Customary land tenure, inheritance rules, and smallholder farmers in Malawi

Based on information derived from six villages in various parts of rural Malawi, this paper examines the interrelationship between smallholder strategies to obtain land on the one hand, and customary land tenure and inheritance rules on the other. The paper revealed that although the majority of land transactions followed customary land tenure systems and inheritance rules, in a good number of cases land transactions deviated from the basic rules. One factor behind such deviation was the unique personal relationships that were developed between original landholders and heirs. Another factor was the seemingly increasing cases of returning wives in patrilineal villages. Still another factor was the intensifying land scarcity that encouraged villagers to adopt strategies to obtain land from any source by any means. On the other hand, there were also some cases in which the same land-scarcity problem induced villagers to countercheck the practice of flexible land transfer to prevent their lineage land from being alienated to non-kin members. These facts suggest that, in a land scarce situation, an individual strategy to obtain land rights from any possible sources by deviating from customary rules may occasionally be in conflict with a lineage strategy to countercheck such tendency.

Conflict and land tenure in Rwanda

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the historical relation between conflict and land tenure in Rwanda, a country that experienced a harsh civil war and genocide in the mid-1990s. The victory of the Tutsi-led rebel, Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) at that time triggered a massive return of refugees and a drastic change in land tenure policy. These were refugees who had fled the country at around the time of independence, in 1962, due to the political turmoil and persecution (the "social revolution") and who shared the background of the core RPF members. The social revolution had dismantled the existent Tutsi-led political order, compelling many Tutsi families to seek refuge outside their homeland. Under the post-independence rule of a Hutu-led government, the Tutsi refugees were not allowed to return and the lands they left behind were often arbitrarily distributed by local authorities among Hutu peasants. After victory in the mid-1990s civil war, the newly established RPF-led government ordered the current inhabitants of the lands to divide the properties in order to allocate portions to the Tutsi returnees. Different patterns of land holding and land division will be explained in the paper from data gathered through the authors' fieldworks in the southern and eastern parts of Rwanda. Although overt resistance to land division has not been observed to date, the land rights of the Tutsi returnees must be considered unstable because their legitimacy depends primarily on the strength and political stability of the RPF-led government. If the authority of RPF were to weaken, the land rights will be jeopardized. Throughout Rwandan history, in which political exclusion has often led to serious conflict, macro-level politics have repeatedly influenced land holding. Promotion of an inclusive democracy, therefore, is indispensable to escape the vicious circle between political instability and land rights.

Incentives Embedded in Institutions: The Case of Share Contracts in Ghanaian Cocoa Production

Providing price incentives to farmers is usually considered essential for agricultural development. Although such incentives are important, regarding price as the sole explanatory factor is far from satisfactory in understanding the complex realities of agricultural production in Africa. By analyzing the share contracts widely practiced in Ghana, this article argues that local institutions such as land tenure systems and agrarian contracts provide strong incentives and disincentives for agricultural production. Based on data derived from fieldwork in the 1990s, the study analyzes two types of share contracts and the incentive structures embedded in them. The analysis reveals that farmers' investment behavior needs to be understood in terms of both short-term incentive to increase yield and long-term incentive to strengthen land rights. The study concludes that the role of price incentives in agricultural production needs to be reconsidered by placing it in wider incentive structures embedded in local institutions.

コンゴの農村開発 －政策と社会の対応－

農村開発政策の成功・失敗は、当該社会の論理をどのように把握するかに依存している。本稿は、コンゴ共和国プール州の農村地域における社会論理に関して、1970年代から80年代にかけて実施された「プール州農村開発計画」（PDR）の評価と、筆者が1992～94年にかけて行った農村実態調査に基づいて検討した。PDRでは、経済合理性を欠いた蔬菜生産・流通計画が失敗した一方で、いわゆる共同体的な土地保有制度のために土地収用が進まなかった。商品化された農産物の生産・流通がきわめて経済合理的になされる一方で、土地に関しては共同体原理が支配的である状況は筆者の調査でも確認された。共同体原理や生存維持経済の存在の上に、農産物の商品化が急速に進展している状況は、コンゴ農村社会の特質として留意すべきである。

アフリカにおける経済危機下の農村変容－コンゴ農村調査報告

コンゴ共和国では、1980年代以降深刻な不況が継続する一方、首都ブラザヴィルの人口規模が急速に拡大してきた。それに伴う農村の衰退を指摘する研究が多いが、本稿では都市向け食糧生産の拡大によって著しい拡大を遂げた農村地域の事例を紹介し、近年になって浮上してきた生産ボトルネックについて検討する。ブラザヴィル近郊の農村地域では1980年代頃から都市居住者の入植が進み、隣国ザイールからの移住労働者を利用して、都市向けキャッサバ生産が活発に行われるようになった。しかし、近年耕作地の不足に直面すると、コンゴ人とザイール人、またコンゴ人の中でもエスニック集団によって、土地利用権の制限を行う動きが生じてきた。土地余剰状況の中で移民労働者を利用して拡大を続けてきた都市向けキャッサバ生産は、土地制約の中で岐路に立たされている。

Publicness and Taken-for-granted Knowledge: A Case Study of Communal Land Formation in Rural Thailand

The lack of public-mindedness can cause problems in the social order of people’s daily lives, such as the tragedy of the commons and the problem of free riders. Some scholars such as Habermas assert that communicative rationality is the solution, expecting that individuals will communicate with each other to reach a consensus without being bounded by aspects of social background. Other scholars advocate the revitalization of traditional community culture. These arguments, however, are not based on reality. By using the case of communal land formation in rural Thailand, the author shows that collective action is neither a revival of tradition nor a result of communication free from social constraints. Rather, cooperation emerges because the people rationally respond to their present needs and have built, through daily social interactions, taken-for-granted knowledge about how they should behave for cooperation.

Development of land rental market and its effect on household farming in rural China : an empirical study in Zhejiang Province

This paper investigates the impact of land rental market development on the efficiency of labor allocation and land utilization in rural China. To test the hypothesis that the shadow wage of a rent-in household with limited off-farm opportunities will increase with the development of a land rental market for households, a statistical comparison between the shadow wage and the estimated market wage was conducted. The results showed that the shadow wage for both rent-in households and non-rent-in households was significantly lower than the market wage, but that the wage for the rent-in households was statistically higher than that for non-rent-in households in Fenghua and Deqing, the two counties surveyed in this study. In addition, the estimated marginal product of farmland for rent-in households was statistically higher than the actual land rent that those households paid, while a null hypothesis that the actual rental fee accepted by rent-out households is equivalent to the marginal product of farmland for those households was not rejected in Fenghua county where land transactions by mutual agreement were more prevalent. These results indicate that the development of the land rental market facilitates the efficiency of labor allocation and farmland utilization in rural China.