Smallholders’ land access in Sub-Saharan Africa: A new landscape?

Abstract

While scholars long recognized the importance of land markets as a key driver of rural non-farm development and transformation in rural areas, evidence on the extent of their operation and the nature of participants remains limited. We use household data from 6 countries to show that there is great potential for such markets to increase productivity and equalize factor ratios. While rental markets transfer land to land-poor and labor-rich producers, their operation and thus impact may be constrained by policy restrictions. Their functioning may also be constrained by ill-defined or insecure rights that may arise from failure to fully compensate existing rights in cases of expropriation, a failure to implement more broadly land policies or to do so in a gender sensitive manner. Methodological and substantive conclusions are derived.

Land rental markets and rural poverty dynamics in Northern Ethiopia: Panel data evidence using survival models

“…The reason for dramatic increase in the year 2000 may be that having a land use certificate improved the sense of tenure security of farm households and reduced their reluctance to lease out land though this is not witnessed in the descriptive evidence from the supply side of the market . Overall, the data used provides a balanced sample from both sides of the tenancy market (especially, with the last three data cohorts) suggesting there is no evidence of under-counting of landlords relative to tenants as claimed by Deininger, Savastano, and Xia (2017) and Chamberlin and Ricker-Gilbert (2016). This could be due to the predominance of sharecropping arrangements in the study area, which lowers the chances of being an absentee landlord as compared to fixed (cash) rental arrangements.…”

On the Structural Transformation of Rural Africa

“…While this is not evidence of intrinsic superiority of smaller farms per se-it may well be the endogenous outcome of the various factor market imperfections or behavioral phenomena that generate these patterns 10 --the historical evidence from Asia (Ravallion and Chen, 2007), and more recently also from densely populated African countries such as Ethiopia and Rwanda (World Bank, 2015a,b), shows that increasing smallholder productivity can induce rapid poverty reduction, at least in the initial stages. Studying land rental markets in six African countries, Deininger, Savastano and Xia (2016) also find that, despite significant inefficiencies, land rentals are already occurring, transferring land to land-poor and labor-rich producers. Proper land certification is in some cases also having positive impacts for smallholders, inducing them to maintain soils, make productive investments, and enhance land productivity (Holden et al 2008).…”

Prospects for Improving Irrigated Agriculture in Southern Africa: Linking Water, Energy and Food

“…Across SSA, issues around land are highly contentious, and this is worsened when water issues are introduced. The key land issues of concern in the region include: access to land (individual or collective), rights to land (individual or collective), land tenure (formal or informal), land tenure security (secured or insecure), land governance (transparency and accountability), the use of land (extensive or intensive) and the management of land (protective or productive) [64,65]. In addition, land tenure has bearings on food production, water rights for irrigation, and the expansion of land under bioenergy uses, hence the WEF nexus [10].…”