Land Rights and Investment Incentives in Western Nigeria

Afeikhena Jerome
Department of Economics
University of Ibadan
Ibadan, Nigeria
Tel.: 234-2-810-3898
Fax: 234-2-810-0079
E-mail: ajerome1@skannet.com.ng
1.

Introduction1

Within the context of Africas rapid population growth and the need for increased
productivity of land, a debate is raging on the indigenous land system. Some researchers
view customary tenure systems as economically inferior arrangements acting as a static
constraint on agricultural development and providing insufficient tenure security to
induce farmers to make necessary investments (Dorner, 1972; World Bank, 1974; and
Harrison, 1978). The main source of inadequacy in tenure arrangements, according to this
view, is the fundamental disequilibrium between systems embodying a long tradition of
extensive farming practices on the one hand, and requirements of output growth in the
context of intensive agriculture on the other hand (Eicher and Baker, 1882; Gouror,
1991). To facilitate economic growth and prevent the static and dynamic efficiency losses
assumed to be associated with this tenure arrangement, the establishment of freehold title
and the subdivision of the commons were proposed.
Others have countered that the indigenous tenure arrangements are dynamic in
nature and evolve in response to changes in factor prices (Boserup, 1981; Feder and
Noronha, 1987 and Bruce, 1988). More intensive study of communal tenure systems in a
broader framework and the recognition of the multiple functions these systems perform
have led to a reassessment of this view against the backdrop that they are far from static
and evolve in response to exogenous changes. Contrary to earlier beliefs which saw

Prepared for Presentation at the Beijer Research Seminar on Property Rights Structures and
Environmental Management in South Africa, 28-30 May, 2002. I am grateful to Prof. Jean-Philippe
Platteau for materials and helpful comments.

customary land tenure arrangements as a sign of backwardness and inefficiency, many

African countries (e.g. Uganda, Mauritania, Tanzania, and Niger) have adopted legal
reforms that provide recognition of such rights. There is a new rethink. Under conditions
of low population density and high ecological variability, communal tenure arrangements
can be a cost-effective way to ensure land access and security of tenure.
However, these rights are yet to be clearly understood. The environmental
implication of the land rights system in Africa has received relatively little attention in
the literature. The ways in which access is regulated, property rights are defined, and
ownership conflicts are resolved has broad implications beyond the sphere of agricultural
production. Past land use patterns aggravated by rapidly growing population have
disposed most lands to loss of productivity and various forms of degradation.
This study examines land rights regime in Western Nigeria and its implication for
equity, efficiency and sustainability. Specifically, it examines the nature and distribution
of property rights in land, how they are acquired, and how they are changing under
demographic and economic pressures. It also explores the issue of tenure rights and the
nature of investment incentives. The focus on Nigeria is particularly warranted because,
while long considered a land abundant region, increasing population densities have
created marked land scarcity in certain areas. In addition, observers have begun to note
the demise of a number of social institutions which have traditionally managed risk in the
region.

2.

Property Rights Regimes and Environmental Degradation

Environmental economists have long recognized that the nature and extent of property
rights regime significantly influences the rate of resource depletion and degradation.
Property rights have been defined as a bundle of characteristics; exclusivity,
inheritability, transferability, and enforcement mechanisms (Alchain and Demsetz, 1973).

These rights define the uses that are legitimately viewed as being exclusive and who has
these exclusive rights (Feder and Feeny, 1991). They have a profound influence on
incentives, resource allocation decisions and economic performance.

Property rights can be categorized into four basic types: private, common, state
and nonproperty (or open access). In the law and economics literature, private property
(res privatae) typically denotes property owned by individuals holding rights to use (in
socially acceptable ways), dispose of, and exclude others from the resources. However,
certain formal or informal limitations on these rights may be imposed by the state or the
community; for example, the state may forbid certain uses of resource or its sale.
Common property (res communes) refers to collective ownership situations, in which
the owners cannot exclude each other, but can exclude outsiders. Although there may be
incentive problems, related to the unwillingness of any individual member to undertake
the appropriate fertility-enhancing (or resource-conserving) investments, the group as a
whole may overcome these problems by viewing those investments as a public good and
using communal tax to finance investment costs. If the community is so large that
exercising control is not practicable, the distinction between communal and open access
systems disappears. Public or state property (res publicae) is a special form of
common property supposedly owned by the all the citizens, but typically controlled by
elected officials or bureaucrats, who are free to determine the parameters for use and
exclusion. The authorities may transfer temporarily some of the rights to private users or
to communities. If the state does not assert its authority, state property may become de
facto private property if individuals (squatters) establish their rights by physical
possession and acquire informal communal recognition of their rights. Finally,
nonproperty or open access (res mullius) denotes a situation in which a resource has
no owner; all are at liberty to use it, thus no one has the right to exclude anyone else.
However, these property categories are idealizations. Real-world property regimes
are inherently complex and inevitably combine features from various categories (Feeny,
Hanna and NcEvoy, 1996, Cole, 2001). Different aspects of the same resource may lie
within the decision-making purview of different individuals (e.g., tree conservation for
fuel wood and fodder may be within the purview of women, but of domestic construction,
or for sale, within that of their husbands). Although the rights to the crop from a given
tract of land may belong to an individual, the community has a right to graze livestock on
the post-harvest residue. Property rights equally have a temporal dimension. For example,

the right to use land can be defined over a short period of time (for example, a years
rental) or a longer period (for example, inheritable and permanent use rights).
A major conceptual problem in the literature is the confusion of common property
with open access (Hardin, 1968; North and Thomas, 1973). This is somewhat
understandable. What distinguishes open access resources from common property is the
unlimited size of the group capable of accessing and using the resources (Seabright,
1993, p. 114). In order for property to be common (res communes) rather than open
access (res nullius) there must be at least two groups, one of which collectively controls
the resource and excludes the other from access and control (Ciriacy-Wantrup and
Bishop, 1975, p. 715). Common property represents private property for the group of coowners because all others are excluded from use and decision making (Bromley, 1991,
pp. 25-26). Each member of the group possesses individual rights in the property unlike
open access, which is characterized by universal access and the utter absence of legal
rights and duties with respect to the resource.
Common property is also sometimes confused with state property. Ostrom (1990),
however distinguish state from common ownership based on the size of the ownership
group and the location of the resource. When a group of self-governing villagers controls
access to a fishery, for example, that is considered common ownership. But when nonusers, far removed from the village control access and use, that is state or public
ownership. Moreover, depending on the political circumstances and management
practices, state or public property may more closely resemble individually-or corporately
owned private property than common property (Denman, 1978, pp. 3-4 and Eggertson,
1990, p.37).
A contentious issue in the literature is the preferred regime for environmental
resources. In the late 1960s, Hardin (1968) and Deserts (1967) provided the classic
accounts of, respectively, the depletion of open-access resources, including many
environmental goods, and the historical evolution of property institutions to avert the
over-exploitation of such goods by reducing externalities and transaction costs. Hardins
The Tragedy of the Commons provides a particularly useful framework for the analysis
of property rights in environmental goods.

Its thesis is that resource depletion and

pollution problems both stem from the incentives created by open access regimes, in

which no one can be excluded from using a given resource. Unless property rights are
imposed, these incentives lead inexorably to the tragedy of the commons. Hardins
proffered solutions to the tragedy of the commons involves the conversion of the resource
from open access (nonproperty) to some form of property ownership private, common,
or state. However, contrary to the claims of critics such as Cox (1985), Berkes et al.
(1989), Feeny et al. (1990), and Feeny, Hanna and MacEvoy (1996), Hardins analysis
provides no basis for preferring private ownership over common or state ownership. It
only suggests the creation of property rights where none previously existed, but does not
indicate in whom (individuals, groups or the state) those property rights should be vested.
A more legitimate criticism of Hardin concerns his assumption that rational
private owners would never knowingly exploit their resources to destruction. This
assumption is empirically and theoretically unfounded. Empirically, individual private
owners have often done exactly what Hardin assumes they would not do. Clark
(1973b,pp.950-951) has shown, for example, that extermination of an entire {animal}
population may appear as the most attractive policy, even to an individual resource
owner, when (a) the discount (or time preference) rate sufficiently exceeds the
maximum reproductive potential of the population, and (b) an immediate profit can be
made from harvesting the last remaining animals. The outcome may not be socially
optimal, but private property owners make decisions to maximize private, not social,
benefits. Despite these criticisms, Hardins chief insight remains nonetheless valid: open
access resources will be unsustainably exploited unless some property rights regime is
imposed for their protection.
It is not good enough to recommend a certain property regime for environmental
goods; one must also specify just what rights and corresponding duties that regime would
entail (Ostrom, 1990, p. 22).

Those rights and duties may well vary from one

environmental good to another, or, with respect to any particular environmental good,
from one institutional context to another. An adequate theory of property rights on
environmental goods must consider the full range of possible property rights and
regulatory solutions to the tragedy of all commons, and recognize that no single regime is
likely to work for every resource and in every institutional and ecological setting. As Noll
(1989), Komesar (1994) and Eggertsson (1996, p. 166) have all pointed out, each

circumstance requires a comparative assessment of the costs of production, exclusion and

administration.

A private property regime based on individual ownership may be

appropriate in cases where the costs of governance are relatively high, but exclusion costs
are relatively low. Some form of (private or public) common or state ownership may be
preferable, however, in the converse situation of high exclusion costs and relatively low
costs of administration. Where the costs of either exclusion or governance would be
extraordinarily high (reflecting, perhaps, the technological infeasibility of exclusion) or
the resource itself is superabundant (Demsetz, 1964,p. 20), open access may be
inevitable, maximally efficient or both (Coase, 1960, p. 39 and Libecap, 1989, pp. 1314).

3.

Literature Review

There is broad agreement in the literature that secure individual land rights will increase
incentives to undertake productivity enhancing land related investments. More secure
property rights could affect productivity by improving household's security of tenure and
thus their ability and readiness to make investments; providing better access to credit; and
reducing the transaction costs associated with land transfers. For example in Ghana,
having more secure tenure to a plot increased the probability that individuals would plant
trees, and undertake a wide range of other investments such as drainage, irrigation,
mulching, etc. (Besley, 1995). The need for secure ownership rights over a sufficiently
long time horizon which need not necessarily be a formal title to facilitate improvements
also emerges from Burkina Faso (Brasselle et al. 1997) and Niger (Gavian and
Fafchamps 1996).

The empirical evidence on the relationship between land rights and

investment or land yields is, however, largely inconclusive. Table 1 presents a summary
of these studies.

Methodology

These authors use the same data set as Place and Hazell (1993).

(Gavian and Fafchamps, 1996)

(Harrison, 1992)

(Roth, 1994)

(Roth, 1994)

(Pinckney and Kimuyu), 1994

(Place and Hazell, 1993)

(Migot-Adholla et al. 2, 1991)

(Green, 1987)

(Migot-Adholla, Place and Oluoch-Kosura, 1994)

Study

Neither land rights nor land title was related to tree crops or
terracing improvements, after controlling for other possible
effects. More individualized land rights were associated with
greater land improvement activity in Lumakanda but had
little effect elsewhere.
Titled land is not being utilized productively because of
absentee ownership.
No relationship was found between investment and land
rights.
In Madzu, land rights are not significantly related to land
improvements. In Kianjogu, preferential transfer parcels are
more likely to receive drainage or liming improvements than
are limited-transfer parcels.
The increase in investments is related to the disappearance of
the prohibition to grow coffee rather than to the land reform.
In the regions where coffee growing was allowed, farmers
planted it prior to land registration, implying that indigenous
tenure was secure enough.
The effects of land title on various types of agricultural
investment have all been found to be not significantly
different from zero.
Registration appears as significantly and positively related to
investment in fencing, continuous manuring and mulching,
and positively but insignificantly related to all long-term
investments.
Smallholders, without having private title to their land, have
achieved rapidly increasing maize yields, and their
productive performance is not inferior to that of the biggest
commercial farmers.
There are no significant differences in the farmers
investment behavior when he owns his land individually

Main Findings

Table 1: Studies Measuring the Impact of Tenure Security on Investment

Source :- Adapted from Brasselle, Gaspart and Platteau, (1998) and .

(Brasselle, Gaspart and Platteau, 1998)

(Brasselle et al. 1997)

(de Zeeuw, 1997)

(Saul, 1993)

(Migot-Adholla et al., 1991)

(Place and Hazell, 1993)
(Migot-Adholla et al., 1991)
(Migot-Adholla et al., 1994)

Land tenure security is strongly influenced by investment;

and once this endogeneity bias is properly controlled,
increased land rights do not appear to stimulate investment

In Butare and Gitarama, long-term improvements are

positively related to land rights, but not in Ruhengeri. The
ability to bequeath land rather than to transfer it freely
appears to be an important determinant of investment.
Land improvements were highly associated with security of
tenure in Anloga, but to a lesser extend in Wassa, although
not in Ejura. In Anloga, the ability to freely transfer land was
positively related to investment in drainage or excavation
improvements. In Wassa, tree crops were less likely to be
planted on parcels on which farmers had only limited transfer
rights, yet the results were not significant. In Ejura, there
was no relationship between category of land rights and
investment in tree crop planting or destumping.
Investment does not vary significantly between owned and
borrowed fields.
Except for tree planting this is considered as an act of
appropriation, both borrowers and lenders are free to improve
their parcels.

(which implies that he has the right to freely dispose of it)

and when the land farmed is a so-called hawjou land which
has been borrowed from a pool of community land entrusted
to the village chief.

Most of the studies are, however, deficient methodologically. Brasselle, Gaspart and
Platteau, (1998) notes that verifying the impact of tenure security on investment
behaviour is a difficult task because of the causality problem of inferring from the
existence of a significant relationship between tenure security and agricultural investment
that causality actually runs from the latter. A few studies have however dealt with this
problem beginning with the pioneering study of Besley (1995) who re-worked the data
collected by the World Bank on Ghana to assess the sensitivity of the results to the
methodology used. Specifically, while the original World Banks study (Migot-Adholla
et al., 1994a) concluded that tenure security has a clearly positive impact on investment
in the region of Anloga but a less noticeable impact in Wassa and no impact at all in
Ejura, Besleys study found the opposite that better land rights facilitate investment in
Wassa but not in Anloga. The conclusion is that such sensitivity is considerable since the
results have been simply inverted. In addition, a recent study on 36 villages in central
Uganda concludes that investment enhances tenure security, yet the converse relationship
is not true (Baland et al., 1999).
The studies by Moor (1996) and by Alston et al. (1996) on the impact of land
titling on investment behaviour in Zimbabwe and Brazil, respectively, also control for the
endogeneity of the land rights variable. The approach differs from that of Besley. In the
latter study, investment is measured continuously but, unfortunately, it is defined as the
portion of the farm placed in improved pasture and permanent crops [Alston et al., 1996:
45] which is only indirectly related to the notion of investment (which is a flow and not a
stock) (Platteau, 1996).
Anne-Sophie Brasselle, Frederic Gaspart and Jean-Philippe Platteau (1998) also
controlled for the endogeneity of land rights while assessing their impact on investment
behaviour in a sample of villages in Western Burkina Faso. According to Platteau (1996),
the methodology used in this study is more appropriate than that adopted by Besley on
two counts. First, the land rights variable is constructed in a more meaningful manner and
second, the econometric technique is more suited to the problem at hand. On the one
hand, while Besley simply adds up rights by giving equal weight to each of them,
Brasselle et al. have based their definition of the land security variable on a hierarchical
set of five distinct bundles or categories of rights. Furthermore, by using a single OLS

model to estimate a reduced form equation of land rights as the first stage of the
investment equation, Besley implicitly assumed that an ordinal variable behaves as
though it were a metric variable. On the other hand, Besley uses a linear probability
model to estimate the investment equation, which enables him to use the method of
instrumental variables to correct the endogeneity bias at the cost of impairing the
efficiency of the estimators. The two-stage conditional maximum likelihood model and
the simultaneous probability model (with correction of the variance-covariance matrix by
means of the bootstrapping technique) used by Brasselle et al. avoids this difficulty. The
results obtained by Anne-Sophie Brasselle, Frederic Gaspart and Jean-Philippe Platteau
(1998) indicates that land tenure security is, indeed, strongly influenced by investment;
and once this endogeneity bias is properly controlled, increased land rights do not appear
to stimulate investment. Baland, Place, and Platteau (1999) have applied the same
methodology in their study of central Uganda and they have reached exactly the same
conclusion. This is the approach that will be adopted in this study. It intends to
conceptualize and measure multiple dimension of property rights in a way which
elucidates the competing interests affected by the rights.

4.

Methodology
The study draws on a comprehensive survey of 80 households conducted between

April and May 2002 in Oyo North Province of Western Nigeria. The household
questionnaire adapted from Anne-Sophie Brasselle, Frederic Gaspart and Jean-Philippe
Platteau (1998) asked questions including characteristics of the parcel (mode of
acquisition, soil fertility, parcel size, rights of transfer and use, land improvements made,
type of document held, incidence of dispute, and, in the last season, the crops grown,
inputs used, and output). Focus group discussions were also organized to supplement
information from the questionnaires on land tenure arrangements
In view of the necessity to allow for a possible endogeneity bias, the econometric
testing of the impact of land rights on investment follows closely the approach adopted
by Anne-Sophie Brasselle, Frederic Gaspart and Jean-Philippe Platteau (1998).The
standard procedure for testing for exogeneity is the two-stage LS model. However, such a

10

procedure is not legitimate when the dependent variables are discrete. We are therefore
forced to resort to non-conventional methods that turn out to be applicable only if some
particular conditions are satisfied.
First, we specify the following system of four basic equations:
(I)

I * = + R * + X + u

(II)

R * = + I * + W + v

(III)

R =1

if R * t 2 ; R = 2

(IV)

I =1

if I * > s ,

if t 2 < R * t 3 ; ...... R = 5

if R * > t 5

where R * and I * are latent variables measuring in a continuous manner land rights and
investment, respectively; R is the observed variable measuring land rights on the basis of
a hierarchization of several categories; I is the observed variable for investment
constructed as a dummy with value 1 when a household has undertaken at least one
investment during the last five years, and value zero otherwise; X and W are distinct
vectors of exogenous variables aiming at solving the identification problem; u and v are
uncorrelated residuals in the investment and the land rights equations, respectively.
Finally, s and the four t k are unobserved threshold values in the corresponding
continuous variables that serve to separate the different categories and are to be
determined endogenously from an ordered probit estimation technique: Eqs (I) and (IV)
give a specification for a simple probit model while Eqs (II) and (III) correspond to an
ordered probit model.
The standard procedure for estimating eq. (I) consists of working with a reduced form
of eq. (II) and instrumenting R * in the specification of (I), that is, estimating the
following equations together with (III) and (IV):

= +

= R

R + X

+ X
^

+ u

+ v

11

+ v '

Because of the non-linearity of the probit model, this method, proposed by Mallar
(1977) and called IVP (Instrumental-Variables Probit), would however yield downwardbiased estimators of standard errors and coefficient estimators that are not normally
distributed.

No statistical inference is therefore legitimate [Maddala, 1983: 242]. To

overcome the above problem, we follow the approach recently developed by Rivers and
Vuong (1989).

This approach, called 2SCML (Two-Stage Conditional Maximum

Likelihood), involves using a linear form for the first stage of the estimation procedure
(in our case where there are two discrete variables, this linear form corresponds to a
linear probability model), and incorporating the residuals thereby obtained in the secondstage equation which is a probit model.
The crucial assumption is that the residuals of the second-stage equation follow a
normal distribution conditionally to the endogenous explanatory variable, with a
conditional expected value that depends linearly on the residuals of the first-stage
equation.

This condition is more requiring than the usual normality assumption.

It

cannot be taken for granted if the first-stage equation is a linear probability model and,
therefore, a Jarque-Bera test on approximated residuals will be conducted to verify
whether their distribution does not differ significantly from the normal law.
It is useful to cross-check the results obtained by using the 2SCML technique with
another estimation procedure that avoids the above-mentioned strong normality
assumption, especially if it appears to be violated in our particular sample. A natural
candidate is a modified IVP method in which standard errors are replaced by confidence
intervals constructed by means of a bootstrapping procedure (thus solving the problem of
bias in standard error estimates). Since coefficients are unbiased when the IVP
(maximum likelihood) method is used and judgements about their significance can be
pronounced without having recourse to the unreliable standard errors, we believe that it is
a sound approach to use for the problem at hand.
Let us first consider the estimation of eq. (II). The 2SCML procedure amounts to
estimating the following system of equations:

12

(V)

I = + W + X + u'

(VI)

R * = + I + W + u ' + v

(III)

R =1

if R * t 2 ; R = 2

if t 2 < R * t 3 ; ...... R = 5

if R * > t 5

A guiding principle is to first estimate the investment as a function of exogenous

variables and then use the residuals thus generated as an explanatory variable in the
second-stage equation (here, the equation explaining land rights). Two important remarks
are in order. On the one hand, Eq. (V) is an OLS model where the binary variable I is
the dependent variable. (This is known as the linear probability model). On the other
hand, the investment variable is not instrumented in Eq. (VI) as would have been the case
in the standard 2SLS procedure. Here, the significance of is the criterion used to test
for exogeneity of investment: if does not significantly differ from zero, there is no
simultaneity bias.
Turning to the estimation of eq. (I), an additional difficulty arises because land rights
are not represented by a binary variable but by several ordered categories (a difficulty not
considered in Rivers and Vuongs paper). What this means in practice is that there are
four endogenous binary variables in the investment equation since there are five
categories representing different bundles of land rights. For each of them, a reduced-form
linear probability model must be computed and residuals extracted. We can therefore
write:

(VIIi)

Ri = + X + W + v i

(VIIIi)

Ri = 1 R = i

for i = 2, 3, 4, 5

Now, there remains the question of actually assessing the impact of land rights
categories on investment, given the possible endogeneity of some of the former. This key
estimation and a test for exogeneity of each of these categories as well as of land tenure
security as a whole (i.e., a joint test on all categories) are performed by means of the

13

following probit model of investment, which must be combined with eq. (IV) linking the
observed investment variable, I , with the latent variable, I * :

(IX)

I* = +

i Ri + X +

i=2

v + u
5

i=2

The significance of the coefficient i would reveal the endogeneity of category i of

land rights; this test, part and parcel of Rivers & Vuongs method, is in the spirit of the
classical Hausman specification test [see, e.g., Gujarati, 1995: 670-72]. On the other
hand, a joint Wald test on the vector of i s (i=2,3,4,5) will also be performed to test for
exogeneity of land tenure security as a whole.

5.

Study Area

The study area is Oyo North Division often referred to as the food basket of Western
Nigeria. It is located at the fringe of Guinea Savanna, between latitude 8 and 9 North
and longitude 2 and 5. Subsistence agriculture is the main preoccupation and the
cropping system is basically maize-based. Other crops in rotation and mixture include
cassava, yams and sorghum. The area has undergone continuous cropping with only
traditional conservation measures. Agricultural input services are also minimal but
supplied by the Oyo State Agricultural Development Programme. It has 7- 8 months of
rainfall. The soil is prone to slight to moderate sheet erosion, since the soil is shallow,
conservation measures are of primary importance to sustainable crop production.
Traditional small holding is less than 2.5 hectares and the dominant farming system is
intercropping. However, for larger farms, mono-cropping is adopted which exposes the
soil to rapid degradation.

6.

Survey Results

Characteristics of the respondents

The 80 respondents were drawn from 13 villages. 68 of them (85 percent) are natives
while 12 (15 percent) are migrants. Males constituted 94.9 percent of the respondents
interviewed, while females constituted 5.1 percent.

14

Table 2: Sex of Households Interviewed

Frequency

Valid Percent

Male

75

94.94

Female

5.06

Total

79

100.00

Missing

1
80

Source: Survey Results (2002)

Table 3 presents the age profile of the respondents. The sample is ageing as all of them
(100 per cent) are above 30 years. The respondents have been living in their communities
for 15 to 72 years, with more than half of them having lived in their communities for 20
years or more. This suggests that the selected respondents would be familiar with their
environments and be able to provide useful information about the research issues.

Table 3: Age Profile of Respondents

Frequency
20 30 years

Valid Percent
0.00

31 40 years

17

21.25

41 60 years

37

46.25

Above 60 years

26

32.50

Total

80

100.00

Missing
Source: Survey Results (2002)

All of them are predominantly farmers with farm sizes ranging from 0.18 and 50 hectares
as shown in Table 4.

15

Table 4: Farm Sizes (Hectares)

1990

1995

2001

Min

0.18

0.24

0.32

Max

26

35

50

Median

4.4

10

Mean

5.12

8.56

11.04

Source: Survey Results (2002).

The major crops grown are Cassava, Maize, Beans, Yam and Melon. Others are Cocoa,
Kolanut, Millets and Cocoyam. All the farmers grew Cassava and Maize. The
agricultural techniques practiced are quite simple as shown in Table 5.

Table 5: Agricultural techniques

1990

1995

2001

Yes = 72 (90 per cent)

Yes = 76 (95%)

Yes = 78 (97.5%)

No = 8 (10 per cent)

No = 4 (5%)

No = 2 (2.5%)

Soil preparation
Manual labour

Hired labour

Yes = 70 (87.5 per cent) Yes = 72 (90 %)

Yes = 72 (90 %)

No = 10 (12.5 per cent)

No = 8 (10 %)

No = 8 (10 %)

Yes = 54 (67.5 %)

Yes = 54 (67.5 %)

Yes = 72 (90 %)

No = 26 ( 32.5%)

No = 26 ( 32.5%)

No = 26 (32.75%)

Yes = 69 (86.25%)

Yes = 69 (86.25%)

Yes = 69 (86.25%)

No = 11 (13.75%)

No = 11 (13.75%)

No = 11 (13.75%)

Yes = 53 (66.25%)

Yes = 53 (66.25%)

Yes = 53 (66.25%)

No = 27 (33.75%)

No = 27 (33.75%)

No = 27 (33.75%)

Sowing
Hired sowing

Manual sowing

Weeding
Casual manual

16

Hired weeding

Yes = 69 (86.25%)

Yes = 70 (87.5%)

Yes = 7 (8.75%)

No = 11 (13.75%)

No = 10 (12.5%)

No = 7 (8.75%)

Fertilizer

Yes = 67 (83.75%)

Yes = 69 (86.25%)

Yes = 71 (88.75%)

application

No = 13 (16.25%)

No = 11 (13.75%)

No = 9 (11.25%)

Crop rotation

Yes = 65 (81.25%)

Yes = 72 (90 per cent)

Yes = 74 (92.5%)

No = 15 (18.75%)

No = 8 (10 per cent)

No = 6 (7.5%)

Yes = 70 (87.5%)

Yes = 70 (87.5%)

Yes = 70 (87.5%)

No = 10 (12.5%)

No = 10 (12.5%)

No = 10 (12.5%)

Yes = 26 (32.5%)

Yes = 26 (32.5%)

Yes = 26 (32.5%)

No = 54 (67.5%)

No = 54 (67.5%)

No = 54 (67.5%)

Productivity
improvement

Land fallowing

Slash and burn

Source: Survey Results (2002).

Nature of Tenure System and Rights

Ownership (at least nominal ownership) of land and other natural resources within the
communitys geographical area is vested in the community. Most resources, such as
forests, water, and grazing land, are used and managed collectively by the community;
the great exception is agricultural land which is allocated to individual households. There
are common principles underlying tenure systems in the area. Chiefs, whose authority
over land derives from their covenant with the ancestral spirits in the area, continue to
play a dominant role in rural communities. People obtain access to land through
membership of a particular community. All households recognized by the community
have the right to arable land for cultivation. If the land a household possesses is not
sufficient, it may be allocated additional land. Allocations of land for farming are also
given to new households; in some areas a one-time, token fee is charged by the village
head. In general, the main mechanism for acquiring land for farming has been, with
authorization from the community authorities, for a household or individual to clear a
piece of unoccupied land. While land has been reallocated periodically in some parts of

17

Africa (for example, in northern Ethiopia), land allocations in the study area are
permanent and inheritable. Thus, although the community is the owner of the land, the
household has secure rights to cultivate or otherwise use the land and, in most areas, to
pass it on to heirs. Consequently, most agricultural land is now acquired through transfers
that are interhousehold (for example, through sale or borrowing) or intergenerational (for
example, through inheritance or gift).
How land is allocated and transferred among households in a community and
within households and who has access to and control of land are based in part on
inheritance laws and practices. Family structure and inheritance practices are most
influential. Thus, most land transfers are affected by inheritance. This corroborates the
findings for Uganda (Troutt et al, 1993), Ghana (Okali, 1983), Madagascar, (Robles,
1995), and Togo (Akinbode et al, 1989). In general, customary land is not supposed to be
alienated, that is, sold or allocated permanently to someone outside the community
without the consent of the community or family concerned.
Where private property tenure is operational, market forces and commercial
transactions are major determinant of land transfers and family structure has less
influence; access to land is obtained primarily through purchase or lease agreements
based on the value of land.
The security of tenure level of land ownership by the respondents is presented in
Table 6. The rights are permanent except for the rights to fell trees, graze livestock, loan
out, give out, bequeath and hire out ones land, that some of the respondents have to get
the approval of the village head or family. It must be mentioned that Customary
institutions are being weakened and increasingly not recognized by the state or by rural
people who see that most traditional structures are no longer acting in their interests.

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Table 6: Security Level of Land Ownership

Right to choose ones type of farming

Yes = 79 (98.75%) No = 1

Right to leave the land fallow

Yes = 80 (100%)

No = 0 (0%)

Right to develop the land

Yes = 80 (100%)

No = 0 (0%)

Right to gather firewood

Yes = 80 (100%)

No = 0 (0%)

Right to gather wild fruits

Yes = 80 (100%)

No = 0 (0%)

Right to fell trees for sale

Yes = 74 (91.34%) No = 6 (7.5%)

Right to graze livestock

Yes = 50 (62.5%)

No = 30 (37.5%)

Right to prevent livestock grazing

Yes = 80 (100%)

No = 0 (0%)

Right to collect the entire yield

Yes = 80 (100%)

No = 0 (2%)

Right to loan out ones land

Yes = 54 (67.5%)

No = 26 (32.5%)

Right to give out ones land

Yes = 50 (62.5%)

No = 30 (37.5%)

Right to bequeath ones land

Yes = 51 (63.75%) No = 29 (36.35%)

Right to hire out ones land

Yes = 52 (65%)

No = 28 (35%)

Source: Survey Results (2002).

Conflicts
Land conflicts, in some cases exacerbated by and intermixed with ethnic issues are
pervasive. There are rising conflicts over land which most frequently have been between
(and among) farmers and governments. With increased mobility of individuals and
scarcity of land, transactions among individuals who are not members of the same
community are becoming frequent, increasing the scope for asymmetry information and
the resultant land disputes.

Gender dimension
Though, until recently largely ignored, or left out of analysis due to insufficient data,
gender is one of the most basic and prevalent factors in determining tenure relations and
tenure rights of control and access in customary societies (Lastarria-Cornhiel, 1997).
Even though women are major agricultural cultivators, their ability to gain access to land
is often restricted by inheritance laws, customary rules that recognize only male

19

ownership, and divorce procedures that favours males. Women do have access to land,
but this access is regulated through male relations.
Women in most cases have only cultivation rights. A husband for instance has an
obligation to provide arable land for the woman to farm and decides the specific land or
part of his farm the woman can cultivate and for how long. Instances abound where men
and women cultivate and manage the same plots. Generally, women grow food crops for
the family while the men grow cash crops. Difficulties arise in case of separation or
divorce. Women lose cultivation rights to the husbands land. Such women usually return
to their families and try to obtain cultivation rights on the family land.

Markets in Land
Markets in land rights are active, whether within customary or formal systems. The
important trends in the area are: increased scarcity and growing value of land, especially
around towns, leading to increased transactions in land. The types of transactions differ,
however. Customary systems tend not to accept permanent land alienation because even
if the current user wishes to dispose of the land, the family and lineage, which also have
rights in the land, are reluctant to see it alienated.
Under the pressure of market forces and growing land values, many customary
systems have come to accept such alienations. These systems are not static but very
responsive to new needs and opportunities. Location is a key variable and the pressure of
the market is felt most strongly in peri-urban areas. Urban development and the growing
value of land for uses other than agriculture are major forces driving the development of
a market in land ownership rights.
Non-market transactions such as inheritance, allocation by village chiefs, informal
rental among kin and use of common property resource for collection and gathering are
still influential and continue to have far reaching effects. These informal systems tend to
be characterized by low transaction costs and access to land for the poorer segment of the
population.

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7.

Empirical Analysis

While the descriptive statistical analysis of the evolution of property rights has been
suggestive, a deeper and more thorough econometric analysis is called for in order to
understand the constraints and perceptions which are shaping institutional innovation.
This is the focus of this section.

8.

Conclusion

{Yet to be written}

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