(AGENPARL) – Mon 28 April 2025 [cid:e05d555a-b527-4464-94ab-12493c1275d7]
Securing land rights with just a few clicks
How digitalization in Serbia protects land rights for future generations
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© FAO/ Sanja Knežević
“I inherited this farm together with my brother and sister, from our father, our uncle and our grandfather,” Serbian smallholder farm, Milivoje Ćosić, says smiling with obvious pride. “Today, our land is properly registered and can be found in the cadastre online.” He shows the screen of his mobile phone, pointing to a digital platform which provides data on the online cadastre records, proving instantly that his name is officially attached to the land.
Intently typing on his mobile phone, Milivoje Ćosić, a smallholder farmer, university professor and a father of three, throws glances from time to time at a sun-lit lawn where his cows are grazing at a distance. He is standing in front of his house in the Serbian village of Mionica, some 100 kilometres southwest from the country’s capital, Belgrade.
His mother Isidora and daughter Irina are bustling about in the kitchen. Minutes later, Irina appears in a doorway bringing out traditional hot burek pie. The table is already filled with a wide variety of homemade breakfast foods: fresh eggs, cheeses, cured meat and hot bread from the oven. The smell of coffee prepared in a traditional cezve pot completes the morning picture.
Just a few years ago, registering of land or changes in property rights, such as an inheritance or a purchase, was a time-consuming and often costly process in Serbia. It would take months to register a transaction. Data were fragmented, unreliable and not easily accessible, often available only in analogue archives. The process of obtaining the documents to prove someone’s land rights usually required several visits to the cadastre offices, which could be in another village.
All of this changed in 2015, when Serbia’s Republic Geodetic Authority (RGA) — a specialized state institution that collects, connects and distributes national geospatial and real estate data— launched the Real Estate Management Project, funded by the World Bank and technically supported by the Investment Centre of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).
The project integrated data from several different information technology systems including the address register, the digital archive, the national spatial data infrastructure and others into one, simplifying business processes and significantly minimizing the time needed to register land transactions.
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This email was issued by the Media Office at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).