HAVANA.- (Prensa Latina) With changes to the policy of handing state idle lands in usufruct, the Cuban governmnent Works today to imnprove land productivity and quality of soils.

The mentioned modification include the increase from 13.4 to 26.84 hectares the máximum area for natural persons applying for the first time.

This aspect establishes a minimum of 26.84 hectares for the applications for livestock and crops in productive poles, as was informed in a press conference.

To guarantee sustainability of agriculture is of great importance in a country where less than 25 percent of soils have first and second agroproductivity level categories, according to data published by Granma newspaper.

To that aim, modifications pretend to ensure the exploitation of the most amount of hectares possible of those that are idle today, to prevent a bad use of the soil abnd the loss of its agroproductivity, said Eddy Soca, director of Soils and Control of the Land of the Ministry of Agriculture (Minag), quoted by the daily.

According tio the information released, the transformations coherently fit with the process of economic updating actually being applied in the country which will give way to a legal norm.

Soca stressed this is mostly the result of the opinions of the productive bases and the proposals made by peasants in different scenarios.

He also referred to the changes related to the link or integration of the landholders to the productive forms.

The official recalled that until now the landholders could relate to the basic units of cooperative production, thwe cooperatives of agricultural production and those of credit and services, as well as the state farms of new type with legal personality.

'The modifications will allow to become part of or relate also to state enterprises through the basic entrepreneurial units, which has been a repeated demand of the landholders', he emphasized.

From 2008 to 2016, the government handed in usufruct one million 917 thousand hectares of idle land, 31 percent of the farming land, of which one million 733 thousand hectares were handed to 222 thousand natural persons. At the end of last year there were still 894 thousand hectares, said the directive this week in a press conference.

The information given has as precedent the meeting of the Council of Ministers on June 28, which evaluated the performance of the economy in the first half of the year and approved the modification to the policy for the handing in usufruct of parcels of idle state land, which continue to advance in its implementation.