Gendered Incidence and Impacts of Tenure Insecurity on Agricultural Performance in Malawi’s Customary Tenure System

Abstract

Malawi’s recent passage of Land Acts provide an opportunity to clarify different aspects of the country’s land tenure in an integrated way. To assess whether doing so might be economically justified, we explore incidence and impact of tenure insecurity among smallholders. Insecurity is not only widespread, with 22 per cent of land users being concerned about losing their land, but is also associated with a productivity loss of 9 per cent for female operators, equivalent to US$ 11 million per year at the national level, enough to pay for a nation-wide tenureregularisation programme in two to three years.

Acknowledgement

We thank Daniel Ali, Blessings Botha, Thabbie Chilongo, Mercy Chimpokosero-Mseu, Alejandro de la Fuente, Time Fatch, Thea Hilhorst Valens Mumvaneza, Henry Kankwamba, Sam Katengeza, Richard Record, and two anonymous reviewers as well as the editor of this journal for helpful comments that helped to greatly improve the quality of the paper. Funding support from DFID and the German Government (BMZ through GIZ) is gratefully acknowledged. The views presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the World Bank, its Executive Directors or the member countries they represent. We commit to provide the data and the code on request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Burkina Faso conflict risk – emanating largely from migrants – was estimated to have reduced agricultural productivity by at least 8.9 per cent.

2. Key issues relate to dissemination to eliminate informational advantages by the rich and well-connected (Peters, 2004) which otherwise could result in such interventions disempowering the poor (Jansen & Roquas, 1998) and entrenching inequality in land access (Easterly, 2008).

3. In fact, limited benefits (Atwood, 1990; Pinckney & Kimuyu, 1994) or a high cost of registration (Jacoby & Minten, 2007) that can be caused by complex processes and inefficient systems can undermined sustainability of benefits from registration (Galiani, 2011) even if land registration is associated with social (Galiani & Schargrodsky, 2010) or productivity benefits (Ali, Deininger, & Duponchel, 2017).

4. Transactions were directly supported through loans from the Farmers Marketing Board (FMB), a successor to the Native Tobacco Board, later transformed into the Agricultural Development and Marketing Cooperative (ADMARC). Indirect support came from restricting tobacco cultivation by smallholders and from establishing ADMARC as the sole marketing option with a power to fix prices (Mandondo & German, 2015).

5. As access to a minimum of 12 hectares of land was required to access tobacco marketing quotas, an unknown number of so-called ‘ghost estates’ was established, often in office-based processes without corresponding to actual land on the ground.

6. Failure to recognise customary rights – reinforced by subsidies that benefit the rich (Chinsinga & Poulton, 2014) – was a key reason why even prima facie successful expansion of tobacco cultivation may have had mixed socio-economic impacts (Mandondo & German, 2015).

7. A 1997 study that aimed to obtain more precise figures faced difficulties due to the parlous state of records. It estimates that leasehold estates cover less than one million ha while smallholders on customary land account for the remainder of the country’s agricultural area (Gossage, 1997).

8. A resettlement programme partly addressed this increased beneficiaries’ food security but may have jeopardised women’s rights (Mueller, Quisumbing, Lee, & Droppelmann, 2014). Little is known about the extent to which this programme addressed the issue of ‘idle estates’ or was the most cost-effective way for doing so.

9. The most plausible explanations for such overlap in recorded areas are (i) imprecise or erroneous measurement so that the overlap exists on paper only but not in reality; (ii) weak record keeping so that the same estate was awarded twice (for example, due to the original assignee not using it for agricultural production); or (iii) outright fraud. Field verification will be needed to determine reasons for such overlaps and possibly resolve them.

10. Estimates suggest that the Government could collect up to US$ 35 million per year in ground rent (Deininger & Xia, 2017).

11. This requires policy decisions on (i) how to define an estate, how to define idle land, and what to do with land that had been leased to estates but is no longer used as an estate (for example, subsistence farming as a result of sub-division or transfer); (ii) what action to take in case of lessees’ failure to comply with lease conditions (either in terms of non-compatible land uses or failure to pay ground rent); (iii) how to adjust estate boundaries in case of imprecise original surveys and expansion or contraction of the originally leased area; and (iv) lease terms including levels of ground rent to be charged for renewal of leases on land that is lawfully occupied by estates; and (v) procedures for re-allocating unused estate land, in particular the role of TAs and other local institutions in this process.

12. In EAs with less than five small farms, small farms were added to bring the total sample to 15.

13. The survey contained space only for one main operator.

14. In our regression analysis, coefficients of interest for the entire sample have the same sign but are less precisely estimated, consistent with the notion that information on parcels that are not operated by the respondent contains considerable measurement error.

15. Higher outside demand for land is also visible from the fact that 11 per cent and 15 per cent of villages had, in the last five years, sold or given land to outsiders, sometimes (14%) failing to respect the village head’s authority.

16. General household characteristics such as education or wealth that affect risk attitudes and the ability to exert local influence or parcel-attributes such as soil quality that would affect the payoffs from land disputes are used as control variables and included throughout in our regressions but we refrain from reporting estimated coefficients.

17. All variables in Equation (1)(1) $T{I}_{ijk}={\beta }_0+{\beta }_1{D}_{ijk}+{\beta }_2{X}_{ijk}+{\beta }_3{V}_{jk}+{\lambda }_k+{\epsilon }_{ijk}$(1) are included in the regressions but only variables that significantly affected the fears are displayed in Table 5.

18. To interpret coefficients reported in columns two, four, and six, note that the estimated impact of a specific inheritance regime on female’s propensity to invest is the ‘regime’. The relevant interaction illustrates if estimated effects of one regime on males is significantly different from those for females. Results from F-tests of whether a regime has an effect that is significantly different from zero on males are reported at the bottom of the table.

19. Detailed data on input use including values are available for maize, groundnuts, rice, tobacco, and tea. The regression sample thus only includes households that planted these five crops.

20. Hired labour, exchange labour, and agricultural assets are household-level variables.

21. Smallholders operate some 4.05 million ha or about 75 per cent of the country’s arable area with estates operating the remaining 25 per cent (Deininger & Xia, 2017).