Study Trip to Lithuania

In October 2014, experts from partners, GIZ and AMBERO travelled to Lithuania for a study trip in the frame of the project “Co-financing EU – Strengthening of Local Land Management” – Rural Module.

The Serbian land management team met with colleagues in Lithuania and together, they visited different institutions in Vilnius and the rest of Lithuania.

Topics that were dealt with were the EU integration concerning bylaws, IT systems, and the institutional framework; information and data exchange about land between the different responsible institutions as well as the drafting of future perspectives and challenges for Lithuania.

Lithuanian partners explained the general procedures of granting farmers access to EU direct payments and the underlying IT-system for area declaration. With the help of 50 municipalities’ declaration points, applicants may declare their land and its use through a web-based geographical information system, the so-called Land Parcel Identification System LPIS. Payments run directly from the paying agency to farmers. Serbian participants noted with interest that the LPIS though it is owned by the Lithuanian Ministry of Agriculture, is up-kept and maintained by the state-enterprise Agri-Information and Rural Business Centre. Its tasks include as well the implementation of new legal EU-requirements through the LPIS and control of data provided by farmers.

Noting that Lithuania developed its spatial infrastructure long before the INSPIRE directive, participants visited also the state-owned GIS-Center that manages the Lithuanian spatial information portal (geoportal.lt). The information portal creates, shares, manages and uses geo-referential data, data for surveyors and land use planners, municipal and national data including accessible metadata. Data can be viewed, searched, ordered and downloaded through a web browser. Additional interactive portal services are accessible through individual user interfaces that were designed e.g. for the State Land Fund on vacant state property in rural areas or map inaccuracies on desolated land.