Legal Eye: Your own Green Acres

Buying paradise

Whether you are buying an apartment in the city or arable land in the countryside, the procedures are pretty much the same. Most importantly, after you've found the perfect parcel and negotiated the terms of purchase, you need to get to a notary. Real-estate transactions must be in the form of a notarial deed. Afterwards, your purchase must be filed in the appropriate Title and Mortgage Register, but your notary should assist with that.

If you are not a Polish citizen, you need a permit from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration before you can buy farm land. Before Poland entered the European Union, it negotiated a couple of restrictions on the purchase of land in Poland. For agricultural and forest land, citizens of other EU member states will need to obtain permits for 12 years after Poland's accession to the EU (until May 1, 2016). However, if you just want a vacation home in the countryside, EU citizens only need to wait five years past Poland's accession (until May 1, 2009) before you can buy without first obtaining a permit.

Becoming a farmer

Once you have your land, you may want to qualify as a farmer (important for obtaining EU funds). As recently reported, having a day job, such as being a high-ranking politician from a populist party, does not necessarily preclude you from claiming village status and reaching for those EU funds with both hands.

However, Polish law contains criteria for qualifying as  running a farm. First, you need land, which means that you own or lease at least one hectare (approximately two acres) of farm land. Second, you need to qualify as a farmer. To do so, you must run the farm yourself (you are the decision-maker). You must have taken agriculture and farming courses or have run or worked on a farm for five years. Finally, you must reside in the township in which at least one of your fields is located.

EU payments

Unless you have an innate desire to get up at the crack of dawn to milk the cows, your decision to become a farmer would likely be influenced by payments you could receive from the EU Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), particularly the coveted direct payments. In 2003, the EU decided to reform the CAP. One of the main areas of the reform was the direct payments system, which is to be phased out in favor of a single farm payment. Nevertheless, over the next several years, Polish farmers will receive less money than, for example, their French counterparts. In 2006, farmers from the 10 new member states only receive 35 percent of the payments that other farmers may receive. This percentage increases each year until 2013.

Beginning in 2007, Poland is supposed to start introducing the single-farm payment system.  Given the complexity of the various forms of payment, I have not been able to divine what this will really mean to farmers or taxpayers. However, the EU assumes that there will be savings enough to fund noble goals, such as rural development, the maintenance of grasslands, and tighter administrative controls on the use of payments.

Judith Gliniecki is the managing partner of Rymar and Partners