High land fragmentation and accelerated rate of
conversion of agriculture land are major challenges for
food security of Nepal. Realizing ineffectiveness of
previous efforts to manage these problems, government
of Nepal has adopted land use policy 2012. The paper
reviews the effects of previous land management
policies on land fragmentation and conversion of
agriculture land, and analyzes land use policy 2012
with respect to these problems. Analysis suggested that
land fragmentation and high rate of agriculture land
conversion could partly be attributed to failures of
previous land management policies that were adopted
for land re-distribution. Land use policy 2012 has
proposed classical regulation tools for controlling land
fragmentation and conversion of agriculture land such
as land pooling, land classification, zoning and tax/
incentive based discrimination. Considering long
history of non-regulated land use system in Nepal, the
acceptability of the strong regulatory provisions could
be the main constrain for successful implementation of
the policy, thereby recoiling the effort to control land
fragmentation and agriculture land conversion in
Nepal.