Land
reforms have been lingering since 1994 despite land being a major source of
livelihood in rural and a tool for economic growth and poverty reduction in
Malawi. It is estimated that almost 55% of smallholder farmers cultivate
lessthan a hectare of land (Chinsinga and Chirwa 2008:2. The dawn of democracy was
a critical juncture as it gave renewed hopes of a fast tracked land reform process.
However, efforts for land reform have also been impeded by lack of commitment
to enact a new comprehensive land law to replace the Land Act of 1967, which is
not responsive to current trends and challenges on land. The Community Based
Land Development Programme (CBLDP) sponsored by the World Bank has been the
only significant effort undertaken to address the issue of Land reform though
it has encountered numerous unprecedented challenges. This paper seeks to
critically analyze the issue of land reforms in Malawi since 1994 through the
lenses of political economy. It argues that land reform is not only a technical
issue, but also a political one that involves winners and losers. The process of land
reform since 1994 has been
captured by the interests
of actors involved, leading to
crafting of tenure arrangements that potentially result
in asymmetrical benefits. Therefore understanding the interface between
politics and economics is vital in implementing a pro-poor land reform.
Political
economy analysis focuses on the interaction between politics and economics. It
examines the distribution of power between different groups and individuals,
and the processes that create, sustain and transform these relationships over
time and how these relations affect outcomes of
development interventions (DFID2009:4) In any reform, parties have different
powers, and interests, and winners and losers.
Political economy seeks to asses whose interest’s shapes and impact, the
outcomes, success and failures of a reform. It is against this background that
a political economy analysis also undertakes a stakeholder analysis with the
aim of mapping stakeholders and their relation and influence over the policy
reform process. This helps to find factors; incentives and actors that will
oppose and support a reform process and how these will affect the outcome. A
development program succeeds when key players have an incentive to make it
succeed. When a society’s key actors
are threatened by
a development program,
they have an
incentive to make
it fail (Melim-McLeod 2012:1). However, the mere presence of an
incentive does not translate into actors acting upon it. Stakeholders in the
society have constraints and these puts a limit on their actions. Institutions
are systems of rules that regulate behavior of stakeholders by establishing norms,
rewarding compliance, and punishing violations (Fritz V, 2009: xiii)
Land
reform in Malawi is caught in competing objectives between the state and
private sector on one hand and local communities on the other (Zuka 2013:154).This is manifested in the
mismatch of agriculture policies being pursued by the state. Despite the
recognition by the Malawi growth and development strategy (MDGS) and the Malawi
poverty reduction strategy paper (MPRSP) that smallholder agriculture is a key
to accelerated poverty reduction little has been done to address the issue of
land scarcity. Government policy in agriculture has focused on increasing
efficiency in production through the creation of large commercial farms. This
is being achieved by consolidating smallholder farm plots.For instance the Green
Belt Initiative is to ensure that the commercial farmers have access to large
tracts of land for agriculture at the highest possible economies of scales
(Chasukwa and Chinsinga 2012:2)The potential tax to be extracted from these
commercial farmers and the huge sums of money accrued from such land deals are
the major incentives upon which government has been acting upon. The
powerlessSmallholder farmers have been losers. They are being squeezed out and
exposed to food insecurity and poverty. There is need for state policy on
agriculture to make a tradeoff between these commercial farms and smallholder
agriculture.
State
interests have also been reflected in the recent Land Billof 2013. A political
economy analysis of this bill reveals it has no transformative powers as far as
land relations and distribution is concerned. It fails to establish substantial
property rights to smallholder farmers farming on customary land because it
merely reclassifies land into private and public. This means the Act implicitly
puts customary land in the jurisdiction of the state and the state being a
powerful actor is at liberty to perpetrate further land grabs on the pretext of
encouraging an efficient utilization of the scarce resource.This indicates that
the interests of the state is one of the major influencing factors impeding a
meaningful pro-poor land reform.Zuka notes that
the major goal
of and reform
in Malawi is
generally to change customary
land administration to
suit market capitalistic economic
models (Zuka 2013:161)
Land
reforms have also failed to understand the institutional contexts in which they
are operating.According to Chinsinga, “understanding the
interface between formal
and informal institutions
in the context of
the reforms is
important in terms
of anticipating and
dealing unexpected consequences”
(Chinsinga 2008). Malawian societies are either patrilineal or matrilineal and
this has an implications on land process and the power dynamics in these
societies. The Land Bill which will have a significant impact on reform processes
mentions of ensuring equality in landownership regardless of sex and age or
marital status. Though this is good in addressing some inequalities, it depends
on how the state will succeed in changing institutional settings. By
implication when enacted into a law, the act will dispossess women of some of
the land in matrilineal societies and it will mean land gains for women in
patrilineal societies and vice versa. Land reform processes in this context
means changing existing social structures and this is an extremely difficult
exercise. It is important to note that though informal social institutions may
lack legitimacy in the eyes of the elites, they are a fabric of local
communities and cannot easily be changed. Informal institutions serve a
regulating purpose and should not be seen as weak or irrelevant (Melim-McLeod
2012:1). This means institutions also pose a serious challenge in the
implementation of land reforms.
Land
reform process has been captured by the elites. The elites who accumulated
large tracts of land during post-independence era have been one of the powerful
stakeholder which the state has failed to contend with. Estimates shows that
about 2.6 million hectares of cultivable arable land
falling under freehold, lies idle in the rural area (Chirwa&Chinsinga2008:2Paradoxically,Chinsinga
and Chasukwa (2012:4) notes that government land grabs have involved taking
land from smallholder farmers which is under use. The state owners have not
been willing to give up their idle land until they get a compensation. On
contrary, the government seems not to be ready to pay hugecompesations due to
resource constraints. Thus, unless government acts on elite’s interests and
incentive, a meaningful landform is far from being achieved. In general, this
would require a strategic plan that will also examine not only the
technicalities of such a redistribution but also the politics, incentives and
interests involved. These elites have also taken advantage of their power to
influence the outcome of the Land bill of 2013. The bill fails to make
structural changes to free the idle lands being held by these elites.
The
Community based land distribution program (CBRLDP) is one of the major
initiative undertaken to address the issue of land. However, this programme has
echoed the necessity of a political economy analysis if we want substantive
reforms. It has been argued that the implementation of the CBRLD has failed to
transform land relations and institute tangible reforms because it has been caught
in the interests of elites and chiefs who benefited in the 1967 Land act.(Chinsinga
2008).Particularly, Chiefs,a losing stakeholder in the reform processes have
been impeding the reform process using a number of tactics. The sending chiefs
have been misinforming their citizens on the true intentions of the Land reform
and have sometimes sought rents as precondition for being included as a
beneficiary. They have also perceived the reform process of Community Based
Land Distribution Program (CBRLDP) as a threat to their ruling powers. This has
also been reflected in the chief’s resistance to the enactment of the Land Act
2013 which will see chiefs losing some of the unanimous powers through the
establishment of Village committees on land. This portrays that there is no
homogeneity of interests between the chiefs and the citizens in the villages
who are in need of land. Chiefs are not the right representatives of the local
people as their engagement in the land reform processes is driven by personal
interests. In general terms, the design, reform and implementation of pro-poor
institutional arrangements such as the one espoused in the World Bank CBRLDP should go beyond its technicalities by
examining political factors (Chirwa and Chinsinga 2008:3). In view of the
diversity of in interests among stakeholders, it imperative that reforms take a
wide sector approach and a multi discipline analysis ranging from politics to economics.
A
capitalistic agenda has also been pushed in the reform exercise. There has also
been growing conflict of interest on what land reform should actually do. The
local people in the villages would like to have a land reform that involves
restitution. For instance in Zimbabwe restitution was used as it was believed
to bring fast results. On the other
hand, stakeholders like the World Bank who sponsored the CBRLDP initiative have
always advocated for a market based redistribution involving a willing seller
and a willing buyer. However, one sees that this approach is far from bringing
fast results considering the urgency of the matter. Additionally, this approach
has a potential of concentrating land to those who have the power to purchase
the land and foreign investors. The smallholder farmer also emerges as a loser
in this approach. This explains why efforts of the CBLRDP have been curtailed
in different ways by residents in the areas where the land is being distributed
under the program.
The
purpose of a political economy analysis is to identify risks, which are factors
that may impede a reform process and working on means to manage those risks.
The foregoing analysis demonstrates that reforms create losers and winners. The
winners will facilitate the change processes while the losers will impede or
influence change to meet their interests. Therefore, instead of focusing on
technical and managerial matters alone, there is need to examine the nature of
incentives that exist for major actors that can help them to put public
interests over their private interests. Land reforms process t should do a
systematic political economy analysis of stakeholders, their incentives and
interests and devise means of restructuring the incentives and interests in the
manner that the actors will be motivated to influence a positive change in
policy. Power analysis should be an integral part of reforms designs. Above all, institutions should also be
devised to support the actions of the actors and changes in policy because
without this institutions will put constraints on the actors thereby limiting
there sphere of action and the general processes of reform.
REFERENCES
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V (2009) Problem-Driven Governance and
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P.S. (2013) Butterfly land policy reform
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E and Chinsinga B, (2008) The Economics
and politics of Land Reforms in Malawi: A Case Study of the Community Based
Rural Land Distribution Programme (CBRLDP) IPPG Policy Paper No.20
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C et-al (2012), Institutional and Context
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