Abstract
Medium-scale farms have become a major force in Malawi’s agricultural sector. Malawi’s most recent official agricultural survey indicates that these account for over a quarter of all land under cultivation in Malawi. This study explores the causes and multifaceted consequences of the rising importance of medium-scale farms in Malawi. We identify the characteristics and pathways of entry into farming based on surveys of 300 medium-scale farmers undertaken in 2014 in the districts of Mchinji, Kasungu and Lilongwe. The area of land acquired by medium-scale farmers in these three districts is found to have almost doubled between 2000 and 2015. Just over half of the medium-scale farmers represent cases of successful expansion out of small-scale farming status; the other significant proportion of medium-scale farmers are found to be urban-based professionals, entrepreneurs and/or civil servants who acquired land, some very recently, and started farming in mid-life. We also find that a significant portion of the land acquired by medium-scale farmers was utilized by others prior to acquisition, that most of the acquired land was under customary tenure, and that the current owners were often successful in transferring the ownership structure of the acquired land to a long-term leaseholding with a title deed. The study finds that, instead of just strong endogenous growth of small-scale famers as a route for the emergence of medium-scale farms, significant farm consolidation is occurring through land acquisitions, often by urban-based people. The effects of farmland acquisitions by domestic investors on the country’s primary development goals, such as food security, poverty reduction and employment, are not yet clear, though some trends appear to be emerging. We consider future research questions that may more fully shed light on the implications of policies that would continue to promote land acquisitions by medium-scale farms.
Highlights
After 40 years of relative inertia, African agriculture seems to have engaged a renewed structural transformation path
In order to analyze the medium-scale farmers in Malawi, our analytical framework focuses on accumulation patterns and farm trajectories, examining how changes in farmland ownership patterns are associated with the socio-economic characteristics of households in different farm size categories
The medium-scale farmers of the three districts examined in this study predominantly occupy, lease or own 5 to 10 ha
Summary
After 40 years of relative inertia, African agriculture seems to have engaged a renewed structural transformation path. Most of the attention on changing farmland ownership in sub-Saharan Africa over the past few years has been focused on large-scale foreign land investments [1,2], due in part to a rise in global food prices since the mid-2000s These investments are significant, if not huge, in size, transforming the high-end of the sector and, as Anseeuw and Ducastel [3] note, initiating trends of corporatization and increased international financing. Representative smallholder surveys do not, shed much light on how rapidly medium- and large-scale farms are growing over time, how these farmers have acquired their farms, the prior status of the land they acquired, or the extent to which they are productively utilizing their farms Nor do they inform whether these dynamics are related to the present renewed interest in agriculture and transformation of the value-chains (as described above), or whether they are more externally driven, or are endogenous processes of smallholder growth.
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