Under a deed of gift, the Kingdom of Sweden will donate 16.15 million of Swedish krona, namely 12.58 million kuna for the implementation of the entire project.
The main goals of the three-year project, which will start this year, is to enhance agricultural productivity, create conditions for economic and social development and remove the effects of poverty in rural areas, said the Croatian agriculture ministry, which is in charge of implementing the project.
According to the 2003 census of the population living in rural area, there were 450,00 agricultural households with the average space of the arable land of 1.92 hectares and there were 1,364 farm companies.
The area of arable land totalled 1.08 million hectares, and 860,000 hectares of that land was privately owned.
According to this register, there were 141,141 commercial agricultural households and only one percent of those commercial farms possessed more than 50 hectares of the land, with the largest category of commercial farms being those that possessed between one and five hectares (42 percent).
The fragmentation of arable land is one of big obstacles for the development of the agriculture, the ministry said.