably differentiated in terms of space. At present, Poland has agricultural areas which, in many respects, have a chance of competing with agriculture in the other member states of the European Union. However, in some areas, agricultural production run by private farms owned by individuals is on the verge of falling below the limit of profitability or falls below the limit of profitability. Currently, Poland lacks tools (strategies) allowing identification of land for intensive agricultural production as well as information about agricultural land that should be developed for non-agricultural purposes. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a methodology for identifying similar areas using available tools that can facilitate reliable identification of the areas relating to the indicated factors. Taxonomic methods can be used for clustering purposes. The study materials are data derived from real property register databases referring to one of the districts (poviats) situated in east-central Poland. As a final result, a method of clustering villages according to similar land-use categories was developed. It was created using two independent statistical methods: Ward’s method and the complete-linkage method. The highest consistency was observed in two groups of identified types of areas sharing very similar characteristics. A high index of similarity of both methods—the so-called Rand index—testified to the reliability of the results of calculations. The results of clustering corresponded to a large extent to actual features defining the use of land in the analysed villages as well as the terrain relief.
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