The State Service of Ukraine on Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre has said that the moratorium to sell farmland could be revoked in 2018, taking into account the initiated experiment to sell state-owned farmland at auctions.

"Then [after experimental auctions] it would be possible to lift the moratorium for citizens, maybe in 2018 or 2019," Service Head Maksym Martyniuk said at an offsite cabinet meeting in Poltava on Wednesday.

He said that the auctions would allow the service to receive a benchmarking and study the behavior of buyers and sellers and balance the price due to the arrival of a large number of players to the farmland market.

"If the laws are passed, we still are not ready to introduce the full-scale market, and our initiative is conducting the economic experiment to sell state-owned farmland at auctions," Martyniuk said.