Under the state program compensating for demining costs, almost 10 thousand hectares of agricultural land have been returned to farmers. And the expansion of the program to households, and potentially to Land Bank plots, will allow for an increase in the pace of demining agricultural lands.

This was announced by the Minister of Economy, Environmental Protection, and Agriculture Oleksii Sobolev during the annual humanitarian demining forum Demine Ukraine.

«By the end of the year, we will reach the 2024 targets despite the unfavorable forecast for this year. And importantly, farmers harvested part of the yield in already demined territories. And in the Kharkiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv regions, which were affected by the war, the harvest collected is even larger than last year,» – noted Oleksii Sobolev.

During the forum, Deputy Minister Ihor Bezkaravaynyi presented the GRIT humanitarian demining prioritization system, which operates based on the tech giant Palantir. It combines and analyzes complex datasets and converts them into management decisions. Specifically, the creation of a digital twin of land plots (cadastres), taking into account information about contaminated and potentially contaminated territories, allows seeing where small polygons of uncleared land block significantly larger areas that could be cultivated by farmers.