Fragmentation and conversion of agriculture land in Nepal and Land Use Policy 2012

High land fragmentation and accelerated rate of conversion of agriculture land are major challenges for food security of Nepal. Realizing ineffectiveness of previous efforts to manage these problems, government of Nepal has adopted land use policy 2012. The paper reviews the effects of previous land management policies on land fragmentation and conversion of agriculture land, and analyzes land use policy 2012 with respect to these problems. Analysis suggested that land fragmentation and high rate of agriculture land conversion could partly be attributed to failures of previous land management policies that were adopted for land re-distribution. Land use policy 2012 has proposed classical regulation tools for controlling land fragmentation and conversion of agriculture land such as land pooling, land classification, zoning and tax/ incentive based discrimination. Considering long history of non-regulated land use system in Nepal, the acceptability of the strong regulatory provisions could be the main constrain for successful implementation of the policy, thereby recoiling the effort to control land fragmentation and agriculture land conversion in Nepal.