The roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in the context of population growth and land use intensification in Africa
By Stein T. Holden, K. Otsuka. 2014
278 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article reviews the past and potential future roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as responses to population growth in the process of land use intensification and livelihood transformation. The farm size distribution and the existence of an inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and land productivity in SSA and the implications of this relationship for efficiency and equity are investigated. More secure property rights and removal of restrictions on land markets have the potential to create both efficiency and equity benefits, but there are high risks of elite capture of large land areas with inefficient and inequitable outcomes. This situation is the case not only in land-abundant areas but also in urban and peri-urban areas where increasingly larger proportions of people will make their living. Increasing population pressure in densely populated rural areas contributes to more rapid rural–urban migration, and creating alternative livelihood opportunities for the migrating youth population is essential to achieving economic development with social stability.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science, Urban Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d473374ed6f829ef73a741b9715c116850cea4bd
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Soil Science
In Urban Studies
Citations in the corpus
- The Role of Smallholder Farms in a Changing World (2020, background): “Moreover, in Ethiopia, evidence shows that land tenure reform that expanded land renting contributes to improved tenure security, food security and child nutrition, whereas restrictions on land renting may contribute to deeper rural poverty traps and food insecurity (Holden and Otsuka 2014).”
- The Rapid Urban Growth Triad: A New Conceptual Framework for Examining the Urban Transition in Developing Countries (2017, background): “There are a number of reasons behind this including the green revolution [55,56], surplus labour [57], rural poverty [6], politics of land inheritance [58], Malthusian theory [14,16], natural or man-made disasters [59] and war and conflicts [50,60].”
- Effects of rising rural population density on smallholder agriculture in Kenya (2014, background): “001 generally expected to experience fertility transition at the same time (Johnson-Hanks, 2008). Changes in reproductive behavior include changes in nuptiality and declines in marital fertility as suggested by Boserup (1965) and Malthus (1798).”