Land Affairs

Land Law Reforms as Cover-Ups for Land Grabbing? (2) Reflexions on Tanzania

Were the new wave land reforms introduced only to enable the elites in sub-Saharan African countries to legalise the grabbing of land? Based on my impressions from Uganda, I discussed the question in a previous blog post. I concluded that it could be the case. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why so little effort is put into making the new land administration services, prescribed by the law, available to the majority of the population.

In Tanzania, which I know better because this is where I did most of my field research, the situation is, in some ways, less clear. The issue of land grabbing is not really part of my PhD project (which is more about land administration). However, since a titling project had been carried out in one of the districts I have studied, I could not avoid digging into it. I have focused on the choice of pilot implementation districts. Here comes my reflexions.

Four larger pilot projects have been carried out in Tanzania. I have described some of the initial experiences in the Working Paper Tanzania’s Land Law Reform: The Implementation Challenge. I do not all of them in detail and I do not know a lot about all of the districts in which they were implemented. However, there seems to be a pattern in the choice of pilot districts. There seems to have been pre-existing commercial interests in the land in the chosen districts.

The first major project was carried out in Mbozi District by the Ministry of Lands. The official explanation that I have come across for the choice of Mbozi as a pilot project district is the district’s ‘commercial farming potential’. In Mbozi District, according to the report The State of the Then NAFCO, NARCO and Absentee Landlords’ Farms/Ranches in Tanzania by Chambi Chachage, there is a large, formerly state-owned, maize farm in the waiting to be privatised. There are also a number of coffee farms owned by the Mbozi District Council. Furthermore, according to Andrew Kiondo, in the book Agrarian Economy, State and Society in Contemporary Tanzania from 1999, there were reports of illegal land sales in that area in the 1980s (p. 48).Mzeri Village. The ranch is in the hills behind the village.

The second pilot was MKURABITA’s project in Handeni District It is a project I have researched quite a bit. The official explanation for the choice of Handeni District, according to Kosyando’s report Mkurabita and the Implementation of the Village land Law was that the district, due to a previous land use planning and forestry project funded by a German aid agency, had the equipment and knowhow to implement a pilot project.

I thought of a less noble explanation when I was there. The huge Mzeri cattle ranch (41,246 hectares) was being privatised - or subleased according to Chachage’s report - in the period. The then Prime Minister Lowassa (who was later fired because of corruption) got a big chunk of land there. So did the local MP. Accidentally, one of the pilot villages is situated right next to the ranch (see the map: the green area indicates the ranch, the blue area indicates the village) and people were evicted during the survey, when they were found to be living on land that had been allocated to the farm in the 1970s. When I asked, nobody in Handeni would confirm that the pilot had to do with the privatisation of the farm. Still, I found the correlation between pilot project implementation and privatisation remarkable.

The third pilot was carried out in Bagamoyo District. With its proximity to Dar es Salaam it is a much more urban setting and there is a pressure on the land because of the expansion of the city, but also because ‘it is an easy target for land based investments, such as biofuels’ (Kosyando’s Bagamoyo report p. 5). Apparently, there is no relationship between the pilot project and land privatisation. But again, there is a remarkable correlation in time between the MKURABITA project, carried out from September 2007 to February 2008 and a large Biofuels project in the district starting from January 2008. The biofuel project, thoroughly described in Kjell Havnevik’s chapter in the book Biofuels, Land Grabbing and Food Security in Africa and Chachage’s report Acquisition and Accumulation in Tanzania, had a Swedish investor and was to be carried out on 22,000 hectares of a large, idle, cattle ranch belonging to the Government of Zanzibar.  Havnevik describes how there was a ‘great confusion’ over what the project area entailed and that pastoralists and neighboring villagers used the land. Chachage also describes a number of smaller state farms in Bagamoyo which were to be privatized in the period from 2005 onwards.

The fourth – and by far the biggest – pilot project has been carried out in Babati and Bariadi Districts by the Ministry of Lands. I do not know much about these two districts. But again, there is a correlation between project and the privation of a farm, although it is not as clear as in Bagamoyo. The pilot was carried out from 2008 to 2010, whereas the Setchet Farm was privatized in 2005. I have also noticed the recent newspaper reports on tensions over the land. According to the Citizen’s article Envoy’s Fear on Babati Clashes 30 January, much of the land had allocated to settlers during colonial times, but was left idle, sold or taken over by the state after independence. Is this the land now being resurveyed as part of the pilot project and is that giving rise to the clashes in the area? I do not know. But the commercial interests in the land seem be the same in Babati as in the other pilot districts.

My conclusion on this? My conclusion, so far, is that the 1999 land law reform may result in Tanzania’s elite legalizing the land they have grabbed, but it is not the only purpose of it. There are other elements of the reform, for instance the land court system, which has greatly helped a lot of people in the country. The land use planning requirements also have some potential. And most of the pilot project outputs actually benefitted non-elites. The people I talked to who had received a customary title deed – a CCRO – were happy about having it.

Still, when it comes to the choice of pilot implementation districts, there is a remarkable correlation between the choice of pilot project sites and commercial interests in land, in particular linked to the privatisation of former state farms and ranches. A similar focus on the sale of former state farms to investors, by the way, can be found in the Tanzanian government’s prestigious SAGCOT agricultural growth corridor. Is it land grabbing? I am not sure. Some would argue that the transactions are illegitimate and that the land, when not used by the state, should be returned to the communities it was taken from. From their point of view it is land grabbing. From a strictly legal point of view, however, I guess there is nothing wrong with the re-surveying old boundaries and the selling of the land. What do you think?

How to stop land grabbing



Grab a piece

The heated debate about large-scale land acquisitions – also called the land grabbing debate – continues. Increasingly, it is also being informed by knowledge based on genuine empirical research. This week two major reports came out, Land Rights and the Rush for Land published by the International Land Coalition and Corruption in the Land Sector published by FAO and Transparency International. Both reports provide scary reading.

The report from the Land Coalition, written by renowned scholars, claims to be the most comprehensive study of large-scale land acquisition in developing countries to date. It describes a land market out of control with illegitimate investments on an unprecedented scale, and concludes that ‘there is little in the findings to suggest that the term “land grabbing” is not widely deserved.’ The poor are paying the price when they loose their access to land.

The report from FAO and Transparency International is no less alarming. But it is more oriented towards providing advice for interventions. It is possible, as I read the report, to do something to stop land grabbing. That has to do with the reasons why land grabbing has become possible in most countries in the first place. A not very surprising insight in the report is that ‘recent findings by TI (Transparency International, ed.) show that there is a very strong correlation between levels of corruption in the land sector and overall public sector corruption in a country.’

The obvious answer to the question, how to stop land grabbing, then, is to fight corruption. But that is easier said than done. A colleague of mine, Ole Therkildsen, keeps telling me that good governance and democratization are results of economic growth – not the other way around (read about it here). But I am afraid that the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, if they wait for the benefits of economic growth to reach them, will loose all their land in the meanwhile.

Another way to prevent land grabbing would be to ban land sales to foreign investors altogether, as is suggested by some NGOs. Personally, I am skeptical towards this option, not least because the ban primarily would apply to poor developing countries and, thus, probably be seen as some kind of neo-colonial intervention. Besides, if land deals are done properly, investments may benefit the development of more profitable agricultural sectors, also for the poor. A more viable way to prevent land grabbing is by establishing ceilings on land ownership, as I have suggested in another blog post.

Finally, there is the tiring work of reforming land governance, that is, the ‘rules, processes and structures through which decisions are made about the use of and control over land, the manner in which the decisions are implemented and enforced, and the way that competing interests in land are managed’ (quote from the FAO report). Required measures include recognition of customary rights to land, the strengthening of democratically elected local level land authorities, more accessible land court institutions, etc.

Probably, a combination of all these different measures are required. There is no easy way to stop the land grab.

Drivers of Land Grabbing and Large-Scale Land Investments

How about a shady contract?

I hate to admit it when I am wrong. But I have to. Some months ago, I wrote a blog post about land investments. Back then, I assumed that serious investors would prefer investments in well-governed countries with strong institutions, also at the local level, that could enforce property rights. I was wrong.

In a recently published Working Paper, What Drives the Global ‘Land Rush, Rabah Arezki, Klaus Deininger and Harris Selod conclude the opposite. And they base their conclusion on empirical research, not on assumptions. Had I been writing about foreign investments in general, I would have been right. In such cases the business climate matters. But when it comes to land, investors seem to prefer weak governance:

...in contrast to what is found for foreign investment more generally, rule of law and good governance have no effect on the number of land-related investment. Moreover, and counter-intuitively, we find that countries where governance of the land sector and tenure security are weak have been most attractive for investors (p. 3).

That does not mean that Sub-Saharan African countries should stop improving local governance of land. On the contrary. The authors demonstrate that if positive outcomes are to be produced, investors should fulfil specific requirements formulated by the state. In Peru, for instance, transparent auctions of large tracts of land, subsequently, brought large investments in horticulture and created many jobs.

Giving away land too cheaply or for free, on the other hand, as happens many places in Sub-Saharan Africa, is unlikely to bring any benefits to the local communities or to society at large. That was, by the way, also the conclusion of another report, What is in the Contract, published by Lorenzo Cotula earlier this year.

The problem, of course, is that countries with weak governance structures are unlikely to make such requirements and enforce them. And that the investors do not seem to care.

NB:
I am not sure that Tanzania should be categorised as a country with weak governance institutions. On the one hand, the Tanzania Investment Centre has complained that land laws are too strict, making it difficult to attract investors. On the other hand, when you read reports like Accumulation by Land Dispossession and Labour Devaluation in Tanzania from HAKIARDHI and Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa – Tanzania Country Report from the Oakland Institute, you get the impression that the country is an all-you-can-eat buffet for investors.

Agriculture, Inequality and Economic Growth

The market place coming to a town near you.

I am not an economist. Still, I find the discussions about economic growth in Africa interesting, not least because my field of study, land, is rife with theories about how land can and can not contribute to economic growth.

A very dominant theory among decision makers in Tanzania is the one about large-scale farming, which they see as a shortcut to economic growth. I am not able to tell if they are right or not. But I am quite sure that they should start focusing on Tanzania’s small-scale farmers, if they also aim at distributing the benefits of growth equally.

I write this, because I have just read a book published by the World Bank, Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent. It analyses the policies behind a number of development successes in Africa. Tanzania is such a success case because of macroeconomic stability. Tanzania’s economy has grown 6% on average since 1996. That is a number that would make most politicians in the rich world jealous. But Tanzania’s growth is not reducing poverty significantly.

The poverty rate in Tanzania was 38.6% in 1991, 35.6% in 2001 and 33.4% in 2007 according to this Twaweza publication. That is a very poor performance. It is hard to understand why the development has been that slow. But then, in the World Bank book one can read that Tanzania’s growth is driven mainly by services and industry. Agriculture did not contribute to growth. That is a problem, according to the authors, since most people in the country depend on agriculture: The limited contribution of agriculture - in a country whereabout three-quarters of the population resides in rural areas, where poverty is concentrated - is a concern (pp. 26-27). In other words, unless the Tanzanian politicians start focusing on improving the conditions of small-scale farmers, they are unlikely to reduce poverty levels significantly.

The book describes a couple of success cases where agriculture has contributed to economic growth. Malawi is one and Kenya the other. Their stories are quite different.

In 2005 the Malawian government, in response to severe food security difficulties, launched an input subsidy program. It provided vouchers for maize fertilizers to more than half of Malawi’s farm households and also distributed improved maize seeds and tobacco fertilizers. Subsequently, maize production is estimated to have increased by 26–60 percent, while food availability has improved and wages in the agricultural sector have increased.

The Kenyan story goes like this: around 1990, the Kenyan government liberalised the fertiliser market and donations by donors were phased out. The use of fertiliser, subsequently, doubled between 1992 and 2007. Much of the increased use was among smallholder farmers. Largely as a result of the increase in fertilizer usage, maize yields in Kenya increased 18 percent over 1997–2007.

Obviously, it must have been cheaper for the Kenyan government than for the Malawian to achieve the increase in production. That is part of the reason why the book’s authors like the Kenyan story better. Another reason is the more market-based Kenyan intervention (it is, after all, a World Bank publication).
What I find interesting about the Kenyan story is that fertiliser became much more accessible for most farmers after liberalisation. In some regions the average distance from the farm to the fertiliser seller was reduced from 15 kilometres in 1997 to around 4 kilometres in 2007. To me, the examples point to the importance of improving ordinary, small-scale farmers’ access: access to improved seeds, access to fertiliser, access to markets, etc.

It is possible, in other words, to improve agricultural growth without a narrow focus on large-scale agriculture. The measures described here are small, practical improvements, not the grand schemes, the distribution of tractors, and the focus on large-scale farming that Tanzanian decision makers tend to prefer (read a previous blog post about it here).

Small vs. Large-Scale Farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. A Verdict

Sufficiently efficient?

An implicit, but usually unstated, assumption of the current critique of new wave of land grabbing in Sub-Saharan is that small scale farming is socially more just and economically more efficient than large-scale farming. Subsequently even legal large scale land transactions are denounced as illegitimate land grabbing.

Large-scale farming, on the other hand, is preferred by many colonial and post-colonial governments alike, eager to attract investments. They believe that large-scale farming, often under the banner of ‘scientific agriculture’, is the only real shortcut to improving agriculture in their countries (see for instance  James Scott’s Seeing like State about the failures of the Ujamaa reforms and large-scale farming in Tanzania).

I have just read the Working Paper Experiences of Plantation and Large-Scale Farming in 20th Century Africa, which seeks to pass a verdict in the heated debate. Through a careful review of existing literature on large-scale farming and plantation farming from the first economic theories in the late 18th century up to scientific studies of the present the author, Peter Gibbon, concludes that both positions may be right. Previously, in the last half of the 20th century, scholars regarded small scale farmers as superior. That may be true any more, he writes, because of a combination of policy interventions and market developments:

The albeit unevenly rising productivity of LSF food and tobacco production in the settler economies from ca. 1960…relates to public interventions in the areas of credit, input supply and especially research and extension. These investments were racially skewed and costly – which in turn limited their lifespan. The high productivity characterizing LSF (Large-scale farming, ed.) production of higher value crops from the 1980s onward, in contrast, seems to have related to the advent of a new generation of investors and the establishment of new, relatively short global value chains linked to dynamic changes in demand in retail markets.

The lesson, in other words, is that adept policy makers can increase the productivity of large-scale farming. Policy makers can also influence the creation of jobs and the quality of jobs:
In short, productivity, employment generation and employment quality can all be subjected
to modification by policy – policies to support capital intensification, policies to promote farming of more labour intensive crops and policies of labour protection.

Peter Gibbon thus identifies ways to increase the benefits from large-scale farming. But he has not analysed whether similar interventions could enhance the productivity and wellbeing of small-scale farmers, who make up the majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is a shame. More attention should be devoted to supporting the activities of small-scale farmers. Not because they are more efficient, but because it will contribute to a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Land Markets

Above and below some impressions from Uganda where I am currently involved in a research project about land, land markets and economic growth. Land is increasingly becoming an investment object in many Sub-Saharan African countries. That is obviously also the case in Uganda. The photos show some of the negative consequences when land markets become too lively. I have not seen similar signs in Tanzania.

Good news from the Tanzanian Government?

It is not often that I praise the Tanzanian government. But good news appeared from there recently. Maybe. At a conference for land stakeholders the Minister of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, Mrs. Tibaijuka, decried the bitter conflicts between villagers and investors. Her comments were, I believe, aimed at the land grabbing debate. In order to end these conflicts, she said, according to an article in the Citizen, the Ministry of Lands had made rules to ensure that no land is allocated and no deals are made unless local representatives are made part of the process and play a part in signing the documents. If that means that the village authorities are guaranteed a role and final say in land deals, this is good news!

In a previous blog post I have written about the lack of sustainability which characterises deals made without proper involvement of the village authorities. I have also written about the amendments of the Village Land Act, currently underway, which are rumoured to aim at facilitating land deals by bypassing the villages authorities. If Mrs. Tibaijuka’s announcement means that the village authorities’ role in land deals will be strengthened, it is a new signal and a very positive one. But maybe that was not what Mrs. Tibaijuka meant. According to the article in the Citizen she said that local representatives should be made aware and play a part in the deals and then she continued: Councillors and MPs should attend all the meetings in which plans to offer land to an investor are discussed. They should comply with the plans before any deal is signed. But are district councillors and MPs ‘local representatives’ when it comes to land deals? I am not so sure.

What made the Village Land Act so significant, when it was passed in 1999, was the decentralisation of power over land to the village level authorities, that is, to the people living on the land. By then, Tanzania had witnessed several incidents of land grabbing where corrupt district leaders and district land officers had sold village land without consulting the communities. Some of these shady deals were documented in the reports by the Land Commission, headed by Professor Shivji. If the new system referred to by Mrs. Tibaijuka means that the village authorities will, now again, be bypassed when land deals are made, it is not a step forward. It is the opposite.

...and the Tanzanian Government’s Position on Land is...

It came the day after, actually, the government’s position on the land distribution issue I had asked for in my previous blog post. All the major English-language newspapers had it on their frontpages: PM rushes to the rescue of Sh48bn lands budget (the Citizen); PM allayes fears over land (the Guardian); PM defends large scale farmers (Daily News).

The newspapers reported that the Prime Minister had stepped into the parliamentary debate to support the minister of Lands, Anne Tibaijuka. He made it clear that large-scale farming is imperative for this country and that foreign investors play a key role in achieving this. This position is of no surprise, though, it could be deducted from previous government practices, but it has rarely been spelled out in the public.

With his comments the Prime Minister turned the debate into whether you are for or against foreign investors and economic development. That, however, is a bit beside the point. As I see it, the real question is which kind of foreign investments you are interested in attracting? As the recent report Land Deals in Africa: What’s in the Contracts? points out, if a land deal is to improve the living conditions at the local level, it should explicitly state so. It should also be very specific about what should be achieved in terms of job creation, training and infrastructure. Past experiences have shown that not all land deals bring development.

Personally, I believe that some kinds for large-scale investments may be beneficial, for instance contract farming, where the small-scale farmers keep the control over their land and receive inputs and training from investors. The large-scale land deals, on the other hand, which render more small-scale farmers landless than they create formal jobs, are unlikely to have a positive effect on local livelihoods.

This brings me back to the question of the distribution of land in this country. According the Guardian the prime minister proudly stated during the debate that all land in Tanzania will remain state property and that the government would not budge on this issue. However, that is of little comfort for the small-scale farmers and the pastoralists whose land has been expropriated by the government and sold off to investors. Do their rights to land not deserve similar guarantees from the government?

‘MPs accuse ex-presidents over land grabbing’

The debate about land in Tanzania has finally broken into the open. The above headline is a copy-pasted from today’s cover story in the Citizen. According to the article, members of the Tanzanian parliament accuse ex-presidents and former prime ministers for grabbing large chunks of land. For once, land is not covered as a small story about regularities in a remote district, hidden inside the paper. This story is front page and hits core land affairs issues. Both members of the opposition and the ruling party take part.

The rumours about leading politicians owning large tracts of land are not new. I have written about them in previous blog posts. But it is new that the debate addresses the issue directly. And it is new that it is debated openly in the parliament. They debate is likely to be heated.

Personally, as an academic, I find the land grabbing term imprecise because it bunches too many disparate phenomena together. For instance investments, which have followed all legal procedures, are put on an equal footing with outright illegal theft of land. Still, I find that the MPs and the press deserve applause for starting a serious debate about the distribution of land in this country. Irrespective of one’s position on the issue, the debate should be welcomed. It is high time. I look forward to the government’s response.

Secrecy in Lawmaking. Lessons from the drafting of Tanzania’s new constitution and the amendments of the land laws

NGOs working with land here in Tanzania are up in arms. There are rumours that amendments of the Village Land Act, which governs most land in the rural areas, are underway. As usual, it is hard to find out exactly what is on the table. Rumours are abound, but no one outside the government really knows what is coming.

The closest I have got is a summary of a speech, held by the Permanent Secretary in the Prime Ministers’ Office at a Tanzania-India Friendship Association Symposium, in which he evaluates the implementation of Kilimo Kwanza, President Kikwete’s pet project introduced two years ago to bring a Green Revolution to Tanzanian agriculture. I have been searching for the speech in its entirety but I have not, so far, been able to find it. So we shall have to do with the summary brought in the Guardians’ bimonthly Kilimo Kwanza section (I always wonder who pays for the publishing of that section, by the way. It should not be too cheap getting such praises of government initiatives printed).

So far, Kilimo Kwanza has not brought much new under the sun. It focuses on promoting mechanisation and large-scale investments in agriculture. That approach has been tested repeatedly by colonial and post-independence governments alike, but with very modest success, to put it mildly. The amendments to the Village Land Act seem to continue down the same beaten track. According to the Guardian the amendments are aiming to facilitate access to village land for agricultural investment (The Guardians’ Kilima Kwanza section, 5 July 2011, page 3).

NGOs have pointed out that unless Kilima Kwanza starts addressing the need of small-scale farmers, who make up the vast majority of farmers in Tanzania, the initiative is unlikely to bring much development (read some examples of the critique here and here). It has also been pointed out by a Swahili Street blog post that the approach, with its focus on delivery of tractors and power tillers, is top-down and does address the needs of most farmers.

But I am digressing; we should get back to the amendments of the land acts. They seem to be made in a similar top-down manner as Kilimo Kwanza. The government has come pretty far in the lawmaking process, with a draft currently being reviewed by the Attorney General. It seems get amended without prior public debate and without asking the NGO’s and experts working within the field for comments and advice. Secrecy is the preferred approach and that intrigues me a bit.

It reminds me of the process preparing for a new constitution for Tanzania, which came to a halt in April this year after fierce critique. The Constitution Review Bill, it turned out, did not provide for the involvement of Tanzanians in the drafting process. In the end, the government had to withdraw the bill. The quality turned out not to be good enough, I believe that some lessons could be learned from that story.

Land of Desperation

I recognise desperate people when I meet them. I have encountered quite a few during my research into land affairs in rural areas in Tanzania. Actually, I have come to see desperation as a very Tanzanian thing, on a par with Tingatinga paintings and Daladala taxis. Where I come from, people may get frustrated, but rarely are they desperate. But here...hui...!

I was reminded of the Tanzanian kind of desperation the other day, when I read the article District Officials Accused of Harassing Villagers in the Guardian (9 July). District officials and the district commissioner in Kilombero District, so the story goes, have given almost 10,000 hectares of land to an investor for sugar cane production. At least 10,000 people have been evicted. Now, the villagers who dare to protest are getting arrested on fabricated charges. Desperation sounds like this villager’s statement: We have got families, where should we go? The government should protect us, not alienate us.

For an outsider it is always difficult to know who is right and who is wrong in this kind of conflicts. It is, however, quite likely that there is something rotten going on in Kilombero. The land offices are generally seen as among the poorest performers when it comes to public sector service delivery in Tanzania. Corruption is rife. These are the conclusions in the report, National Governance and Corruption Survey, published by the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) earlier this year.

So what do ordinary Tanzanians do when the ones who were supposed to protect them betray them? They do not have many options. The judiciary is also corrupt, according to an article in the Citizen in the weekend. The Tanzanian Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance is not really functioning if you listen to the rumours here in Dar es Salaam. And it is hardly accessible for people in the rural areas anyway. To elect new local representatives for the district councils is also unlikely to make any difference because the heads of administration in the districts, the district commissioners and the district executive directors, are still, despite decades of decentralisation reforms, appointed by the central government.

So where do ordinary people go when the bureaucrats abuse power? They may go to the NGOs and they may try to attract to the attention of the media, as did the people in Kilombero District. But to be heard is not the same thing as getting justice. More local control over local affairs, including over the district bureaucrats, would probably help.

Property Hierarchies

My feminist friends talk about ‘white heterosexual men’ when they want to point out how certain traits in society favours some groups and disadvantages others (read examples of it here and here). I have come to realise that the perspective is also applicable to land affairs. Here, too, hierarchies are at play which structure access to land and property, though things, of course, are a bit more complex than the slogan indicates.

I realised that the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective was applicable within land and property studies, when I read a press release from European gay activists welcoming a communiqué by the European Commission on property rights of married couples and registered partners. The communiqué, so they argue, is breaking new ground because it treats homosexual couples and heterosexual couples equally when it comes to property rights. That has been a normal practice in countries in the northern part of the European Union for well over a decade now, but in some of the member countries in the eastern part of Europe, homosexuals still face discrimination when it comes to inheritance. There, a person may not inherit the partner’s property despite having shared a life together with him or her. A communiqué at the European level puts these people in a better position.

The situation of these homosexuals, in some ways, reminds me of the situation of women in some rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. They, too, face eviction or loss of property when their husbands die. Most of the new wave of land reforms, which have been carried out in many countries the last couple of decades, prohibit gender discrimination. But the traditional practices are often too strong and the laws are not implemented.

Pastoralists are also disfavoured in many African countries. The new book Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous, by Dorothy Hodgson, describes Tanzanian Maasai’s political struggles over the last couple of decades. One of the Maasias main aims has been to get recognised as a group with a specific culture and lifestyle. Another aim has been to find ways to protect their rights to land. The long history of land expropriations that pastoralist groups in Tanzania have experienced did not stop with independence. Post-colonial authorities continued the practice. At the same time, people from other parts of Tanzania now settle where the pastoralists used to graze their cattle. Land which is not under the plough is considered vacant and, thus, a potential object for farming and investment. In 2007, according to a memo quoted in the book, President Kikwete stated that the livestock keeping, using mobility as its key strategy, has no future for pastoralists in the country (Hodgson 2011, 172).

Tanzanian decision makers may be right that the pastoralist lifestyle is under threat. The competition for land is fierce. And pastoralists are, after all, also modernising. What makes their statements slightly problematic, however, is that they put the blame on the pastoralist instead of seeking to protect their rights to land. Most other groups in Tanzania, I believe, would get treated differently if their land was being taken.

That brings me back to the reason why I find the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective too simplistic. The people accumulating land in Tanzania are not all white. On the opposite. The investors I heard about during my research in Tanzania's rural areas were all elite Tanzanians from the major cities. And the Tanzanian decision makers, who are responsible for the policies which make the land alienations possible, are certainly not white. That was, indeed, also pointed out by two Ministers in the article Investment debate grows more fierce in the Guardian, on July 3rd, in which they made it clear that the formulation of the right policies is a Tanzanian responsibility. Finally, the ones benefitting from the current state of affairs may not even be male.

To focus on the privileges of ‘white heterosexual men’ is, in other words, misleading when it comes to land affairs. But, the perspective - that there is a hierarchy among groups, whose rights are not equally well protected – is still worth pursuing.

Property Hierarchies

My feminist friends talk about ‘white heterosexual men’ when they want to point out how certain traits in society favours some groups and disadvantages others (read examples of it here and here). I have come to realise that the perspective is also applicable to land affairs. Here, too, hierarchies are at play which structure access to land and property, though things, of course, are a bit more complex than the slogan indicates.

I realised that the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective was applicable within land and property studies, when I read a press release from European gay activists welcoming a communiqué by the European Commission on property rights of married couples and registered partners. The communiqué, so they argue, is breaking new ground because it treats homosexual couples and heterosexual couples equally when it comes to property rights. That has been a normal practice in countries in the northern part of the European Union for well over a decade now, but in some of the member countries in the eastern part of Europe, homosexuals still face discrimination when it comes to inheritance. There, a person may not inherit the partner’s property despite having shared a life together with him or her. A communiqué at the European level puts these people in a better position.

The situation of these homosexuals, in some ways, reminds me of the situation of women in some rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa. They, too, face eviction or loss of property when their husbands die. Most of the new wave of land reforms, which have been carried out in many countries the last couple of decades, prohibit gender discrimination. But the traditional practices are often too strong and the laws are not implemented.

Pastoralists are also disfavoured in many African countries. The new book Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous, by Dorothy Hodgson, describes Tanzanian Maasai’s political struggles over the last couple of decades. One of the Maasias main aims has been to get recognised as a group with a specific culture and lifestyle. Another aim has been to find ways to protect their rights to land. The long history of land expropriations that pastoralist groups in Tanzania have experienced did not stop with independence. Post-colonial authorities continued the practice. At the same time, people from other parts of Tanzania now settle where the pastoralists used to graze their cattle. Land which is not under the plough is considered vacant and, thus, a potential object for farming and investment. In 2007, according to a memo quoted in the book, President Kikwete stated that the livestock keeping, using mobility as its key strategy, has no future for pastoralists in the country (Hodgson 2011, 172).

Tanzanian decision makers may be right that the pastoralist lifestyle is under threat. The competition for land is fierce. And pastoralists are, after all, also modernising. What makes their statements slightly problematic, however, is that they put the blame on the pastoralist instead of seeking to protect their rights to land. Most other groups in Tanzania, I believe, would get treated differently if their land was being taken.

That brings me back to the reason why I find the ‘white heterosexual men’ perspective too simplistic. The people accumulating land in Tanzania are not all white. On the opposite. The investors I heard about during my research in Tanzania's rural areas were all elite Tanzanians from the major cities. And the Tanzanian decision makers, who are responsible for the policies which make the land alienations possible, are certainly not white. That was, indeed, also pointed out by two Ministers in the article Investment debate grows more fierce in the Guardian, on July 3rd, in which they made it clear that the formulation of the right policies is a Tanzanian responsibility. Finally, the ones benefitting from the current state of affairs may not even be male.

To focus on the privileges of ‘white heterosexual men’ is, in other words, misleading when it comes to land affairs. But, the perspective - that there is a hierarchy among groups, whose rights are not equally well protected – is still worth pursuing.

A Crash Course in Tanzanian Politics, Please!

Some days, I find reports on my desk which are so thick that I’m about to give up before opening them. In particular, scholars and activists working within the land grab business tend to produce this type of reports. It is as if they believe that the multitude of words, the length of the list of abbreviations, and the sheer number of pages can transmit the sufferings experienced by the local communities, whose land has been illegally acquired by investors or expropriated by the state.

The Tanzanian policy analyst, Chambi Chachage, has produced a couple of this kind of reports. I have had them on my desk for quite a while, wondering if I would ever get to read them. Over the last couple of weeks I did. It turned out to be rewarding and thought provoking reading.

Chachage sets himself the huge task of investigating what has happened to the state farms when privatisation of state assets started in Tanzania in the 1990s. In the report The State of the then NAFCO, NARCO and Absentee Landlords’ Farms/Ranches in Tanzania, co-authored by Richard Mbunda, he provides an overview of the fate of 34  NAFCO (National Agriculture and Food Corporation) farms and 13 NARCO (the National Ranching Corporation) farms, covering almost 550,000 hectares. The other report, Land Acquisition and Accumulation in Tanzania. The Case of Morogoro, Iringa and Pwani Regions, is an in-depth study of farms in selected districts.

The state farms were established in the 1960s and 1970s on land expropriated from large-scale settlers and small-scale farmers and pastoralists alike. Their establishment was part of an attempt to promote state-driven development of the country under the banner of African socialism.

Economically, the NAFCO farms never became viable. No wonder, then, that they were on the list of businesses to get privatised when the era of socialism was over. NARCO, on the other hand, still exists. That, however, has not prevented a number of its farms from being sold also. The outcome is a mixed picture of farms being kept by state authorities and farms sold or leased to private investors.

Some of the investors are foreigners, but land has also been acquired by public-private partnerships involving the Tanzanian state or by Tanzanian investors. One of the former state farms mentioned in Chachage’s reports is Mzeri, which is situated in one of Handeni Districts where I carried out much of my research. There, I was told, the local MP and a former Tanzanian prime minister have acquired large tracts of land.

When reading about these deals I understand Chachage’s indignation. The privatisation path chosen by the decision makers rarely benefits the local communities, whose land was expropriated in the first place. Often people, who have moved into land left vacant by ineffective state farms, are expelled a second time when land is privatised.

Chachage blames the World Bank and other foreign actors for propagating these privatisation policies and rightly so. After having finished reading his reports, however, I am left with a feeling that there is more to it than that. Privatisations can be carried out in different ways. I have the feeling that Tanzanian decision makers have a decisive say over how it is being carried out in Tanzania. Land could, as described by Chachage, be given back to the communities. That rarely happens. The Tanzanian decision makers choose to sell the former state farms to investors. When President Kikwete met local protests in an area which had been privatised he responded: I cannot repossess the farms and give them to you. They have already been divested... Let us stop lamenting and give the investors time to revamp wheat production. You had the opportunity when the farms were still government-owned but you failed to sustain them (Kikwete in Daily News 18 September 2008 according to Chachage).

The debate makes me realise that there is much I do not understand about Tanzanian politics. I do not understand why people keep electing representatives who seem disinterested in safeguarding ordinary people’s rights. Is it because their policies are thought to bring growth and prosperity and benefit the public in the future, as the quote by Kikwete suggests?

There may be good reasons why these policies are pursued. There may also be good reasons for why people keep electing the same representatives. I would be happy to learn more about them.

Land Reforms are Political Projects

The term ‘land reform' denotes a host of very different projects. The nationalisation of land in many African countries in the 1960s and 1970s was one type of land reform. The current redistribution of land in Zimbabwe and South Africa is another. It is pretty obvious that these reforms, which change the ownership of land, are inherently political.

There are also the new wave land reforms which have been initiated in a number of countries in Sub-Saharan the last two decades. Often they aim at recognising existing rights, and sometimes at facilitating registration and titling. There is a tendency to see these reforms as apolitical, technical exercises. They are not. They, too, are extremely political.

I have just read about the Russian land reforms which were carried out 1906-1910, ie. before the Russian Revolution, in a book about Danish-Russian relations during 500 years. The chapter about the land reforms analyses the role of C. A. Koefoed, a Danish farmer and agronomist, in these reforms. They were named the Stolypin Reforms after the then Russian Prime Minister, who was their main architect. Koefoed was made head of the implementation. The land reform exercise gained momentum after peasant uprisings in 1905 and it was meant to de-radicalise the peasant.

By then land was owned as common property. Families had individual use rights, usually for limited time periods. There were also communal grazing areas in the villages. It was Stolypin’s hope that by giving peasant private ownership over land they would become more engaged in optimising their farms and less engaged in revolutionary politics.

Koefoed had campaigned for this type of reform for almost 25 years. He had lived in Russia since 1878 and it had become his new fatherland. Based on his knowledge about Danish land reforms a hundred years earlier, he knew that productivity could be raised significantly when farming land was individualised. In the first years, his points of view were not welcome in Russia. The common property character of peasant land was seen as a valuable, egalitarian, Russian institution. Koefoed therefore started looking for areas where peasant themselves had managed to divide the land. He analysed the areas and publicised findings, which showed the advantages of private property.

The Stolypin reforms gave the peasants the same rights as other people in Russia. After the reforms, a peasant could demand to get a piece of land and a title deed. The common grazing areas were also divided into individual plots. Furthermore, peasants got the right to sell their land and leave the villages. The flip side of this development was that the weaker peasants could loose out. If a farmer sold his land, his family risked having no other means to make a living. Proletarisation would ensue.

In Tanzania there were similar discussions before the 1999 land law reform was passed. The recommendations by the Presidential Land Commission in 1992 aimed at making it extremely difficult to sell land. It was meant as a safeguard against land grabbing, which was already flourishing by then. But these restraints also limited the individual farmers’ right to sell his land and, thus, his or her ability to move. Not all of the recommendations became law. Some did, however, and today there are several regulations which restrict land sales (see for instance page 45-46 in Liz Alden Wily’s Community-based Land Tenure Management).

There seems to be a trade-off between the dynamics created by individual land ownership and social equity. There are, thus, good reasons why land reforms are so heatedly debated. Reforms are not mere technical exercises. The reform design matters and restrictions to protect the rights of vulnerable groups may be required. Even impeccable land laws are likely to produce winners and losers. Land reforms are political projects with profound political implications.

NB: The implementation of the Stolypin reforms stopped with the Russian Revolution in 1917. From 1929 land was collectivised and the peasants lost the control over it. Many of the farmers, who had received individual titles, were declared kulaks. Subsequently, they were harassed and often deported. Millions died.

Poster from: Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.

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 Policies – do they Matter?

The fuss about land grabbing in Sub-Saharan Africa is understandable. A comparison has shown that the amount of land being transferred is often smaller than reported in the media. Still, the scale of large-scale land acquisitions is breathtaking. Even the liberal magazine the Economist indicates that the time may be up for more regulation. In the article When others are grabbing your land it describes how land deals rarely deliver the benefits they promised.

But whereas activists are right in ringing the alarm bell, the solutions they suggest may not solve the problem. It became clear to me during the conference Africa’s resources – Lions on the move in Copenhagen, earlier this month. There, during his presentation, Lorenzo Cotula, author of the report Land Deals in Africa: What is in the Contracts?, made it clear, that despite the land policy reforms which have been carried out in Sub-Saharan Africa the last couple of decades, the issue of compensation has not been seriously addressed: '…even in those countries where legislation is perceived to be particularly progressive, safeguards within the context of land takings may be weak. And not just because land deals are new – takings have been going on for many years for mining, petroleum, roads, etc.'

Lorenzo Cotula points to a more general problem of loopholes in the legal frameworks in many countries. Therefore, an outright ban on large-scale land transactions, as has been proposed by some activists, is unlikely to solve the problem. It would not address the other types of expropriations which are taking place and it would probably be difficult to enforce.

Policies which ensure compensation in case of expropriation, on the other hand, would be a step forward in protecting people’s rights to land. Ceilings on land purchases and land ownership may also be effective measures. In Brasil, large-scale foreign land acquisitions stalled once such a measure was implemented, according to a recent investment report. I would argue that the ceiling should be for foreign and domestic investors alike. To the locals it does not matter whether land is being bought by a foreign or a domestic investor. The damage they do is the same.

Better land policies may not in themselves solve the problem. As pointed out in a comment to a previous blog post, the question of access to justice and the enforcement of decisions remain crucial. But better land policies would provide a good point of departure.

Through Investors' Eyes. Land Acquisitions Revisited

A good investment?

A change of perspective on land acquisitions in developing countries can be healthy. I was exposed to the views of a potential investor recently, which made me adjust my way of thinking. Maybe the interests of investors may not be that different from the populations in developing countries? Investors – the serious ones – are also interested in strong, accountable institutions which can provide secure and stable access to land.

The one making me think about land acquisitions anew was the fiancé of a female friend of mine; a professional investor. A couple of weeks ago I had shared a newspaper article on my Facebook wall about an African continent on its way to becoming an economic super power with high economic growth rates.

The fiancé-cum-investor let me know, through his girlfriend, that I should not invest in Africa. The risk of loosing money there was too high. But I was also told that if I really wanted to pursue the idea of investing in Africa he knew of a company in Congo, a palm oil producer, with an option on 100,000 ha of arable land, which was worth considering. The company promised high average returns. High returns, if I understand investors correctly, can compensate for running big risks.

I was a bit baffled by his suggestion. First of all, I do not have the money to invest. And even if I had had the money, I would not invest in a palm oil producer in Congo. I am not really the gambling type of guy. Still, I got inspired by the suggestion. It made me wonder how investors think.

If I were an investor, I would find an investment in a company in Congo with an option on 100,000 ha of arable land extremely risky. Maybe the number of land acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa is on the increase. But so is the number of deals being cancelled. In Tanzania, a story about South Koreans investing in large-scale rice farming keeps circulating. But if there ever was a deal, it has also been cancelled several times (read about it here). In 2009, a sale of land in Madagascar fuelled a rebellion against the incumbent government. That deal was also cancelled (read about it here). Vast tracts of land in Sub-Saharan Africa are transferred to investors without ever being utilized, often because the projects stall after encountering local resistance.

Add to that the potential ethical aspect, which also plays a role for modern investors. What will happen to the ones living on those thousands of ha, once the palm oil producer decides to expand its production? A report by the World Bank from 2010 showed that investments in countries with weak laws and weak institutions – and I imagine civil war-torn Congo is such a country – are unlikely to benefit people at the local level.

A solution to the ethical problem could be to prohibit foreign land acquisitions completely. Some civil-society groups have suggested this recently (read about it here). I do not believe, however, that it will solve the problem for the local poor since it does not address the problem of large-scale domestic land acquisitions, which can be equally damaging. It could also make it more difficult to set up industries, businesses, etc. in these countries in general, which would be damaging to the economy.

I find the investor perspective intriguing. Because it makes it clear how difficult it is for businesses, foreign and domestic businesses alike, to operate in many African countries. Last week, Tanzania’s President Kikwete tried to address the problem by assuring investors that the country would maintain its investor-friendly policies (read the article in the Citizen here). But in the case of Tanzania, I believe that the president may be part of the problem. The large-scale land acquisitions in Tanzania have often been made possible by the government’s expropriations of land. An investor would wonder whether a future Tanzanian president could expropriate his land holdings as easily as land has been expropriated in the past. Stephen Johnston from the Canadian fund manager Agcapita, in an article in the Wealth Report 2011, produced by Knight Frank and Citi Bank, recently stated that 'I don’t think you can make a long-term case for investing in developing countries. Poor people vote and politicians listen. At some point, somebody will get elected who will nationalize farmland’. According to the same article, investors see most African countries as ‘a potential Zimbabwe’. The lack of stable institutions and checks and balances, in other words, reduces tenure security, not only for the poor, but for all.

A different way of addressing insecure land rights would be to strengthen the capacity of the local authorities and citizens and increase their role when land deals are made. Maybe the parliaments should also be given a larger role in controlling the deals. The power of the executive should be diminished correspondingly, and the huge, surreal, transfers of land should be stopped (maybe ceilings on land purchases would work?). Interestingly, the interests of serious investors, in strong institutions and in a system with more checks and balances, may not be very different from the interests of ordinary Africans.

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.

Change the word ‘native’ with ‘pastoralist’...

It has been noticed by several scholars that when it comes to rights to land, the change from colonial authorities to post-colonial governments in Tanzania may not be so big. Authorities, then and now, have an extreme focus on large-scale farming and on ‘putting land into productive use’. In Thomas Spear’s book Mountain Farmers, about Arusha and Meru farmers on Mount Meru, there is a quote from a Confidential Colonial Government Circular from 1935, which illustrates the point:

While we seek to safeguard native rights, no one, simply by virtue of being a native, has the right to land, which neither her nor the community to which he belongs, has occupied continuously in recent times... Where there is congestion of native population in one area and ample room for expansion in another, there is a moral, though not a legal, obligation resting upon Government to (grant) all such expansion; but it must be strictly controlled, for otherwise Government will lose the power, which is its main duty to maintain, of utilising selected portions of the unoccupied land for the benefit of others whose claims are worthy of consideration on public ground. If, for example, area A is thickly populated by an agricultural community of natives and area B is lightly populated and suitable for the growing of valuable crops, a native A has no more right, legal or moral, than a good settler to occupy the best land... (p. 181).

Try change the word ‘native’ with ‘pastoralist’ and you will get the point. If the government sees that land can be put into more productive use, it will do so. In the colonial times, land was given to settlers. Now it is given to domestic or foreign investors. Existing rights to land may be protected de jure, but in reality they are often not. The approach has lead to considerable alienation of land in rural areas, but, so far, not to many large-scale farming successes.

At the local level this approach has meant that ‘the government’ is, still, often seen as the major threat to tenure security by pastoralists and small-scale farmers.

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.

Are Tanzanian Farmers Stupid?

A Tanzanian farmer on his power tiller.

The advices given to small-scale farmers sometimes make we wonder what planet Tanzania’s politicians and the public officials are from. I thought of it again this morning when I came across an article in the Citizen, inspired by a District Commissioner in Mvomero District, who was complaining about farmers being backward. Allegedly they prefer the hand hoe over using a power tiller when preparing their fields. Therefore, so the story goes, the farmers are to blame for the failure of the President’s high profile initiative to increase agricultural production, Kilimo Kwanza.

Tanzanian farmers may be conservative. But to my knowledge, they are not stupid. Based on my intuition, being the son of a farmer myself (though not a Tanzanian one), I shall suggest that the district commissioner takes a closer look at the economy of the farmers in her district. Farmers where I come from, being confronted with new government schemes, usually ask, whether they pay off. I imagine that Tanzanian farmers may ask the same question. They do, after all, not farm for President Kikwete. They farm for themselves and their families.

Farmers may have good reasons for not using power tillers. I can think of several reasons; they cannot afford the fuel; it is cheaper (for those who can afford it) to hire manual labourer; their plots of land are too small; the risk is too high. Concerning the latter, I would suspect that the risk is quite high. In case a power tiller breaks down in a remote area, a farmer may have to wait long for spare parts. Maybe there is no fuel around. In case of drought he or she may loose a big investment. Etc.

In a remote village I once visited, I was told that the district agricultural extension officer had passed by recently. He had advised people to use tractors. I was amazed. The previous year, that village had been hunger struck because of draught. Their biggest problem was water. Or the lack of drought resistant crops. Or the bad road, which made it difficult for them to get to town with their produce…

If you ask small-scale farmers in Tanzania what they need the most to increase their production, they would probably make a long wish-list before they started thinking of power tillers and tractors. It could be an interesting exercise by the way. What would happen if politicians and public officials started asking farmers what they need instead of telling them what to do?

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?

Land Conflicts in developing and developed countries. What is the difference?

I was in Iceland to celebrate New Year’s Eve with some friends. Up there, I was reminded of the fact that conflicts over land use and land ownership are not only a developing country phenomenon. Nor are various kinds of communal land ownership unknown in Europe, though we tend to forget it.

My host, an Icelandic farmer, told me about his grievances with Icelandic state authorities over grazing land. A government committee is currently attempting to clarify land ownership in Iceland, especially in the highlands, following the adoption of a law (see page 17 on this link) which states that the Icelandic state owns all land that individuals can not legally uphold their claim for.

The aim of the law is to twofold: to protect the environment and to secure that natural resources found in those areas will benefit the public. I do not think that a change in ownership status will make any difference to the farmers’ use of land. They will probably still have the right to graze it. Still, everybody is searching for all kinds of old documents which can somehow proof that they or their forefathers somehow have had earned a right to the land. My friend and his fellow farmers have the feeling that the state is taking something away from them.

His story reminded me of something which I tend to forget: that conflicts over land use and land ownership is not a developing country phenomenon only. We have conflicts over land in Europe too. We also have common pool resources; pastures, oceans, etc. Actually, one of the reasons why I find the study of land management systems in Tanzania fascinating is because it makes me look at my own society with fresh eyes.

It occurs to me, though, that European conflicts often differ from the ones I have met in African countries. In Europe, we may no to the same extent have elements of personal gains and losses which decisively influence individuals’ and communities’ incomes and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa. In north-western Europe land use conflicts usually involve the state and evolve around issues other than ownership.

An example of this type of land use conflicts, can be found in a marsh area, Tøndermarsken, in the south-western part of Denmark. In that area farmers and public authorities have been fighting for more than thirty years over how to use the land. The traditional farming system, with farmers associations regulating grazing and the water levels in the canals, has created an ecosystem which provides the basis for a fantastic bird life. But modern farming techniques, with intensive cultivation, now threaten that ecosystem. In order to protect the birds, the Danish Ministry of the Environment has increasingly sought to regulate how the area should be farmed; the water level in the channels; the type of crops grown in the fields; the density of animals, etc. The Marsh farmers, on the other hand, feel that they are loosing the control over their land, which farmers won some 200 years ago when farming and land ownership got more individualised in Denmark.

The conflict in Tøndermarsken is not about ownership ‘classic’. Still, the new environmental regulation completely changes the meaning of ownership. In a condensed form the conflict in Tøndermarsken shows us what has happened with governance of agricultural land in Denmark during the last thirty to forty years.

Sometimes I have this feeling that our categories of land and land rights deceive us. We often focus on one category, private property rights for instance and tend to forget all the other types of ownership and use rights. You may see that when you learn about systems in other countries. Are they not all equally fascinating and worth studying?

Iceland photo by Ragnar Th. Sigurðsson, with permission from www.visiticeland.com
Tøndermarsken photo by Jon Detlefsen, www.marsken.dk

Are they Crooks? Reflections on African politicians

Some months ago Chambi Chachage and Swahili Street started a debate on this blog about how to understand the lack of implementation of the Tanzanian land law reform. It started off as comments on one of my blog posts about land investments, but evolved into a debate about conspiracy theories.

The question of how to interpret the lack of implementation of land reforms is not only an issue here on this blog. It is a recurrent theme in much literature about land in Sub-Saharan African countries. A large group of scholars tends to see everything related to land in the light of informality, corruption, and politicians’ illegal practices. I have met quite a few NGO representatives who adhere to the same views. Take a look at this website about land grabbing, and you will find plenty of it.

The reason why I touch upon the issue again is because I have just read the book The Politics of Property Rights Institutions in Africa by Ato Kwamena Onoma who addresses the question directly. He sets out to investigate the truth behind some of these conspiracy theories. He does not decide whether the theories are right or wrong. As a true academic he states that things are more complex. He does make us wiser, though.

In a series of case studies from Botswana, Kenya and Ghana, Onoma investigates the role of politicians in strengthening or undermining land administration institutions in those countries. He does identify incentives for politicians to undermine institutions. Leaders whose power positions are insecure, for instance, often prefer weak institutions because poorly secured property rights allow them to redistribute land and resources to their followers. Thus, they can strengthen their own positions. Conversely, politicians, whose positions rely on a strong business sector which makes productive use of land, for instance through agriculture, tourism or mining, have incentives to strengthen land administration systems which secure businesses’ rights to land.

The most interesting about Onoma’s book, however, is his conclusion. He states that incentives to be corrupt do not automatically lead to corruption. Politicians are not necessarily crooks, even if we can identify incentives which indicate that they could make gains by being crooks. We can only establish whether they are crooks by studying their actions.

Personally I think that non-implementation of land reforms often has more to do with a lack of capacity than with bad intentions. It may merely be bad planning when politicians pass a law without having made any plans for how to implement it. It may be outright stupid when they, like politicians did in Tanzania in 1999-2001, pass an ambitious land reform without a plan for how to implement it. And then, when they make the plan, only allocate 3 billion out of the 300 billion shilling which are required for its implementation. But it does not make them crooks.

Only if they or their followers take advantage of non-implemented laws, for instance by grabbing land which should have been protected by the law but is not, should they be looked upon as crooks.

I am convinced that some politicians are crooks. But I do not think that all politicians are. This conclusion, by the way, is so self-evident that it would not be interesting if it was not for all the conspiracy theories about land and politics in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Habari Nzuri ! Progress in the Fight against Corruption in Kenya

It is difficult to understand a country from the outside. This is not least true in African countries (I apologise for this generalisation) where political life is usually so rife with rumours, speculations, and conspiracy theories, that it may even be difficult to know what is going on when you are in the country.

Still, it appears to me that there is something encouraging going on in Kenya at the moment. The last couple of weeks I have read a number of stories in the press about corruption cases against high-ranking politicians. All are being investigated and many are related to land:

28 October the Daily Nation wrote that Nairobi Mayor Leaves Office Over Corruption Charges, related to the public purchase of cemetery land.

27 October you could read an article, also in the Daily Nation, announcing that Foreign Affairs minister Moses Wetang'ula had been forced to step aside because of involvement in irregular purchases or sales of embassies in Japan, Nigeria, Belgium, and Pakistan.

20 October Business Daily announced that Higher Education Minister William Ruto had been suspended by President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga. The minister, allegedly, has received money to facilitate the sale of ungazetted forest land to Kenya Pipeline Company.

According to the Director of Kenya's Anti-Corruption Commission, Prof Lumumba, more ministers are under scrutiny. There seems to be a pattern. The question is, of course, which kind of pattern. I do not know much about Kenyan politics. I do know, however, that the latter accused, William Ruto, made himself deeply unpopular among his government colleagues by campaigning for a no to the new constitution earlier this year. Could charges be politically motivated and not raised as a consequence of the fight against corruption? I do not know.

Still, I find any prosecution better than no persecution. Kenya, after all, slid further down in this year’s Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International http://www.transparency.org/, from number 146 in 2009 to number 159 in the world in 2010.

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.

Land and investments in agriculture

It can be a bit confusing to follow debates about land and investments in land. On the one hand you hear about land grabbing and land acquisitions for investments in large-scale farming in rural areas. On the other hand you hear investors complain about laws which are too strict and hinder investments. Can both be true?

The last couple of weeks I have had an article from the Citizen with the heading Farming Still Attracts few Investors on my desk, and I have struggled to make sense of it. It is an interview with the executive director, Emmanuel Ole Naiko, from Tanzania Investment Centre. He complains that it is hard to make land available for investments because The Village Land Act of 1999 renders it difficult to get it out of village control and onto the land market. According to him, too many meetings with villagers and too complex procedures are prescribed.

Mr Naiko’s statements to the Citizen largely correspond with my observations from the countryside; the land acts, when it comes to large-scale investments, provide a pretty good protection of the villager’s rights to land. According to the law, the local village authorities have a big say in managing village land and the villagers also get consulted (to some extent at least).

But that, of course, requires that the law is implemented on the local level; that villagers know their rights and control their leaders, that local leaders get trained in the procedures, and that legal institutions are easily accessible to enforce rights if they are violated. If these things are not in place (and in most villages they are not), local leaders and public officials can cooperate to bypass the administrative procedures prescribed by the land acts.

It is my impression that irregularities occur. But it is also my impression that they do rarely occur on a very large scale. Often land is given to local wabwana kubwas, big men like bank directors, district commissioners, and MPs, who can get away with semi-illegal transactions as long as they do not overdo it. Most of the large scale land grabbing I have heard of stem from the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. from before the passing of the village land act.

The above are reflections based on my impressions from talks with villagers, NGOs and local leaders and from newspaper articles - land grabbing and land investments are not the focus of my study and I have not investigated the phenomena systematically. I may be wrong?

The land question in Sub-Saharan Africa

There is not one land question in Sub-Saharan Africa! That is an established truth among land rights scholars. They regularly state it to challenge one-size-fits-all solutions within the land sector; universal titling, nationalisations, privatisations, collectivisations, etc. Problems related to land, they argue, are diverse and context specific. What is the right solution in one country at a certain time may be fatal in another.

Similarly, I have regularly been told that, when it comes to land, Tanzania is not Kenya. The ones telling me so are Tanzanians, who wish to underline the difference between the two countries when it comes to inequality. In Kenya there is a conspicuous correlation between possession of political power and land ownership. The leading politicians are also among the biggest land owners in the country.

Tanzania is different, I am told. Primarily because the first President, Julius Nyerere, restricted politicians’ and ministers’ involvement in business. But the more I learn about recent developments in the Tanzania, the more I am convinced that the story of Tanzanian equality has become a myth. This week the Citizen brought an article about villagers in Mvomero District who complain about Frederick Sumaye, Prime Minister from 1995 - 2005, who owns a large piece of land in their area.

During my research in two districts I have come across another former Prime Minister owning large tracts of land, and I have also heard of several MPs and a former President owning land on a large scale. I have come across these findings by pure coincidence; because it is not my field of study, I have not even been looking for this kind of large scale land ownership.

Of course Tanzania is different from Kenya. But when it comes to the convergence between political power and land ownership the difference may be smaller than what is commonly believed.

Sikujua (I didn’t know)

Bare land outside Arusha.

The first times I heard about people buying land illegally in my case villages in Tanzania, I imagined shady businessmen and corrupt public officials and politicians looking for a quick win. But I have come to realise that a lot of middle- and upper class Tanzanians take part in the scramble for land. I have had research assistants - young, smart, city-born university students - talking about buying land. And I have met people working in ministries, private companies, and NGOs, owning fields and forests. I am always surprised by this interest in rural areas; why?

In Denmark you may find people dreaming of owning a house and living a quiet life on the country side. But unless they are hunters, farmers, or born on the country side themselves, no one talks of owning land just for the sake of it.

Yesterday, having given a lift to a friend, who then asked me to stop on the way to pick up two sacks of maize from her farm, I realised that some people actually acquire land in order to farm it and supplement low salaries with cheap food. There is probably also a great deal of insurance-thinking behind the land acquisitions; after having experienced several economic downturns, people in developing countries see land as a safe haven for the next time the times are changing. In his fantastic book Expectations of Modernity James Ferguson describes how those families in Zambia’s crisis-hit mining towns who did reasonably well during the economic downturn of the 1970ies, were the ones with good connections to their rural relatives, who, then, provided access to land and income when jobs in the mining sector disappeared. Finally, some buy land for investment purposes, either to produce cash crops or because they expect that prices on land will continue to rise in the future.

But town-dwellers are not always good farmers. Outside of Arusha, to the south towards Simanjiro, there is an area which the locals call Sikujua, which, in English, means I didn’t know. This area, so the story goes, has been bought by wealthy people from Arusha as an investment. They planned to produce turn the area into a farming area from which they could annually harvest maize and other cash crops. But they never managed to harvest anything; it practically never rains in the area and, therefore, nothing grows. They had bought the land not knowing that it was useless for farming. Sikujua; I didn’t know.