Flurbereinigung

Flurbereinigung is the German word used to describe land reforms in various countries, especially West Germany and Austria. The term can best be translated as land consolidation. Unlike the land reforms carried out in the socialist countries of the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany, the idea of Flurbereiningung was not so much to distribute large quasi-feudal holdings to the formerly landless rural workers and/or to Kolkhoz-style cooperatives, but rather to correct the situation where after centuries of equal division of the inheritance of small farmers among their heirs and unregulated sales, most farmers owned many small non-adjacent plots of land, making access and cultivation difficult and inefficient. Another European country where this kind of land reform has been carried out is France (Remembrement).

Although these reforms had been anticipated by agricultural planners since the beginning of the 19th century, they were not executed in grand scale until the time about 1950. These reforms sought to improve agricultural efficiency and support the infrastructure. After criticism about loss of biodiversity caused by large-scale land reforms began to be voiced in the late 1970s, restoring the natural environment became another objective.