Zagreb - Croatia has been warned by the World Bank to improve the use of its arable land, the Zagreb-based daily Jutarnji List said Monday.

Some 41 per cent of the total 2.7 million hectares of arable land in Croatia remains unfarmed, so agriculture generates just 7.4 per cent of the nations economy.

According to Jutarnji, contributing to inefficiency is the fact that just 1 per cent of family farms own more than 20 hectares of land.

A farmers organization official, Darko Grivcic, said Croatian authorities should hand out fines for unfarmed land, "like in France or Sweden ... that would force landowners either to rent or farm the land themselves."

According to the report, an average employee in farming in Croatia generates around 11,000 dollars of value annually, or one-third of what a counterpart creates in Western Europe.

Jutarnji did not specify whether its data was from the World Bank's report on Croatia's agriculture. (dpa)