The emergence of land markets in Africa: Impacts on poverty, equity and efficiency, edited by Stein Holden, Keijiro Utsuka, and Frank Place (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, pp. 320, ISBN 978-1-933115-69-6)

✍ Scribed by Philip Woodhouse

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 44 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1663

✦ Synopsis

There can be little dispute about the central role of land policy in discussion of African development. Insecurity of land tenure is frequently invoked as both a threat to the welfare of the poor and as a constraint on investment in more productive agriculture. Land tenure reform has been the subject of legislation by governments throughout Africa during the last decade. Yet debate on land markets in Africa remains largely polarised. On the one hand proponents of land markets see them-and the property rights that they entail-as essential to the re-allocation of land to more efficient producers willing and able to raise capital investment for increased productivity. On the other hand, opponents fear that land markets will be a mechanism through which the poor will be tempted to make distress sales of land previously held under customary tenure. At this juncture, the publication of a book analysing land markets in Africa is therefore timely. This is even more the case because the volume edited by Stein Holden, Keijiro Utsuka and Frank Place sets out to identify and analyse the scarce quantitative data that exist on the contemporary operation of land markets in Africa. The editors and their collaborators have focused their analysis on four countries (Ethiopia, Malawi, Uganda and Kenya) that they identify as having high population densities and therefore greater competition for land and more likelihood of development of land markets. Following two introductory chapters that establish a 'conceptual framework' for the analytical methodology, the book is organised under three key themes. The first (Chapters 3-7) asks what impacts land markets have on land allocation and the implications of this for equity (are the poor disadvantaged?) and on efficiency (is the ratio of land to labour and/or capital improved?). The second (Chapters 8-10) asks whether the type of market contract (sharecropping, rent, sale/purchase) has a bearing on the efficiency and equity effects of markets. A third (Chapters 11-13) asks whether land markets have any impact on investment in improved land management.

Despite its important and topical subject matter, the book is unlikely to appeal to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with econometric analysis. This is partly a matter of technical accessibility of parts of the analysis, but also because of the limitations that the method imposes on both conceptual and empirical treatment of land markets. This is not to say that the book does not deliver useful findings. The analysis of land use in Ethiopia, where land sales are banned, shows a thriving rental (sharecropping) market with some 12 percent of all cultivated land being rented in. Poorer, femaleheaded households tend to rent out land to wealthier male-headed households. These sharecropping arrangements are often between households linked by kinship. The key driver of these markets is that a necessary means of production-oxen-is not available to many of the 'landlord' households. The fact that so many poor households have 'surplus' land is a consequence of a relatively egalitarian land distribution resulting from earlier land redistributions undertaken by the government. The analysis of data from Kenya, Malawi and Uganda is less comprehensive but suggests a stronger role of immigration in driving land sales and rental markets, with 'land-rich' households tending to sell or rent to those without land but relatively well-endowed with non-land assets. In Uganda, sharecropping is less common than cash rental but some 'rents' are low or even zero, raising questions about the nature of this 'market'. In Kenya, an analysis of land users' concerns over conflict indicated that conflicts with neighbours over boundaries predominated, with worries over contested inheritance in second place. Such worries increased greatly when land remained registered in the name of a deceased relative.