Land Tenure

Farming in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa typically takes place on small plots cultivated by individuals. The land tenure system is often described as 'communal', meaning that land is owned by a kin-based or political group and that individuals obtain the right to cultivate through their membership in that group. If a generalization is possible about the process through which people obtain land for farming in such a broad and diverse region, the consensus would be that land tenure in Africa is characterized by flexibility, complexity, and negotiability (Shipton and Goheen 1992; Amanor 2008). Claims to land and land resources commonly depend on membership in broader social groupings: extended families or lineages, villages, or other social networks. Land tenure in this broad region are often multi-layered, with differentiated rights over standing crops, crop stubble, fallowed fields, 'wild' foods, minerals, water access, or trees and forests. These multiple layers of rights over land and its produce can be associated with rich and flexible land use by multiple parties, as when grazing on crop stubble complements cultivation in many areas of the Sahel. They can also be associated with multidimensional conflict, as between timber extraction, cultivation, and wild food gathering in many forest areas. Layered on top of this customary tenure system is a growing share of land obtained by commercial transactions via sharecropping, rental, or outright purchase. The flexibility and complexity of land tenure systems in sub-Saharan Africa are often associated with conflict: the fact that many individuals may have claims to the same piece of land, and to different dimensions of use of that land may imply that each one of those individual's claims are not fully secure. This apparent insecurity, and the hypothesized associated losses in productivity and incentives to invest, attracted for decades much of the attention of policymakers with respect to land rights. There are a number of economic mechanisms through which one would expect insecure property rights to reduce investment and productivity on farms (Besley 1995). The most direct is the fact that there is some probability that the farmer will be unable to reap the full reward of any investment. A farmer considering an investment balances its cost against the expected future benefits generated by the investment; otherwise worthwhile investments will therefore not be made if those expected benefits fall. This mechanism has received a great deal of attention from scholars and policy-makers concerned with …