Management of the hunting economy of Ukraine on agricultural lands: environmental-legal obstructions

Abstract

Intensive anthropogenic transformations of European territories during the last century caused a significant depletion of the indigenous fauna and led to the formation of its new agglomerations by a modern type. Actually in our country the transition to high-tech processing methods and practice of monoculture agricultural production almost completely eliminated indigenous finely mosaic landscape, which significantly worsened the living conditions for the most wild life species.

The analysis findings of environmental and legal instruments of effective game management ensuring on the cultivated lands of Ukraine confirmed their imperfection. In particular, the research has established that now it makes impossible the sustainable development of domestic hunting in the market economy conditions and requires the relevant government bodies to provide timely and appropriate normative response to current challenges in basic laws and regulations, providing branch functioning.

It has been found out that current arable lands of Ukrainian lowlands through much of the year become destructive with a total dominance of winter fallows (on average more than 69.8 % of the areas), mixed with rare inclusions of winter crops and low-value, in the trophic sense, stubbles of late harvested tall-stalked crops (98%), mainly corn for grain and public initiatives aimed at environmental sustainability restoration. Therefore, in our opinion, the legally regulated allocation of a part of private shares lands (up to 3-5 %) for semi-natural buffer zones (protective and feeding areas) of multifunctional purpose remains almost the only one theoretically possible legal instrument of agricultural lands ecological capacity improvement. Due to the threatening plowing of Ukraine’s territory this proposal is rather harmoniously combined with a number of legislative and recreational attractiveness of domestic cultivated lands.

Despite a significant number of mainly ineffective regulations of various levels on the legal support of game exploitation protection and economic, the Law of Ukraine «On game management and hunting» remains the main regulatory document in this area. This Law regulates the social, legal and economic foundations of game management, determines the process of relations between central and local governments, users of hunting lands, hunters and landowners, as well as liability for violation of the current legislation is determined. 

Modern agricultural lands of Ukraine are unsuitable for the successful existence of field game, considering the four main reasons: monoculture production declaration of crop growing on critically plowed large-contour territories; lack of a sufficient number of field boundaries, biograssplots with natural grass cover, which creates a feed shortage in the non-growing season, as well as from cereals maturity stage to winter sprouting of these crops; excessive predatory pressure of not properly regulated harmful species; low zoo-sozological, not regulated legislatively farming standards generally. 

In turn national legislation on public relations regulations in the areas of protection and special use of cultivated lands fauna, having been at the embryonic developmental stage for a long time, remains ineffective in solving a number of socio-environmental challenges of our time, therefore requires urgent improvement and adaptation to European Union standards. Future approaches to the development and application of environmental policy instruments, namely legislation, national-level programs, developmental plans of individual economy sectors etc. should provide for maximum complementarity and synergism of effective practical legal instruments of intersectorial level to achieve environmental and agricultural goals of the state.