How effective have agricultural land tenure reforms been in Africa? | Land Portal

Land rights are widely agreed to be essential in motivating farmers to make short and long-term fixed investments in their farms – investments that will increase agricultural productivity, raise rural household incomes, and move the needle on the goal of alleviating global poverty.

The good news is that a recent systematic review – funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DfID) – of quantitative literature on the effects of tenure formalisation in developing countries confirmed that formal registration of individual land rights increases investment, productivity, and household consumption.

The bad news? Productivity did not rise as much in Africa as in Asia and Latin America. Differences in short-term gains were considerable: 5-10% average gains in Africa, compared to 25-35% gains in Latin America and Asia.

The more modest response to tenure recognition in Africa raises new questions on the role of tenure reform and rights registration in boosting agricultural productivity and investment.

For decades, many observers believed that customary tenure arrangements – where families gain access to land as a social right and land rights are assigned and protected by local, traditional authorities – were impediments to agricultural development. Customary tenure is not a salient factor in much of Latin America and Asia, where land tends to be secured through title or various forms of registered lease rights, and land reform has focused on land redistribution and granting titles to individual or group beneficiaries.

Customary tenure is far more common in sub-Saharan Africa. But arguments on behalf of formal rights registration in sub-Saharan Africa have in recent years been tempered by evidence suggesting that customary tenure arrangements deliver high levels of tenure security without reliance on formal records of land ownership. Record-based systems have proved expensive to establish due to high surveying and adjudication costs. In some countries, including Kenya, the accuracy of land ownership records were called into doubt within a few years of the initial systematic registration because many rights holders failed to record subsequent transfers of ownership.

Other research suggests that the greater vulnerability of rights under customary systems might be explained by the fear of arbitrary transfer of rights by state agencies to public use or to outside investors. This has given rise to efforts to extend statutory recognition to customary tenure arrangements, accompanied in some cases by cost-effective programmes for verifying and recording customary rights using technologies that reduce the per-parcel costs of rights registration.

Enthusiasm for titling has also been dampened by the poor access that agricultural households in sub-Saharan Africa have to credit. Without access to credit, households receiving title aren't truly able to capitalise on their land assets, in which case benefits may fail to match the costs of titling.

In short, systematic registration of land rights has in recent decades ceased to be the core principle of donor-supported agricultural land reform in sub-Saharan Africa (see the World Bank's Voluntary Guidelines). Instead, policy making is increasingly tempered by the notion that in any given context it is most appropriate to assess what kinds of tenure arrangements – customary, titled freehold, or use rights to publicly owned land and natural resources – may be best suited to delivering tenure security to the greater number of people, in ways that are equitable and that also promote agricultural investment and growth.

A large body of literature supports the view that rights registration, and the degree of added tenure security it may grant farmers, is but one element affecting farmer ability to increase investment and productivity. Land rights recognition alone is no "silver bullet," writes Dr. John Bruce in Simple Solutions to Complex Problems: Land Formalisation as a Silver Bullet. In Latin America, for example, an early focus on land redistribution to smallholders yielded poor results until it was realised that farmers also needed access to markets and supplies, training, and public goods such as roads and social infrastructure if they were to make productive use of their new farms. Agrarian reform supplanted land reform as the policy framework for rural poverty alleviation.

We might hypothesise that the muted impact of formal registration of individual land rights in sub-Saharan Africa has to do with three factors: pre-existing institutions, wealth effects, and a lack of investment in complementary institutions and reforms.

Pre-existing institutions: In sub-Saharan Africa, security under customary tenure may have been stronger than policy reformers understood it to be. Such may not have been the case in Latin America and Asia. If so, then perceptions of tenure security in African cases would tend not to be affected as significantly by formal registration, because they were already high under pre-reform arrangements.

Wealth effect: In contrast to their counterparts in Asia and Latin America, farmers in Africa who are subject to these reforms may operate much closer to subsistence, lacking the resources necessary for translating tenure rights into commercial production. If this were to explain the differences in formal recognition effects, then we would expect to see a few things. First, farmers subject to such reforms in Africa should indeed be significantly poorer than those in Asia and Latin America, manifested in fewer asset holdings, a more constrained agricultural labor supply (due perhaps to higher opportunity costs to leaving urban occupations), and an unwillingness of credit institutions to lend.

Lack of complementary reforms: Contrary to reforms in Asia and Latin America, reforms in Africa have tended not to be coupled adequately with investments in necessary complementary institutions, infrastructure, or other forms of "public capital." Endowing farmers with productive means in the form of property rights cannot on its own lead to increases in commercial productivity if there is no complementary public capital – institutions, infrastructure, cooperatives, extension schooling, farmer training, and other facilitating elements – in place.

Future research should examine whether the observable implications of these theories are evident in cases of reform in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, keeping in mind broader welfare considerations. Modest gains in following rights recognition does not in itself mean that there might not be positive effects associated with formal registration of land rights. For example, there may be significant social benefits associated with the reduction in land-related conflicts or validation of the property rights of women and other vulnerable individuals. A thorough assessment would evaluate such benefits in comparison to those associated with alternative modes of property rights recognition, including statutory recognition of customary tenure.

 

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- Photo source: Albert Gonzalez Farran/AFP/Getty Images

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