Land Affairs

Are Rights the Answer to Underdevelopment?

Are human rights universal, indivisible and equally applicable everywhere or may local contexts and local decision-making matter more in some situations? This is a hotly debated topic among policy makers and development practitioners. In my country, Denmark, it is currently up for debate because the new Minister for Development Cooperation, Christian Friis Bach, wants to reform Danish development assistance, introducing Human Rights-Based Approaches. That has met resistance from some scholars and in the development community. Typically, the minister’s insistence on a set of values defined in the North is seen as neo-colonialism. Furthermore, it is argued, the approach is unlikely to work. You can read a recent example of the critique on this newly established blog, The Political Economy of the Development in Africa.

I experienced a similar discrepancy between high principles and local priorities first hand a couple of years ago when I visited remote villages, in which NGOs worked to secure women’s rights to land. The women usually appreciated the support of the NGOs. But then they raised the question: Now what? What is the use of land ownership if we have no money to buy seeds? What is the use of a title deed if roads are shoddy and we can not transport our crops to town?

Dorothy L. Hodgson, in the anthology Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights explores similar dilemmas about the potential and the limitations of the “women’s rights as human rights” framework. In her chapter, These are not our Priorities: Maasai Women, Human Rights and the Problem of Culture, she describes the dilemmas Maasai women activists in Tanzania face when they do fundraising. Western donors and Tanzanian elite groups, based in the cities, typically offer funds for the fight against female genital modification (FGM). The Maasai activists know, however, that if FGM is the main thing on their agenda when they visit Maasai villages, they are unlikely to achieve anything. Instead, they deem support for girl’s education and income generating activities more important. Things which can make women better able to make their own decisions. The activists do not defend female genital modification. But they believe they can achieve more, also in the fight against FGM, using other means.

A colleague of mine has termed the dilemma between high principles and what works on the ground ‘a conflict between the human rights people and the development practitioners’. The disagreement is over means more than over ends. Both groups see a great value in human rights. The question is how to get there. Maybe, the development practitioners suggest, when resources are scarce – and they are in most developing countries – they should be used for what works. And what works may not always be the rights based approaches. It is a dilemma, is it not?

Decoupled Land Reform Implementation in Tanzania

This week I published an article in the Journal of Development Studies. It analyses the slow and eneven implementation of Tanzania’s of new-wave land reform today, more than ten years after its introduction in 1999. I argue that implementation is characterised by decoupling, involving a lack of coherence and of mechanisms of enforcement. It can be observed at all levels within the land administration structure. If Tanzania is to implement the reform on a larger scale, the country has to put greater emphasis on national initiatives to couple administrative layers. More money alone will not solve the problem.

Because of their novelty, our knowledge about current new-wave land reforms in sub-Saharan Africa has hitherto been limited. In the early 2000s land reforms were underway in more than 20 countries. Decentralisation of responsibility for land management has been an important intention in most reforms. How that spelled out in practice, however, remained unclear. Through implementation analyses conducted in rural areas in mainland Tanzania, the article analyses how a new-wave land reform is being implemented at the local level.

Read the article: Decoupled Implementation of New-Wave Land Reforms: Decentralisation and Local Governance of Land in Tanzania. In
Journal of Development Studies, Volume 48, Issue 2, 2012.



NGO-Land

The Caritas cassava.

It was when I learned that one of the more popular cassava species here in Northern Uganda is called ‘Caritas’ (the name of an international, Catholic relief organisation) that I started thinking that NGOs may have come to play too big a role in development and development assistance. The Caritas cassava was one of the things that the people in the area brought to the villages from the refugee camps, when the civil war ended in 2005-6. It is a high-yielding species that is the good thing about it.

But the thought that something was not quite right was not totally new to me. I had felt it coming for some days. The number of NGOs here is simply overwhelming. On an ordinary drive on one of the main roads in Amuru District, the number of signposts of NGOs and NGO-sponsored projects along the roadside almost equals the number of people walking. Those who have travelled in Africa will know that it means that there is a lot.

Just another junction.

It is a very expensive way of distributing the benefits of development assistance. The number of expensive 4WDs and the number of offices are not for free. The risk of overlaps is obvious. Thursday, I interviewed a local leader about land administration in Amuru District. I asked him if he had received any information about the Ugandan Land Act. In response, he started mentioning the number of NGOs he had been trained by. He gave up after number five, but he was sure there were more. And I am sure he could not really tell whether there was a difference between what the NGOs had taught him.

I have also interviewed people who claimed that ‘I was sensitised about my rights’. It is NGO-speak and another sign that you have entered NGO-land.

Another local government chairman complained about it. People in the area, he said, always talk about and praise the NGOs, but they forget about the things the Ugandan government has done for them. And in a way he is right. The government, after all, pays the teachers’ salaries and provide for rudimentary health services. On the other hand, it was the NGOs that made it possible for the people to return when they were told to leave the refugee camps. The NGOs delivered hoes and inputs for the fields and training in how to handle the land boundary disputes that would invariably arise when people returned to their land after decades in refugee camps. The government did not really think of these practical things.

Maybe the NGOs have a role to play in countries where governments fail to deliver proper services or are discredited by corruption and abuse of power. But there must be a cheaper and more coordinated way of helping people than the multitude of NGOs present in Northern Uganda.

NB: You can read more about the dangers of setting up new structures for service delivery that run parallel to existing local governments in Siri Lange’s excellent article, The Depoliticisation of Development and the Democratisation of Politics in Tanzania: Parallel Structures as Obstacles to Delivering Services to the Poor.

 

Brief on Tanzania’s Land Reform out now

I have published the Policy Brief The Forgotten Villages. Land Reform in Tanzania. Click here to download it free of charge.

Tanzania's 1999 land reform has decentralised land administration to the rural local village governments, but implementation so far has been slow and uneven. The local authorities rarely get the support they need to make it work. As a consequence, the benefits promised by the reform - economic growth and improved tenure security - do not happen.

There has already been an abundance of donor driven projects to implement the reform, but they have been short-sighted and have tended to forget the local authorities that carry out the actual implementation. Much could be achieved if higher level authorities and NGOs systematically strengthened the village authorities and enabled them to deliver their services. This would be a long-term process and more money alone would not solve the problem. But as long as this level of administration is forgotten, the land reform will not work in practice.

Demand-driven or Donor-driven Land Reform? (2)

About a month ago, I posted a blog post which caused some debate about whether the Tanzanian land law reform was donor-driven or not. I wrote about the topic because I had met people who claimed that the two land acts were the result of a foreign scheme. The alleged foreign involvement was used as an explanation for why the reform from 1999 had not been implemented. Tanzanian ownership was lacking, so was the argument.

By then, however, I had seen any empirical evidence which sustained the claim that the policy formulation had been initiated by donors. But I had to acknowledge that the subsequent implementation efforts were donor driven to some extent.

I have now come across some other pieces of evidence which shed new light on the origins of the land reform. It is older and thus closer to the events. It, too, places the major part of responsibility for the new land reform policies on the Tanzanian decision makers of the early 1980s. I found the first piece of evidence in an article from 1993 by C. S. L. Chachage in the book Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa. It describes how private land ownership, which was institutionalised with the land reform, was introduced as part of Tanzania’s homegrown Structural Adjustment Programme in the early 1980s:

From 1982-83 the government initiated cost-cutting exercises in budget allocations, and started removing food subsidies, while 15000 government employees were axed as a retrenchment measure.  Accompanying SAP was the introduction of the 1982 National Agricultural Policy. This policy recommended liberalisation in the countryside, including encouragement of private ownership of land (Chachage in Gibbon 1993; p. 225).

These new policies were not imposed on Tanzania by donors. The reforms were the responsibility of the Tanzanian government. They were enacted after the negotiations in the early 1980s between the Tanzanian government, under the leadership of President Nyerere, and the international financial institutions had broken down. The former Tanzanian Minister of Finance, Edwin Mtei, in his exciting autobiography From Goatherd to Governor, explains that the negotiations failed because of disagreement over the exchange rate between IMF and Nyerere. As an IMF representative, Mtei later came to negotiate an Economic Recovery Programme with Tanzania. The negotiations started in 1985 and finished in 1986, i.e. after the private land ownership had been encouraged. The programme did not, to my knowledge, include a land reform.

Whereas the seeds to the land reform process were sown before the Tanzanian government had come to terms with the financial institutions and donors, the land reform policy formulation process was initiated afterwards. Furthermore, the World Bank, in the report ‘Sub Saharan Africa, From Crisis to Sustainable Growth’ from 1989, for the first time recommended changes in land law. That is also before the Tanzanian reform process started for real. That could leave room for foreign influence. The scholars, however, describe the process as a Tanzanian affair.

Gibbon, Havnevik and Hermele in A Blighted Harves. The World Bank and the African Agriculture in the 1980s from 1993 (p. 66) describe the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters as a response to an increase in the number of land conflicts caused by the land market and a wish to promote investments. So does C. S. L. Chachage:

On the basis of constant public complaints arising from similar cases up and down the country, President Mwinyi was in 1990-91 compelled to form a commission to investigate land problems in the country (Chachage in Gibbon 1993; p. 239).

The descriptions do not, of course, rule out the possibility that the World Bank and IMF influenced Mwinyi’s decision to establish the Commission or directed the work being done by the Ministry of Lands. As UDADISI remarked in a comment to my previous post, access to the persons involved in the decisions back then and to their documents and diaries would be required to rule out that possibility completely. The analyses I refer to above, however, do not indicate that the reform process should have been orchestrated by foreigners.

Maybe this debate about the origins of the Tanzanian land laws appears a bit outdated. But I do not think that history should be used an excuse for not implementing the laws. The Land Act and the Village Land Act do after all, if implemented, provide some tools which people can use to protect their rights to land.

Conservation a Potential Threat to Local Communities

A threat to conservation? Photo by Pernille/Photografika.

A recent study, carried out by U4, an anticorruption centre based in Norway, and co-authored by Swahili Street, has shown that the risk of corruption is high in some of the African countries with REDD forest conservation projects. The study describes a number of ways projects may be derailed by corruption. It concludes that 'In some instances REDD could serve to enhance rather than decrease forest governance
challenges, for example by providing an incentive for new forms of forest-linked corruption' (p. 18).

The problem with the new forms of corruption is not only that forests may not get protected. The major problem, as I see it, is that resources may get eaten by politicians, entrepreneurs and officials before ever reaching the communities they were intended for.

REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a novel approach fostered by the international fight against climate change. It aims at rewarding governments, companies and forest owners in the South for keeping their forests instead of cutting them down. We are talking about big money. Norway, a major donor, has pledged to invest up to 3 billion USD in REDD projects until 2012.
That may affect governance of natural resources. National elites in the receiving countries now have an incentive to recentralise management in order to control the resource flows. REDD may, potentially, undermine the decentralisation processes which, over the last couple of decades, have vested more responsibility for and ownership over natural resources in the local communities in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The potential corruption problems identified by the report revitalises an ongoing debate within academia about the links between community forestry and conservation. A recent article in the magazine Environmental Policy and Governance concludes that there is ‘no systematic correlation between presence of community forestry projects and forest conservation’. The article reviews 56 case studies of local forest management experiences. Of these the majority, however, shows a positive impact on conservation. Practitioners have also hinted that there may be a problem. The Bottom Up Thinking blog http://bottomupthinking.wordpress.com/author/ discusses the link between integrated conservation and development projects ‘which often deliver neither conservation nor development’.

The community based approaches were the new panacea from the 1980s onwards, when colonial and post-independence governments’ heavy-handed conservation practices had proved ineffective. Previously, local communities had typically been expelled when national parks and forest reserves were established. The communities in the areas surrounding the reserves were therefore often against the conservation efforts from the outset. Encroachment and poaching were the logical consequences. To vest responsibility over the management of natural resources in local communities, then, was thought to increase the locals’ sense of ownership and their incentives for protecting the resource. It is now clear that such win-win situations, which benefit both local communities and preservation of forests, should not be taken for granted.

Conservation projects should be quite clear in spelling out the pros and cons for communities and for conservation alike. That would make it easier for local communities to hold higher level politicians and bureaucrats accountable. And vice versa. The above mentioned article concludes that the state may still have a role to play in ensuring conservation, even in cases where the responsibility for management has been decentralised to the local communities.

It is a dilemma. History is rife with stories about state elites ignoring local rights to natural resources on the pretext of protecting nature and the common good.

Land, Power and Party Politics

Researching a highly politicised topic – land in Tanzania - I regularly have to remind myself of a proverb I learned during my first years of studies, when I struggled to understand French post-structuralist thinkers: Though everything in society, from a certain perspective, may involve power, it does not imply that everything is about power.

Translated into the language of land affairs the proverb means that whereas theories about the abuse of power - corruption, elite or donor capture – may apply for parts of the administration of land in Tanzania, they are not likely to apply for all of it. Some of the people working with land actually spend a great deal of their time taking care of their regular work tasks. Such regular day-to-day workings can not be explained by conspiracy theories about the use and abuse of power.

But then, sometimes, I come across stories which make me doubt the wisdom of the proverb. It happened to me last week when I found an article in the Citizen about a dispute over land in Moshi, a major town and an opposition stronghold in the northern part of in Tanzania.

According to one story, councillors from Chadema, the main opposition party in Tanzania, try to ensure that all public property in Moshi stays public. That also includes two plots used by the ruling party, CCM, one plot for its headquarters and another for its youth wing.

CCM, on the other hand, has threatened to take legal actions to get the title deeds it feels it is entitled to. According to the second news story, CCM claims that it has acquired the plots legally.

From the outside it is extremely difficult to find out what is up and what is down in this story. It is definitely about power. But is it also about abuse of power? Personally, I would like to know how and when these plots were acquired. According to the excellent book, Why Planning does not Work?, by Tumsifu Jonas Nnkya, the administration of land in Moshi has previously been marred by irregularities, top-down management, and misuse of power.

Demand-driven or Donor-driven Land Reform?

Photo from a village administration. Maybe a crash course in bookkeeping would help?

Last week I attended a workshop in Dar es Salaam about land in Tanzania. I did a presentation, based on my working paper, which concludes that the implementation of the Village Land Act in rural areas in Tanzania is slow, uneven and project-driven. After the presentation some of the participants raised an interesting question about the political economy of the Tanzanian land law reform; they suggested that the slow implementation could be caused by a land reform agenda which is donor-driven and without Tanzanian ownership.

After having thought about it, I have come to the conclusion that this point of view can not be outright rejected. Still, there is strong evidence that Tanzanian decision makers have the major stakes in the reform.

According to Geir Sundet’s D.Phil dissertation (see his analysis of the Land Acts here), the policy formulation process was started as a response to an increase in the number of conflicts over land and an increased focus on investment promotion in the late 1980s. The Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development established its own policy-making body and, simultaneously, the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters carried out a nation-wide tour of consultations before publishing its final report and recommendations in 1992. Combined, the two bodies prepared the ground for the reform. The National Land Policy from 1995 and, later, the Land Acts from 1999, are based on their recommendations. Tanzanian politicians’ incessant talk of formalisation also indicates that the land reform agenda is very much a Tanzanian agenda.

The implementation projects after the passing of the reform, on the other hand, have been heavily influenced by donors. When the Strategic Plan for the Implementation of the Land Laws (SPILL) was finalised in 2005, it was estimated that it would cost over 300 billion TSH to carry out. Out of this amount only about 3 billion were foreseen to come from the ordinary government budget. Availability of donor funding have therefore, by and large, been decisive for the extent to which implementation projects have been carried out. Still, even these projects have been carried out under the auspices of the Ministry of Lands and of another government-backed agency, MKURABITA.

I do not, in other words, find much evidence supporting the claim that the land reform agenda is donor-driven. I shall suggest asking the question of ownership differently: has the implementation, so far, been top-down or bottom-up? The Land Acts decentralise responsibility for administering land in rural areas to the villages. Still, strikingly little effort has been devoted to enable the village authorities to take care of the new tasks they have been assigned with.

Agricultural Productivity a Threat to Women’s Land Rights

A threat to productivity?

Recently, I realized that there may be a contradiction between governments’ emphasis on the productive use of land and most people’s secure rights to land in developing countries. In particular women’s access to land is at risk. Again, it was the experiences from the Zimbabwean land reform, which made things clear to me.

It is an established truth that the focus on productivity is a threat to the tenure security of pastoralists. Read Once Intrepid Warriors by Dorothy L. Hodgson and you’ll come across several stories, both from before and after independence, about Tanzanian authorities alienating Maasai land in order to give it to more productive farmers. Ironically, the expected improved productivity did often not materialize. If you read the final version of the Tanzanian governments plan for the implementation of the 1999 land laws, SPILL, from 2005, you will find a similar disregard of pastoralist productivity.

In her book, Gender and Land Reform, Allison Goebel concludes that the same focus on productivity may threaten women’s land rights. In her analysis of the experiences from Zimbabwe’s land reforms she starts off with a very positive story from the early 1980s. Back then, the Zimbabwean government’s land reform policies were still aiming at redistributing land to the landless and thus promoting social justice. Women were also eligible for resettlement land, in particular if they were single women. Over the years, however, the government increasingly shifted its focus. Increasingly, it emphasized that settlers should be able to make productive use of the land. First, training courses were made a prerequisite for being resettled on vacant land. Later, criteria became even stricter and applicants should own a schotchcart (a wooden, wheeled cart) and a plough (p. 24). Obviously, it was much harder for women to meet these requirements. Simultaneously, large tracts of land were given to the new black elite for large-scale farming.

I do understand politicians’ focus on economic growth. It is, after all, the only way for their countries to escape aid-dependency. Still, it triggers me that there is so much talk about productivity and so little debate about how to distribute land and resources. Goebel’s analysis makes it clear that the increased focus on productivity may threaten women’s access to land. Just as it may threaten a lot of other groups’ rights to land.

Land and microcredit as vehicles for poverty reduction?

A title deed or a microcredit loan?

A heated debate about the merits of microcredit in developing countries has been going on for a couple of months now. For long, microfinance was hailed as the ultimate answer to poverty and underdevelopment. New findings question the positive effects of providing loans to the poor. The debate reminds me of the equally politicised debates about land titling. I find both debates relevant. But I usually disagree with the alternatives presented by the critics.

The microcredit controversy started towards the end of 2010, when evidence about the microcredit sector in India came out and a critical documentary about microcredit in Bangladesh was broadcast simultaneously. The latter was aired in Norway, but soon caused uproar in Bangladesh. It shows how some borrowers got caught in indebtedness. New loans were taken out to repay old ones, often at sky-high interest rates. Thus, those meant to benefit from microcredit could end up in a worse situation than the one they were in from the outset.

Should the microcredit system be abandoned from the development agenda, then? Yes, say some scholars, who see microcredit as a part of a global neoliberal conspiracy.

Similar controversies can be found in debates about land titling in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the 1970s and 1980s titling was encouraged by the World Bank as a means to enhance economic growth. But empirical research showed that titling did not necessarily generate growth. On the opposite, it turned out, that titling was potentially damaging to the livelihoods of poor and vulnerably groups. Research from Kenya, where titling was carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, showed that titling did not necessarily give access to credit. On the opposite, titling could have negative distributional consequences, especially for women, whose rights were often not registered. Among some researchers, in particular among left-leaning anthropologists, a new orthodoxy evolved, which consistently claimed that titling was a threat to poor and vulnerable groups.

I find the critique highly relevant, though I disagree with the conclusions drawn by some of the critics. Hopes about the poverty alleviating effects of microcredit and land titling have been raised too high. But rather than outright abolishing these approaches, expectations should be adjusted to more realistic levels. The interventions should not be seen as quick shortcuts to poverty reduction. Still, significant benefits could be reaped. Recent empirical findings support this.

A new systematic review of the available evidence of microfinance shows, that microcredit has a positive impact on poor people’s savings and on health and food security. But it also shows that microcredit has the potential to do harm. Setbacks are found on education (to repay loans quickly children are taken out of school, thus saving school fees). Indebtedness, for those unable to repay their loans, was also a reported consequence. A mixed picture, in other words.

A similar mixed picture appears from recent evidence from land titling. In the article Property Rights for the Poor: Effects of Land Titling it is acknowledged, that titles may not give access to credit (as claimed by many). But it also shows that people are more likely to invest in their land, their houses, and their children’s education, if they have a title deed. The findings are based on comparative case studies conducted in a squatter area in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where some people had received titles in the early 1980s, and other’s had not. Furthermore, I find that titles may provide people with at least a little bit of security against the endemic land grabbing observed in many countries.

Microcredit and land titling are complicated issues. Outcomes vary from one place to another.In some contexts programmes should be avoided. We may experience outright failures. Still, to abolish these approaches totally would be a mistake. We may not be able to eradicate poverty using them, but we can improve many people’s livelihoods and quality of life. The key question is how to achieve the benefits without putting too many people’s livelihoods at risk because of the dynamics they set free. There is a balance to strike there.

A title deed or a microcredit loan?

Tanzania’s Land Law Reform - Slow and uneven Progress

NGOs and the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Development are involved in a significant number of projects to implement Tanzania’s land law reform from 1999. Still, implementation in rural areas is slow and uneven. That is my conclusion in the working paper I published this month. You can download the working paper free of charge here.

If you have comments to the working paper, please, feel free to write to me here or on my E-mail address, which you find here.

Land Rights Confusions. Reflections after a Conference with Hernando de Soto

Last week I attended a conference with Hernando de Soto in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The theme of the conference was ‘Property Rights and Poverty’. A more correct theme would have been ‘Property Rights and Economic Growth’ because that was what de Soto was talking about and the issue which was debated afterwards; is there a causal link between establishing a formal system for titling and economic growth? Yes, said de Soto, an economist and renowned author of The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. No, said a lot of scholars who have been researching land affairs on the ground in Africa. The strong and incompatible positions made me wonder whether these people were talking about the same issue. I think not.

De Soto’s main argument is that a formal system for registering property rights and issuing titles in Europe and in USA has been the prerequisite for the widespread use of land and property as collateral for loans. If people in developing countries get the same chance, they can start using the assets they actually possess – a piece of land, a cow, or a shack – as collateral, and get money for investments in income-generating activities. This, he says, will enhance economic growth in developing countries.

But the system does not work in Sub-Saharan Africa, many land scholars say. Usually they refer to Kenya, which started titling decades ago and where the system has not produced benefits for the poor majority. Banks there have been reluctant to accept land as collateral because they found it hard to take the land and resell it in case money was not paid back for the loan. Furthermore, they explain, the process of titling often causes land-grabbing on the local level because the value of land is expected to rise. Finally, if title registers do not get maintained they will become worthless and may even create more – rather than less – tenure insecurity. In the end, therefore, titling may be a risk rather than an opportunity for the poor. Read more about the Kenyan experiences here.

When listening to the debate, I had this feeling that they were not really talking together. It was, to be honest, a bit confusing. After a while, however, a governance consultant, Jens Kovsted, raised the very relevant question whether formal property rights really enhance economic growth or whether the opposite was true – that economic growth promotes the establishment of formalised property rights? That made things clearer to me. Dichotomies like Kovsted’s sometimes do. But they may be deceitful.

Maybe we should see it as a two-way process? Personally, I find it hard to believe that a formal system for registering rights evolves out of nowhere, due to economic growth, unless somebody decides to work on establishing it. De Soto, on the other hand, could learn that the correlation between formal property rights and economic growth, which may be observable in Europe and USA in the time span of centuries, is not easily translated into short-term land policy interventions in developing countries. It may be more complex than that.

Photo of de Soto is from ILD.

Private Property Rights; Theory and Reality

One of the past week’s most interesting land rights news came from Denmark, my home country, where the newly appointed Minister for Development Cooperation, Soeren Pind, a known liberal, proclaimed that he would make respect for private property rights a cornerstone of Denmark’s development assistance.

In an interview in a Danish daily, Information, he explained that if a country is not interested in improving private property rights he sees no point in supporting it. Private property rights, he said, are a prerequisite for creating economic growth to the benefit of the poor.

The Minister’s announcement will without any doubt provoke left leaning NGO representatives and politicians. It will also raise protests from the group of land rights scholars who repeatedly have pointed out that the claim that formalisation (official recognition and registration of land rights) leads to economic growth and poverty alleviation is unsubstantiated.

Personally I look forward to follow the minister’s encounters with the reality in developing countries. Will the fact that all land in a country like Tanzania is owned by the President mean that Denmark, for decades a major donor in the country, pulls out? Or will the various Rights of Occupancy, which people can acquire in Tanzania, be good enough for the Minister? And I can not wait to hear how Tanzanian politicians on one hand will proclaim that Tanzania respects private property and, on the other, justify the country’s extensive use of land expropriations for private investments.

In Denmark Soeren Pind has been hailed for his courage to set a new agenda for Danish development assistance. The crucial question now is how his policies will be implemented in Denmark’s Programme Countries (who receive the bulk of Danish development assistance) and in the multilateral organisations it supports.

(Photo from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark)

EU aid and agricultural development

Underutilised land?

According to today’s Guardian the European Union now supports Kilimo Kwanza (Agriculture First), which is Tanzania’s president Kikwete’s plan for how the agricultural sector can contribute to economic growth in the country. The plan is a very long wish list of initiatives which should be initiated by state institutions to facilitate growth. I assume that all the prescribed initiatives are well intentioned and relevant.

One area which seems to be of particular importance in the plan is pillar number 5; land. In particular the issuance of titles is highlighted. Titles are thought to enhance growth because they can be used as collateral for loans, which can then be used for investments. The agenda has caused heated discussions among scholars. Personally I am more interested in whether it improves security of land ownership for the large majority of Tanzanians, who depends on access to land to farm.

Whereas the intended streamlining of land services may actually make it easier to acquire titles it does not necessarily make land more secure for the majority. That depends on the price of titles and on other government policies. Concerning the latter it may be worrying that “underutilised” land should be identified and allocated to a land bank for agricultural investment. Unless initiatives are targeted to improve the living conditions of the poor part of the population, it is not likely to benefit. For decades “land for investments” has been used as an excuse for evicting people from their land. Hopefully that will not be the case this time.

Back to the EU, I noticed that the EU Ambassador, who expressed his interest in supporting Kilimo Kwanza, highlights support to the road sector (!) and support to Tanzania’s national budget as examples, i.e. to sectors which the EU is supporting already. He does not bring new money. That is probably wise since it has recently been revealed that EU countries are not able to deliver the aid they have promised in 2010.