Legal Challenges against the 2006 Amendment of Farm and Garden Land Use Conservation Act and the Need for its Revision

Environmental protection and natural resource conservation aimed at ensuring food security through healthy, organic food production form major items of Iran's development plans. The involvement of too many public agencies and authoritative sources has over recent years led to legal challenges hindering the realization of development and economic goals. This situation has, in turn, caused the Farm and Garden Land Conservation Act to face not only legal challenges in its implementation but, in certain cases, to conflicts with other laws. Despite its amendment in 2006, the law still requires substantial modifications and radical revisions in such areas as punitive measures for violation of law or methods to restore degraded or encroached land, and selection of trustees to carry out legal verdicts when they are approved for implementation. The present descriptive-analytical study explores the legal challenges facing the above Act and the duplicate roles and interventions by multiple government bodies. It is maintained that, as an attempt to resolve the mentioned challenges, conflicts, and parallel work, it is necessary to adopt a new approach that integrates the highly dispersed and diverse laws into a unit hole and one that grants authority to an independent institution or agency to make decisions about and to carry out law enforcement outside the urban and rural legislative units. These provisions are expected to reduce illegal land use changes and to witness proper law enforcement across the state.