Most work on the relationship between farm size and productivity strongly suggests that farms that rely mostly on family labor are more productive than large farms operated primarily by hired labor. This study began as an inquiry into how rental and sales markets for agricultural land in the developing world affect efficiency and equity. What emerged was the clear sense that great variations in land relations around the world and over time cannot be understood in the common paradigm of property rights and competitive markets. Under that paradigm, land scarcity leads to better definition of rights, which are then traded in sales and rental markets accessible equally to all players. The outcome should be the allocation of land to the most efficient uses and users, yet this rarely happens. Instead, land rights and ownership tend to grow out of power relationships. Landowning groups have used coercion and distortions in land, labor, credit, and commodity markets to extract economic rents from the land, from peasants and workers, and most recently from urban consumer groups or taxpayers. Such rent-seeking activities reduce the efficiency of resource use, retard growth, and increase the poverty of the rural population. The authors examine how these power relations emerged and what legal means enabled relatively few landowners to accumulate and hold on to large landholdings. The authors discuss the successes and failures of reform in market and socialist economies, and the perversions of reforms in both systems, manifested in large commercial farms and collectives. They survey the history of land relations and the legacies that history leaves. They discuss the three analytical controversies surrounding economies of scale, and the efficiency of the land sales and land rental market. They discuss the main policy issues and implications of various distortions and successful and unsuccessful reforms in the developing world, including land registration and titling, land taxation, regulations restricting land sales and rentals, fragmentation and consolidation of land, redistributive land reform, and decollectivization. In an epilogue on methodology, the authors examine how various strands of economic theory have contributed, or failed to contribute, to the explanation of variations in policies, distortions, and land relations over space and time.

Power, distortions, revolt, and reform in agricultural land relations

The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts and expropriation of land beg for closer attention. More emphasis needs to be placed by analysts on who benefits and who loses from instances of ‘negotiability’ in access to land, an analysis that, in turn, needs to be situated in broader political economic and social changes taking place, particularly during the past thirty or so years. This requires a theoretical move away from privileging contingency, flexibility and negotiability that, willy-nilly, ends by suggesting an open field, to one that is able to identify those situations and processes (including commodification, structural adjustment, market liberalization and globalization) that limit or end negotiation and flexibility for certain social groups or categories.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2004.00080.x

Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

This paper presents a simultaneous econometric model of both the determinants of international migration to the South African mines and of some of the economic consequences for each of the labor supplying countries. Not only are the short-run effects of labor withdrawal on traditional crop cultivation and the domestic wage labor markets considered but also the long-term effects of savings from mine earnings invested in crops and cattle in the home countries. The experiences of Botswana Lesotho Malawi Mozambique and the South African homelands are compared. It is shown that "emigration to the South African mines has...reduced crop production in the subsistence sectors of Botswana Lesotho Malawi and the South African homelands in the short run. But the results also suggest that earnings of migrants have enhanced both crop productivity and cattle accumulation in the longer run except in Lesotho." (EXCERPT)

/pdf/emigration-to-south-africa-s-mines-3bhdeseuxv.pdf

Emigration to South Africa's Mines

The African Poor: A History.

(1989). The irrelevance of development studies. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 116-135.

The irrelevance of development studies

List of figures List of maps Preface Part I. The Mang'anja Village: 1. 1859-1863: one of the neatest we have ever seen Part II. The Lomwe Village: 2. 1901-1915: this place is wonderful 3. 1915-1945: my children's market is the graveyard 4. 1945-1985: John Chilembwe will make everything shine Sources Index.

Magomero: Portrait Of An African Village

Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District

(1982). Power and the praise poem. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 8-32.

Power and the Praise Poem

Leroy Vail and Landeg White's lengthy, tightly-argued study of capitalism and colonialism in Mozambique fully lives up to the promise of a series of excellent articles published over recent years. Its focus is situated in Quelimane district, the seat of the plantation economy which produced most of colonial Mozambique's commodity exports. Rarely have the fundamental developments in a single African region over the last century been given such searching investigation. The first hundred pages recapitulates the prazo system of the nineteenth century and its transformation under the impact of an intensified slave trade and then a relatively free cash economy. This section traces the interrelationship of social, cultural, and political change and puts the anti-Portuguese struggles of the last quarter of the century into a plausible framework for the first time. The remaining three-quarters of the book is devoted to the rise, development, and implications of the plantation system that emerged in Zambesia before World War I. It is therefore the first serious historical study to consider the capitalist foreign-run plantation in Africa, Vail and White having had access to the papers of Sena Sugar Estates Ltd. They produce a finely-worked succession of arguments about capital strategies on competition and markets, but above all, labor over more than half a century. It is hardly surprising that a crop as unpleasant to harvest as sugar presented great problems for an employer dependent on cheap labor. Only to a limited extent were wages at Sena in any sense competitive. In the early years, John Peter Hornung, the company's driving spirit, relied on the constraints of the brutal, albeit paternalistic, prazo system. As labor requirements grew, he was obliged to turn increasingly to a complex, segmented migrant labor force that represented a niche in the enormous sub-continental army of cheap, oppressed migrant workers of southern Africa. At the same time, forced labor was provided through the collaboration of the Portuguese state. Because Sena was a British firm, its relationship with the regime contained considerable tensions. Nevertheless, particularly from the establishment of Salazar's Estado Novo, its sugar production was coordinated with the drive for an autarchic Portuguese imperium. To a considerable extent, it was the choice of the Portuguese regime to stress plantation production. The Quelimane peasantry produced cash crops willingly in the late nineteenth century and occasionally later when Portuguese policy permitted. Yet one is struck by the distinctive heritage of the prazo system which had undercut pre-capitalist production. Sena culture had a distinctly un-tribal flavor; the authority of the chiefs was minimal and people turned to the

Capitalism and colonialism in Mozambique

"Do you know, my son," Papa spoke ponderously, and gesticulated a long time before every word. "The most difficult thing to bear is that feeling of complete emptiness ... and one suffers very much . . . , very very very much. One grows with so much bottled up inside, but afterwards it is difficult to scream, you know...." Mama was going to object, but Papa clutched her shoulder firmly. "It's nothing, mother, but, you know, our son believes that people don't mount wild horses, and that they only make use of the hungry docile ones. Yet when a horse goes wild it gets shot down, and it's all finished. But tame horses die every dayas long as they can stand on their feet."'

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1874024.pdf

Landeg White

Papers

Magomero: Portrait Of An African Village

Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District

Power and the Praise Poem

Capitalism and colonialism in Mozambique

Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique