The changing face of African agriculture in an era of rural transformation: Dynamics in land system and tenure policies

Thomas Jayne (), Milu Muyanga, Ayala Wineman, Hosaena Ghebru and Caleb Stevens

Research briefs from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa is witnessing rapid changes in farm size distributions. “Medium-scale†farm landholdings of five to 100 hectares now account for a substantial and growing share of farmland in many African countries. 1 Since 2000, this category of African farmer has acquired more land and put much more new land under cultivation than large-scale foreign investors. In parallel to these developments, the region is witnessing changes in land tenure institutions that influence who is acquiring land (Ghebru and Girmachew, 2019a; 2019b). Parts of the region are experiencing a notable shift in the allocation of customary land from a rights-based approach that secures access to land for localborn members of the community to market-based approaches to land allocation based increasingly on willingness to pay. As population densities rise and land becomes scarce in many areas, tenure security is becoming increasingly important. Research evidence shows that security of tenure typically promotes long-term land investments and agricultural productivity, hence the need for African governments to focus on improving land tenure security to more effectively achieve their national agricultural policy objectives.

Keywords: agricultural extension; agriculture; crop production; systems; farms; land; rural areas; tenure; farm size; Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/145871

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:resbrf:2019synthesisreportii

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research briefs from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().