Interpreting Land Markets in Africa

Abstract

Questions about land markets are central to development policy, as underlined recently in the 2008 World Development Report (World Bank 2007: 9). In particular, markets in which land rights are transferred on a temporary or permanent basis are seen as playing a key role in the redistribution of land to more efficient users, thus increasing productivity and employment. In this view, any negative effects attributed to land markets, notably in terms of inequity and landlessness, result from failures in other markets, especially credit and insurance markets (Deininger and Feder 2001; de Janvry et al. 2001; World Bank 2003). In Africa, until late in the twentieth century it was these negative effects, and a perception of land as being relatively abundant due to low population densities in many parts of the continent, that influenced policy makers' views. Consequently, land markets received relatively little attention in development policy, except, as exemplified in an earlier issue of this journal (Shipton and Goheen 1992), as a means of securing credit flows for agricultural development. Over the past two decades, however, a wave of proposals for land tenure reform in many African countries (Toulmin and Quan 2000; Berry 2002; World Bank 2003) has raised questions about land markets as a means of allocating land that have profound political and economic implications, rarely addressed by previous research. This collection of articles provides an opportunity to explore the nature of land markets in Africa. 1 EMERGENCE AND DYNAMICS OF LAND MARKETS IN AFRICA In African contexts, the question of land markets is commonly framed by an analysis of how customary systems of land tenure have

Contractual Practice and Land Conflicts: The ‘Plant & Share’ Arrangement in Côte d'Ivoire

“…In the 2013 survey concerning cadres , all assignors were autochthon and all takers non‐native Ivorians. The development of P&S arrangements is thus in line with the frequent observation that the commoditization of land access in Africa is closely related to the arrival of ‘outsiders’ (see references in Colin and Woodhouse ) – national or foreign migrants and cadres , in this case.…”

New investment, old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture

“…Here it is important to underline that such tendencies towards commoditised access to land do not require formal land titles, but may be observed within customary land tenure systems (Chimhowu and Woodhouse 2006). The shifting terms of land access are a manifestation of broader change in the rural society in which they are embedded (Colin and Woodhouse 2010), and Pauline Peters argues that evidence of growing competition for land "calls into serious question the image of relatively open, negotiable, and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use and, instead, reveals processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions, and class formation" (Peters 2009(Peters , 1319.…”

Discontents in Japans aid discourse in Africa: Land grabbing activism in Tokyo International Conference for Africa Development (TICAD) process

“…Such analysis of land acquisition, sale, or long term leasing by foreign investors have laid emphasis on the gap between transnational corporations Trans-National Corporations (TNC) eagerness to land acquisition and small holders farmers resistance (Cotula and Vermeulen, 2009;Colin and Woodhouse, 2010). This gap has been expounded in terms of its impact on local residents livelihoods, the local"s accessibility to land (theory of access (Ribot and Peluso, 2003), and food security (Hall, 2013)).…”