Smallholder Income and Land Distribution in Africa: Implications for Poverty Reduction Strategies

By T. Jayne, T. Yamano, Matthias Weber, D. Tschirley, R. Benfica, A. Chapoto, B. Zulu, D. Neven. 2003

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides a micro-level foundation for discussions of income and asset allocation within the smallholder sector in Eastern and Southern Africa, and explores the implications of these findings for rural growth and poverty alleviation strategies in the region. Results are drawn from nationally-representative household surveys in five countries between 1990 and 2000: Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Zambia. The paper addresses five major points: (1) why geographically-based poverty reduction or targeting strategies-e.g., focusing on marginal areas-is likely to miss a significant share of the poor in any particular country regardless of targeting efficiency in these areas; (2) why current enthusiasm for community-driven development approaches will require serious attention to how resources are allocated at local levels; (3) why sustained income growth for the poorest strata of the rural population will depend on agricultural growth in most countries, even though the poor generally lack the land and other productive resources to respond directly or immediately to policies and investments to stimulate agricultural growth; (4) why agricultural productivity growth, while most easily generating gains for better-off smallholder farmers, is likely to offer the best potential for pulling the poorest and land-constrained households out of poverty; and (5) why meaningful poverty alleviation strategies in many countries will require fundamental changes to make land more accessible to smallholder farmers. This could be accomplished through various processes, including improvement in land rental markets or perhaps land redistribution. We briefly elaborate on each of these findings.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e814d424b7515826003cf52a8e5abfb2c217e1a4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Soil Science

In Urban Studies

Citations in the corpus

Fractal Poverty Traps (2006, background): “Krishna (2002) has studied differences in welfare between villages in the Indian state of Rajastan and found internal social cohesion and the strength of linkages to external sources of power and finance to be the most important determinants of village development performance.”
Welfare dynamics in rural Kenya and Madagascar (2006, methodology): “Lybbert et al. (2004) found such patterns in southern Ethiopian pastoralist communities very similar to the northern Kenya sites in our study.”
Livelihood diversification strategies, incomes and soil management strategies: a case study from Kerio Valley, Kenya (2008, background): “Given the wide variation in assets held by rural households across most rural African communities (Jayne et al., 2003), it is useful to develop criteria for categorising households into groups with similar asset bases, welfare status and natural resource management objectives.”
The family farm in a globalizing world: The role of crop science in alleviating poverty (2005, background): “However, in much of southern and eastern Africa, land distribution remains very unequal, mass poverty persists, and significant farm sales are confined to 10–15 percent of farms (Jayne et al. 2003).”
Sustaining intensification of smallholder livestock systems in the tropics (2010, background): “Smallholder livestock production on mixed crop–livestock farms will thus remain dominant in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia for the foreseeable future (Jayne et al., 2003; ILRI, 2006).”
Escaping poverty and becoming poor in 36 villages of Central and Western Uganda (2006, background): “Additional knowledge of a disaggregated nature is required, however, for identifying poverty-reducing and poverty-creating processes at work within different regions of the country (Jayne et al., 2003; Johnson, 2002; Woodhouse, 2003).”
Adaptation to land constraints: Is Africa different? (2014, background): “Evidence on declining farm size for a number of specific African countries over the same period is presented in Jayne et al. (2003). The census/survey data suggest that over this 30-year period the average landholding in high density Africa declined from about 2 hectares to 1.”
Effective livelihood adaptation to climate change disturbance: Scale dimensions of practice in Mozambique (2008, background): “The food crises in Africa and Asia during the 1970s and 1980s generated a proliferation of research describing how households behave and cope with crises (Jodha, 1978; Corbett, 1988).”
Livestock sector development for poverty reduction: an economic and policy perspective. Livestock's many virtues. (2012, background): “CHARACTERISTICS OF RURAL HOUSEHOLDS Agriculture remains the single largest source of income and livelihoods for rural households in the developing world, normally providing more than 50 percent of household income (DFID/ODI/NMFA, 2002; Jayne et al., 2003; Otte and Chilonda, 2002).”
The roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in the context of population growth and land use intensification in Africa (2014, background): “Studies in Ethiopia (Deininger et al., 2008; Ghebru and Holden, 2008; Holden and Bezabih, 2008; Kassie and Holden, 2008), Kenya (Yamano et al., 2008; Jin and Jayne, 2013) and Malawi (Lunduka et al., 2008) demonstrate that land rental markets improve allocative efficiency by equalizing factor ratios…”
Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of Imposed Innovation for the Wellbeing of Rural Smallholders (2016, background): “76 hectares (NISR, 2010) and as many as a quarter of rural households are virtually landless (Jayne et al., 2003).”
The Future of Small Farms: New Directions for Services, Institutions and Intermediation (2010, background): “Jayne et al. 2003a document continued government interventions that have clearly depressed incentives for private sector investment in fertiliser supply in Ethiopia and Zambia.”