Land Affairs

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.

Christiania - The Anthropologist’s Dream

Sitting in my office every day, reading and writing, I tend to forget that my own town, Copenhagen, can be as exotic and fascinating as can the Tanzanian countryside. Almost. Big was my surprise the other day when I arrived at work, opened my computer, and found an email from a colleague in my inbox asking me for the names and contact addresses of anthropologists researching Copenhagen land affairs. Not being an anthropologist myself, I do not know that many anthropologists. And I am not sure that I would refer to an anthropologist, if I knew one. Anthropologists, as I see them, make the world larger, but they rarely make things clearer. But I am digressing...

I do not know of anyone researching land issues in Copenhagen. I did not even think of land issues as a research topic in this orderly capital of Denmark. Land affairs here got institutionalised centuries ago. Actually, I just read an old book which describes how the king gradually got more and more control over land back in the 16th century. He made sure that all land in the realm got registered in jordebøger (land books) in order to collect his land rents from the nobility. Anthropologists back then, had they existed, would probably have engaged in lengthy academic discussions about the pros and cons of registering land in that particular way. Most anthropologists, had they existed, would spend years on the Danish countryside doing fieldwork, describing the traditional, and therefore superior, systems for handling land (these systems, by the way, had been invented by the nobility not that long before to make sure that they got their taxes from the farmers. But I am digressing....).

I did not, in other words, understand why my colleague asked for anthropologists. But now, after having read some newspaper articles about the latest developments in the ongoing conflict between Christiania and the Danish government, I understand why. Christiania is a semiautonomous part of Copenhagen, a former military area, which was occupied by the hippies when the military left in 1971. They founded a ‘fristad’ – a freetown – beyond the control of the Danish state.

The centre-left parties, which made up the majority in the Danish parliament in most of the 1970s, accepted Christiania as a social experiment. But the right wing parties never really liked the phenomenon. First, the right-wingers found, one should not accept that the Christianits never paid for the property they occupied. Second, the right-wingers never came to appreciate the alternative lifestyle in this liberated zone. The direct democracy, the lack of formal decision making structures, and the common ownership were appalling features, they thought, in the middle of the country’s capital (not to speak of cannabis, free love, and the breakdown of respect for authorities...actually I sometimes wonder if the right-wingers ever came to like the 1970s? But I am digressing…).

In fact, no right wing party in this part of the world can encounter a common pool resource (as this kind of communal property is termed academically) without wanting to privatise it. And that is, exactly what Denmark’s current right wing government has been trying to do the last decade. First it aimed at normalising Christiania by making it obey to the same rules and regulations for land use plans, buildings, roads, etc., which apply for the rest of the country. Then, the government suggested selling the area. Now, according to an article in the Danish daily, Politiken, the people living in this green oasis, around a thousand persons in total, have decided to buy the area, which they have occupied for free during the last 40 years, from the state.

According to another Politiken article, however, the Christianits set certain conditions for buying the place. One contentious issue, of course, is the price. Another even more contentious issue is whether Christiania should be able to deny people from outside Christiania the right to move in. The Christianits, seemingly, aim at keeping some kind of communal ownership of the area. But they wish to have a word to say over who can move in. It would not make sense, their lawyer says, that some political hothead, who is against the existence of Christiania, can move in and thereby work against the social, cultural and economical structures we all care about.

The conflict about the ability to exclude outsiders reflects a classic debate within natural resource management studies. In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article, The Tragedy of the Common, in which he argued that open access to resources, for instance a grazing area in Africa, would inevitably lead to depletion of resources. The solution to the problem, he argued, was either privatisation or state control. The American political economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has subsequently spent most of her academic life pointing out that Hardin and consorts are wrong. There is a third option, she argues, namely that of common property. It is far more common than we tend to believe. And for some resources, for instance the oceans, forests, and inhospitable desert areas, some kind of common property regime may be more effective in managing resources than the market or the state.

Anthropologists really like Ostrom. Inspired by her, anthropologists have identified numerous tribes in developing countries who manage natural resources through a common property regime. These traditional, common property regimes, they claim, are much more effective than other types of regimes (irrespective of the fact that the native communities appear to be gradually loosing their access to resources most places. But I am digressing...).

I am certain that the anthropologists will also like Christiania. The Christianits, however, should see that as a warning sign. Anthropologists typically prefer tribes, whose traditional lifestyles are threatened by the development. Christiania, for sure, is much more exotic now, in all its anarchy, than it will be if the community gets a title deed and the right to fence off the entire area.

(Photo1: Bent Næsby. Photo2: Nicolai Perjesi. With permission from VisitDenmark)

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 and Sexual Violence (4). A Report from Cote d’Ivoire...

People on the run from the severe post-election fighting. March 2011. © Alexis Adélé/IRIN.

This week, a report appeared about the use of sexual violence as part of the post-election conflict in Cote d’Ivoire. Again, there seems to be some kind of relationship between political conflict, land, and rape as a weapon of war.

In Cote d’Ivoire, the atrocities started in November 2010 when the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down after having lost the national elections (read about the conflict here). Soon, what started off as a dispute over the election outcome activated ethnic and religious cleavages.

According to the report from the UN news agency, IRIN, there is a link between ethnicity, land and sexual violence:
Most refugees are reporting that the violence is ethnically and politically driven, say NGOs and rights groups. The political fault-lines in this region are largely along ethnic and religious grounds. Violence in the west has also been linked to longstanding clashes over land that have pitted local communities against outsiders. Waines, just back from talking to refugees in Nimba Country, said: “There is a large ethnic dynamic to this violence - targeted ethnic killings and attacks are driving the dynamic.”

The article only reports that these crimes have taken place. Unfortunately, it does not provide much insight into the behind lying ethnic conflicts and exactly how they relate to land issues.

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.

Demand-driven or Donor-driven Land Reform?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agricultural Productivity a Threat to Women’s Land Rights

A threat to productivity?

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

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

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

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

Land and sexual violence (3)

In previous blog posts, I have written about rapes related to major conflicts over land and in land conflicts at the local, everyday level. I was reminded about the link between land and sexual violence again this week when reading about Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform.

According to the book Gender and Land Reform - the Zimbabwe Experience by Allison Goebel, election campaigns and the land seizures were accompanied by state-sanctioned rape:

...state-sanctioned violence that accompanied the 2003 pre-election campaign, the presidential elections, and the seizure of white-owned farms has taken an especially heavy toll on women and children. It is alleged that wives and daughters who sympathized with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) or who were connected to MDC supporters, as well as women farm workers were victimized by ZANU youth brigades. Although the youth brigades were particularly intent on silencing vocal opposition to the ruling party, who were disproportionately male, there was a clear gendered dimension to their violence. Women believed to be associated with the opposition were not beaten, but were instead often raped or gang raped by members of the youth brigades and state functionaries (Mary J. Osirim according to Goebel).

Though she mentions it, the author does not elaborate much on the relationship between land and the use of sexual violence in Zimbabwe. This, again, brings me back to the curious fact that so little research has been carried out into the topic…

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?

Zimbabwe’s land reform. Myths and Surprising Realities...

Land affairs can be intriguingly complicated. Land reform debates, on the other hand, are often remarkably predictable. Once you know a person’s view on formal titling, you know the rest. Sometimes, however, a new article or a new book appears that differs. Based on empirical research it challenges your preconceived opinions. It happened to me this week when I got hands on the book Zimbabwe’s Land Reform, Myths and Realities.

First, whereas most writings about land reform are based on predictions about reform outcomes, this book analyses a land reform post facto. Second, the book does not aim at debating pros and cons of titling. Instead, it asks which effects the Zimbabwean land reform has had on a number of parameters. Finally, the findings and the entire approach do not fit well with the accounts we receive in Europe about the Zimbabwe’s reform.

Zimbabwe’s land reform is in many ways an unusual reform. Whereas most current land reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa focus on streamlining land governance, for instance through decentralisation, facilitation of land markets and titling, the explicit aim of the Zimbabwean reform is to redistribute land to the poorer segments of the population (for an overview of different types of land reforms, see chapter 2 in Evolving Land Rights, Policy and Tenure in Africa). Land ownership in the country was highly uneven distributed prior to reform. 4500, mostly white, commercial large-scale farmers owning the major part of the productive land. Something had to happen.

Whereas we do know that some of the confiscated land was distributed to Mugabe’s cronies, it is often overlooked that around one million Zimbabweans, many of them dirt-poor, also settled on and farmed the land. Almost 50% of the resettled households are doing pretty well, producing a surplus they can invest in the future. So the book’s case studies show. There are several reasons why we have not heard about these more positive reform outcomes. A major explanation is the fact that the production parameters applied from observers outside the country were those of the past; large-scale production of wheat and tobacco. But the current small-scale farmers have diversified and the production of for instance small grains, which fulfil household needs, has soared.

That is all very surprising to me. It is likely to be troubling news to others. I wonder what all those Sub-Saharan African governments, who repeatedly claim that large-scale farming is the only way to economic growth, will do. And how will the population in for instance Kenya, with its highly skewed distribution of land, react when they learn about the potential advantages of small-scale farming?

Still I feel a bit uneasy about the book. It has to do with the questions the authors do not really answer. Could all the sufferings in Zimbabwe have been avoided if the government had been more proactive at an earlier stage? What happened to the 150000 farm workers (and their families, in total around one million people were affected) who lost their jobs? Does it make sense, analytically, to separate land redistribution from the Mugabe regime’s violent excesses? Can it, in other words, be justified that the authors focus on only one aspect of the last decade’s development, the land reform, while they largely ignore that the country is falling apart?

Land and sexual violence (2)

My last blog post was about the use of rape and sexual violence in major conflicts. During a meeting with some colleagues a couple of days ago, I realised that sexual violence may also be part of small-scale, everyday conflicts with neighbours, kins and family members. At the meeting I was asked if we know anything about it. I did not. So far, I have not come across any literature which deals with the topic.

I do know that violent marriages can be quite common in rural areas. In the book ‘Women Forget that Men are the Masters’ Margrete Silberschmidt describes how social change in a district in Kenya challenges men’s traditional identities. Often, women are better at small-scale business and managing the fields. Still many men, though they are loosing their traditional role as breadwinners, cling on to the traditional gender relations: ‘Regardless of the socio-economic circumstances in which they find themselves, men are constantly preoccupied with the fact that they are men, and that this condition differentiates them radically from women’ (Silberschmidt p. 17).  Sex and violence, then, may become parts of some men’s strategies to assert themselves and their masculinity.

Thinking back to my fieldwork, I remember the story of a woman, whose husband had died. Soon, the husband’s brother moved in and took over the role as the head of the family. But the two did not get on well, and the woman asked him to leave. The man turned violent, however, and, in the end, she was the one who had to flee the house and the land with her kids. I do not know whether sexual violence was a part of it. It was not my research topic and I did not inquire into it. I wish I had.

This brings me back to the fact, that I do not think that land and sexual violence at the local, everyday level has been thoroughly researched. Anybody out there who knows more about it?

Land and sexual violence

Survivors of sexual violence at the Hospital of Panzi, South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo from UN Multimedia.

An article in this week’s Economist, War’s overlooked victims, is about the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Most often women are targeted.

From newspaper reports I had noticed current conflicts’ large numbers of rapes during conflicts. Repeatedly, we read stories about rapes in the ongoing civil war in Congo. There were reports about sexual violence during the 2007-2008 political crisis in Kenya (read here). In Bosnia in the 1990s, rape was also widespread. I thought it was a new trend. It turns out, however, that it is not.

What is new is the realisation that rape is often used systematically as a weapon of war. Only in 2008 was it officially acknowledged as such by the UN Security Council.

Often, so it seems, the use of sexual violence during conflicts is related to land. The logic behind is abhorrent. Men are mobile. Sometimes they are engaged in militia activities themselves, sometimes they work in the cities. When conflicts break out, which involve different ethnic groups and control over land, women are easy targets. By raping women, militias can force them and their families to flee an area. According to a research paper by Elisabeth Wood, an American professor at Yale University, a UN Commission noticed the connection between land and sexual violence after the wars in the former Yugoslavia:

In both custodial and non-custodial settings, many victims report that the alleged perpetrators state that they were ordered to rape and sexually assault the victims, or that they were doing it so that the victims and their families would never want to return to the area. Also, every reported case occurred in conjunction with an effort to displace the civilian population of a targeted ethnic group from a given region…

Subsequently, the perpetrators can distribute the land among to members of their own ethnic grouping. Shocking.

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

Tanzania’s Land Law Reform - Slow and uneven Progress

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

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

Are they crooks? (2)

Changes may be underway in the way land is managed in Tanzania. The new Minister of Lands, Mrs. Anna Tibaijuka, who comes from a position as Executive Director in UN-HABITAT, has made some tough statements on illegally acquired land less than a month after her appointment:

30 November, according to an article in the Citizen, she warned that land which had been grabbed illegally, but which rightfully belonged to the public, would be repossessed.

13 December, also in an article in the Citizen, she claimed that the government would repossess property, like beach hotels, which had been built on illegally acquired land.

14 December, in a third story in the Citizen, she specifically addressed those people who had built houses in the posh areas along the beaches in Dar es Salaam. Public land should be used for public purposes like playgrounds or car parks, she said, not for private settlements.

Now, there is an important task for citizens and Tanzanian media in monitoring what happens to the land after it has been repossessed by the government. Will the minister and the Ministry of Lands start constructing playgrounds and car parks on those areas? I look forward to learning about it.

Personally I believe there is another, even more important task ahead of Mrs. Anna Tibaijuka, namely to change the culture of impunity within the land sector. The Ministry of Lands is reportedly among the most corrupt institutions in the country. In rural areas, local district land offices are rumored to be involved in illegal land transactions. Still, you rarely hear stories of land officials being prosecuted and punished. In Tanzanian villages, I have heard numerous stories of local leaders who sell village land without following the proper procedures. Village chairmen and village executive officers as well as traditional leaders may be involved, and their names may be known. Still, no one gets punished. Why?

It would have a tremendous effect if the Tanzanian government started punishing those corrupt official or semi-official representatives who are involved in illegal land transactions.

Photo from UN-HABITAT.

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.

An unhappy Mariage? Women and formalised land ownership

This Tanzanian woman once lost her land in a divorce. Now she is happy that she has a title on her land.

The debate about how to protect vulnerable groups in land reform processes is continuing. In a previous blog post I described the effect of putting the names of women on title deeds in Tanzania. It was my impression that it made a big difference for women to know that they, in a written document, figured as the owners of the plots they use.

Now, from a friend, I have received an example of what happens when women’s names are not written. It does not look good. The findings in The Impact of National Land Policy and Land Reform on Women in Uganda are based on a small survey conducted by Uganda Land Alliance and the international NGO COHRE.

Uganda got its land law reform with the 1998 Land Act. Though women activists had campaigned for spouses’ automatic co-ownership of land the final law did not open up for this option. In the book No Shortcuts to Power Sheila Kawamara-Mishambi and Irene Ovonji-Odida describe how the president deleted the article empowering women, after it had been passed by parliament, because he was afraid that women would accumulate land through serial monogamy. Today, according to the survey from Uganda Land Alliance and COHRE, only 8% of married women in Uganda report that they own land.

Instead, lawmakers have sought to secure women’s rights to land by emphasising their rights according to other laws. The problem with this approach is that it presumes that women know their rights, and know how to enforce them. However, the study shows that women, especially in rural areas, do not know about their rights. Subsequently, discriminatory customary practices persist.

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.

Women and land

Geneva is getting divorced and she is fighting local traditions in order to secure her rights to land.

In a blog post some months ago I wrote about how much women value formal procedures for registration of rights to land and proofs of ownership such as documents and titles. It makes a big difference to them that their name is written. This week I found an interesting article, Customary Law still bars Women’s Access to Land, on Allafrica.com which touches upon a related discussion, namely women’s position under customary law in case of inheritance.

According to the article women in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to safeguard their interests in land when their closest adult male relative – the husband or the father – dies. Often, the family takes the land leaves the woman with nothing. I heard similar stories during my fieldwork in rural Tanzania. Women who are getting divorced experience similar problems with loosing their land. Often they are simply told to go back to their parents.

Therefore, I have always been intrigued by those land rights scholars who recommend strengthening customary systems, for instance council of elders, for handling land, as a better alternative to establishing a formal state backed system for registration of rights and issuance of titles. A formal system requires substantial investments in training, registries, and mapping – i.e. scarce resources in developing countries which are struggling to provide even basic social services to their citizens. Therefore it is more realistic, so the scholars argue, to strengthen the customary systems for managing land and strengthen women’s rights to land simultaneously. You can read an example of this approach here.

I guess these scholars have a point. Still I wonder what is more realistic: To reform local customs and change male attitudes towards women, or to create a proper formal land administration system?

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?

Land Pressure

March 2010

August 2010

When I visited Kiteto District in March this year, along the road I passed a group of people who had started clearing the forest and building houses to settle down.

When I passed by the same settlement in August, less than 6 months later, quite a few other newcomers had arrived. They had started building houses behind the first line of houses, in the second and third row from the road. A similar picture can be seen on opposite the side of the road from where the photos were taken.