Country profile - Societal developments (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia)

Soil management

The main characteristics of the current situation may be summarised as follows:

• erosion remains the most important type of soil degradation. According to the republic’s erosion map (Water Management Institute,1993), 96.5 % of the total area is under processes of erosion;
• according to data for 2005, around 10 % of the territory is categorised as unproductive land;
• only half of the productive land is arable, corresponding to 25 % of the territory. However, parts of the arable land have been abandoned, thus reducing this to 20 % of the territory;
• Only 10 % of the arable land belongs to higher land-use classes. The reduction of the arable areas also occurs in the most fertile areas as the result of different types of degradation;
• overall, in recent years, around 70 000 ha, most of which is first class land, have been removed from agricultural production;
• contamination of productive soil continues to present a problem, especially due to the lack of monitoring of the degree of contamination through established monitoring and information systems.[1]