Commercial pressure is a key force for land reforms

The agricultural sector in Uganda is predominantly subsistence where the major part of farm production is used for household consumption rather than for the market. Smallholder farms cultivate close to 95 percent of the total cropped land and produce more than 90 percent of the total agricultural output.

The sector is highly constrained by a shortage of assets like land, capital and oxen. The per capita land holding is less than 1 hectare. In fact, it is because Uganda’s potential to produce food is very high and has a comparative advantage in the East African region, that government policy appears to promote the commercialisation of agriculture thereby encouraging commercial land pressure and for some land speculators, opportunities for land grabbing under the guise of promoting rural investment.

However, what is generally perceived as land grabbing, is in most cases, driven by speculative demand for land encouraged by good long-term prospects of macro-economic stability on the one hand, and land tenure insecurity caused by uncertainty, lack of awareness of property rights and the absence of legal-institutional designs supporting rural and urban planning, development management and strategies for resolving land disputes.

The major endowment of a rural small-holder household is its labour. Thus, if national land reform is not managed suitably, there can be increased inequality. Secure access to land and natural resources encourages sustainable production; it also helps insulate smallholders against eviction from their holdings as a result of commercial pressure. 

In Uganda, land reform to secure tenure shall be most effective when complemented by interventions to strengthen infrastructures and access to social services, credit and agricultural inputs. 

There is significant evidence indicating that the largest farms in Africa and other developing countries generally have lower cropping intensity, apply less manure per hectare, and have proportionately less irrigation than farms smaller than 1.0 ha. The larger commercial farms are thus likely to have lower productivity than the smaller ones. 

There are, however, opportunities in Ugandan agriculture where investment to gain benefit from economies of scale is both feasible and worthwhile. However, a policy to encourage the commercialization of agriculture by raising land ceilings may result in undesirable increases in rural-urban migration, notwithstanding the fact that ownership of land, no matter how small, lessens poverty and food insecurity. 

Food security in Uganda depends critically on smallholder farmers. Small-holder families constitute more than 70 percent of the national population and account for the largest proportion of the nation’s hungry and poor. It is therefore incumbent upon the nation to assist the smallholder families to increase their productivity and to augment their assets and entitlements.

Government assistance through systematic certification of land rights that might be afforded with community participation and relatively little legal complexity would allow significant expansion of the land-lease market, relaxation of the constraints to commercial land utilization, and would provide institutional support to new models of agricultural co-operatives.

Priorities for assistance to small holders through technical support and interventions should be guided by the need to increase on-farm productivity and sustainable resource use. Thus, public- and private-sector involvements to optimize the prospective benefits from a strengthened extension-farming, access to the market, and monetization of small-holder farming are socially and economically rewarding.

Social attitudes indicate that ownership of land, however small, is associated with superior household income, nutrition, and food security. Any reckless policy to promote commercial land access would transform surplus rural labour into urban destitution and should be discouraged. Instead, mechanisms that generate rural on-farm and off-farm employment should be promoted.

Finally, rural development and rural employment generation each require an investment in human resources and skills strengthening, and other social services. With upgraded infrastructures and strengthened human resources as an incentive for new enterprises and rural non-farm employment opportunities, commercial land pressure would merely reflect dynamic market conditions in a growing economy and less of a land grabbing, food insecurity policy concern.

Mr Jimmy Ochom is the land rights coordinator, Oxfam Uganda.