Nature-Resource Potential of the Carpathian Region of Ukraine and Specificities of Its Use by Farming Enterprises ()
1. Introduction
A system of national-level accounts has been introduced in Ukraine in accordance with international standards. The system represents total indices of consistent and mutually complimentary description of economics’ most important processes and phenomena, i.e., production, income, consumption, and accumulation of capital and finances. Gross domestic product represented on a regional level as gross regional product since 2004, takes the central place in this system.
Proper understanding of nature-resource efficiency in the social-economic development in this or that region requires that the analysis of Ukrainian gross regional product development dynamics and its territorial differentiation were contrasted to assessment indices of nature-resource potential (NRP) of the country’s landscape complexes.
Characterized by increase of human-caused load upon nature, exhaustion of many types of nature resources, decrease of human environment quality, the social development of Ukraine and its regions necessitates elaboration of scientifically substantiated system of use of nature-resource potential within the territory. As a parameter that represents the whole totality of nature resources, the nature-resource potential is a pre-condition and a factor for the economy (inclusive of farming economy) development and functioning, and a basis for rational territorial organization of both nature use and productive forces on the whole.
2. Aim and Tasks of Investigation
Represented by combination of mineral, water, land, forest, fauna and natural recreational resources, NRP of the territory is particularly inertial and relatively stable in its quantitative and qualitative development. Accordingly, natural revaluation of major portion of nature resources on a national level is carried out no more than every 10 - 20 years. The same is true for ecological-economic assessment of the country’s NRP components. The last economic appraisal of Ukrainian agricultural lands, for instance, dates back to 1987-1988. Similar situation is with mineral, water and forest resources. On the one hand, this labor-intensive and time-consuming broadscale operation involves vast financial resources; on the other hand, said NRP inertia makes frequent revaluations senseless (for instance, the country’s annual average stock of water resources stayed practically unchanged in 1985-1990 and 2005-2010).
Considering the above, Ukrainian geographers engaged in resource studies focus on the problem of indexation of nature resource cadastre assessments made in late 1980s-1990s.
Our previous 1980-1992 NRP studies were discussed in detail in [1,2], where the value of the country’s annualized total nature-resource potential was estimated to amount to 53.95 milliard rubles. It is important to study out the NRP cost measurements in 2006-2010 prices in UAH and USD equivalent; explore the country’s present-day nature-resource possibilities on the world market, and its further perspectives for the development of nature use sectors.
To our opinion, land resources as the principal element of national wealth and the key sector of Ukrainian nature-resource complex should be put in the center of the assessment. In the variety of approaches to determine the potential of agricultural lands [3,4], publications by I. R. Yukhnovskyy and G.M. Loboda [5] deserve particular attention. The authors’ dominant idea is that “the natural yielding capacity of Ukrainian lands, i.e. such capacity achieved by adhering to crop rotation and to only mechanical soil cultivation with no fertilization should be taken as an assessment standard”.
Total productivity of NRP components is a weighing pre-condition for the economy development. Agricultural and forestry-based nature use predominates in the Carpathian Region of Ukraine being a direct consequence of the availability of significant areas of land and forest resources. The last decades witnessed the private ownership to substitute a sole state-owned land ownership, when considerable land areas were transferred from collective farms (kolkhoz) and state-owned farms (sovkhoz) to individual owners and newly-formed farming enterprises. The present study also aims at the analysis of specificities encountered in the process of use by farming enterprises of the nature-resource potential within the territory of the Carpathian Region.
3. Research Methods and Areas
According to the data available with the Soil Science and Agro-Chemistry Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the grains average natural yield capacity in Ukraine amounts to 26 dt/ha, which is a serious evidence of the country’s advantages in the world. At the same time, taking into account that the values of average yield capacity in 1995-2000 were lower than those of natural capacity, I.R. Yukhnovskyy and G.M. Loboda suggested that, temporarily and until the yield natural capacity is rehabilitated, the average costs standards be calculated at a level of 21 dt/ha. The authors therewith insist that the value of land tax must not depend on agricultural producer’s real income, but be calculated proceeding from normative income, i.e. the one gained in each particular area provided that a certain economy management standard is kept to. This principle will compel agricultural producer to improve the land use practices, since a fixed tax shall be required to be paid regardless of the achieved economic management results [6].
As calculated by scientists of the Soil Science and Agro-Chemistry Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences [7], average standard cost price of grain in Ukraine amounts to $62 per ton, while its cost—to $97. Hence, the average standard profit will amount to $73.5/ ha. Having taken these as the basis, and with the bank interest rate of 23.5% for deposits to natural persons and with the absolute land rent amounting to $16/ha, I.R. Yukhnovskyy and G.M. Loboda obtained the normative starting price of arable land to be $381/ha. At the same time, “considering high interest rate for bank deposits, the average normative land’s price in Ukraine in present-day conditions is nearly 10 times lower than its real cost”. That is, the present-day price of arable land is $3810/ha.
Having considered that the value of 1 ha perennial crop lands is three times higher, and natural forage nearly two times lower than the arable land price, we’ll get the normative starting price for the potential of all agricultural lands in the country to be $159.3 milliard.
Here we must remember that we speak about the so-called capitalized estimation of the potential of agricultural lands. With Ukrainian economics’ average normative coefficient of capital investments’ efficiency of 0.15, the value of land potential in this country in yearly proportion will amount to $23.9 milliard.
It should be noted that in 1990s we performed calculations of the value of the country’s starting nature-resource potential in USD equivalent and found the annual average potential of the country’s agricultural lands to be $24.18 milliard. And, as it is evident today, the land price according to I.R. Yukhnovskyy and G.M. Loboda practically coincides with our findings. In this case, the scale of comparability of the potential of the country’s most important nature resource seems to be very important, since it is the one that allows (to a certain extent) for application of corresponding conversion coefficients so that we could transform Ukrainian NRP value in nature resource prices of 1990s into the same of present day nature use development. We believe that the USD/UAH exchange rate of 1:6.3 could become the coefficient that would help converse nature resource cadastre prices of 1990s into those of present day. Thus, the nature resource potential of Ukraine in yearly proportion and at the present-day level of prices for nature resources amounts to UAH338.39 milliard.
4. Results
Table 1 below represents the value and territorial differentiation of the integral nature-resource potential of Ukraine and its Carpathian Region in the aspect of administrative oblasts. Estimation grounds on NRP value data available for 500 administrative rayons of Ukraine [8].