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.

Features of Land Conflicts in Post Civil War Rwanda

Land conflicts in Rwanda have attracted particular attention because they have both environmental and political causes. This paper attempts to shed light on the nature of land conflicts in present-day Rwanda based on popular justice records and interviews collected in two rural areas. From the analyses of these data, two types of land confl ict can be distinguished. The first type consists of those among family members. Given that land is the most important asset for ordinary rural households, its inheritance often brings about conflicts between right-holders. Those of the second type are triggered by political change. Impacts of the two national-level violent conflicts in Rwanda, the “social revolution” just before independence and the civil war in the 1990s, are of tremendous significance in this context. The military victory of the former rebels in 1994 caused a massive return of Tutsi refugees, who were officially permitted to acquire land from the original inhabitants. Although no serious protestation against this policy has occurred thus far, it has produced various land conflicts. Dealing with potential grievances among original inhabitants is an important challenge for the present government.

Land and labor reallocation in pre-modern Japan : a case of a northeastern village in 1720-1870

In agricultural societies, adjusting land and labor according to changes of labor endowment that result from family life cycle events is premised on making full use of resources for each farming household and for the economy as a whole. This paper examines how and how well households in pre-modern Japan reallocated land and labor, using a population register covering 150 years from 1720–1870 for a village in the Tohoku region. We find that households reacted to equalize their production factors; land-scarce households tended to acquire or rent-in land and out-migrate their kin members, while land-abundant households tended to release or rent-out land, in-migrate kin members, or employ non-kin members. Estimates suggest that more than 80% of the surplus or deficit area of land was resolved if the household rented or "sold" land. We discuss a potential underlying mechanism; namely, that the village's collective responsibility for tax payment (murauke) motivated both individual households and the village as a whole to reallocate land and labor for the efficient use of resources.

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.

Reconstruction and development of rural Cambodia : from Krom Samakki to globalization

This paper reveals how rural Cambodian people reconstructed their social relationships after the collapse of the Pol Pot regime by examining farmland, which was the most important means of production in rural areas at that time. Section 1 and 2 illustrate the process of returning from collective farming under the Pol Pot regime to the family farming system. Section 3 analyzes the structure of land ownership created through land distribution by Krom Samakki. Section 4 studies the actualities of tenant farming. Section 5 examines the changes of the land ownership structure during a decade years after the distribution of Krom Samakki. This paper concludes that the legacy of Krom Samakki started to fade as early as the 1990s.

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.

Farming strategy of African smallholder farmers in transition from traditional to alternative agriculture : the case of the Nupe in central Nigeria

It is worthwhile to understand farming strategies of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, especially those of farmers who are in transition from traditional to alternative agriculture in terms of adoption of innovative technologies. In a case study of inland valleys in central Nigeria, we investigated the farming strategy of Nupe farmers who have a long-term tradition of wet rice cultivation and indigenous methods of land preparation for soil, water and weed management. In this region, a new method of land preparation has recently been introduced along with a recommendation to use improved seeds and chemical fertilizers. Our findings reveal that Nupe farmers directly sow traditional seeds and apply a marginal amount of fertilizer to paddy plots prepared by labor-saving methods on drought-prone hydromorphic valley fringes and flood-susceptible valley bottoms, whereas they preferentially transplanted improved seedlings and applied a relatively large quantity of fertilizer to paddy fields prepared by a labor-intensive and mechanized method on a valley position where they can access to optimum water condition (less risky against the drought and flood).