The purpose of the research was to study the trend of reduction of agricultural and arable land, as part of the resource potential of agricultural production in the Russian Federation and Western European countries. Using a trend line expressing the change in the average value of dynamic series of the approximation function, the dynamics of changes in the area of agricultural and arable land in the Russian Federation was analyzed for the period from 1990 to 2019. And the forecast of changes in their area until 2030 has calculated in some Western European countries for the period from 1962 to 2019. The main reason for the reduction of agricultural and arable land in Western Europe is the intensification of agricultural production, which has led to an increase in agricultural output based on an increase in the yield of cultivated crops. It has been established that a significant reduction of arable land and other agricultural lands in the Russian Federation in recent decades has occurred due to the transfer of agricultural and arable land for development, as a result of changes in the category and permitted type of use, the termination of activities of collective farms and state farms in connection with their reorganization, the allocation of land shares and the inability to process them due to insufficient material and financial resources of agricultural producers, violations of zonal agrotechnologies and crop rotations, the absence of anti-erosion measures and works to restore soil fertility, the increasing scale of degradation of productive lands, the destruction of the state land management system. The main directions of regulation of the process of reducing agricultural land on the basis of the Strategy of Sustainable Development of rural territories of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2030 and the Doctrine of the Land Policy of the Russian Federation are substantiated.
sel'skohozyaystvennye ugod'ya, pashnya, resursnyy potencial, degradaciya zemel', vyravnivanie linii trenda, effektivnost'