title: Prozesse und Auswirkungen von Landinvestitionen
title: Processes and Impacts of Investment in Land
Creators: name: Väth, Susanne Johanna
Publisher: name: Philipps-Universität Marburg
Year: 2015
Subjects: Land
contract farming
Investition
Soziale Differenzierung
Wirtschaft
subjektive Lebenszufriedenheit
Kenia
Ölpalme
quasi-natural experiment
Besitzrecht
Vertragsanbau
property rights
Institutionenökonomie
quasi-natürliches Experiment
Ghana
large-scale land investment

description: The latest food, fuel, and
      financial crises raised tremendously the interest in global
      farmland. After decades of neglecting the agricultural
      sector, investment is urgently needed to close the yield gap
      in developing countries. While its drivers have been widely
      discussed, insights on underlying processes and associated
      impacts are still incomplete. This dissertation therefore
      analyses how the surrounding institutional environment shapes
      the implementation of an investment and how this in turn
      produces varying outcomes. It further provides a rigorous
      impact assessment with a focus on contract farming as a tool
      to commercialise farmers’ agricultural production in the
      vicinity of a large-scale investment in land. The empirical
      analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative data from
      Ghana and Kenya. The first essay (Nolte and Väth, 2013) shows
      that the present land governance systems in Ghana and Kenya
      are incapable to cope with the increasing pressure on land.
      As well-defined rules and proper enforcement are missing, the
      general process of acquiring land most often disregards the
      procedures laid down by the legislation. Hence, investors
      determine to a large extent how their specific project
      affects the host country. This in turn leads to repercussions
      for the land governance system. As investors often misuse the
      ‘institutional self-service shop’ to their own benefit, they
      provoke resistance by the local population, civil society
      organisations and the international community. Our
      comparative analysis therefore reveals that large-scale land
      acquisitions can trigger institutional reform of the land
      governance system. The second essay (Väth, 2013) displays
      that large-scale land acquisitions produce varying outcomes.
      A land governance system with poorly harmonised formal
      regulations and customary rules, as well as asymmetric power
      relations between investors, state agents and traditional
      authorities, allows actors to lobby for particular sub-groups
      of the local population and to convert outcomes of land
      acquisitions into own benefits. This case study further
      sensitises to rural social differentiation in the vicinity of
      an oil palm company. The analysis reveals that investment
      neither meets a homogenous local population nor yields to
      equal outcomes. Rather, it produces negative and positive
      effects depending on households’ distance to the company’s
      centre of operation, the amount of land a household loses,
      its possibility to gain permanent or casual employment or its
      chance to farm under contract. Thus, the essay discloses that
      large-scale investment in land is often neither completely
      detrimental nor fully beneficial, but requires accompanying
      measures to mitigate increasing inequality. The third essay
      (Väth and Kirk, 2014) focuses on the analysis of a
      potentially beneficial outgrower scheme in a competitive
      setting in Ghana. Here an investor faces excess demand due to
      large production capacities and offers long-term contracts
      for oil palm farming to rural households whose property
      rights remain untouched. Due to a unique setting where
      contract allocation occurred as a quasi-natural experiment,
      we are able to estimate causal effects. We find that contract
      farming enhances participants’ asset endowment and perceived
      future security, which offers long-term security and thus,
      enables rural households to invest in non-farm activities. At
      the same time, we show that farmers earn higher agricultural
      income and profit per acre when they cultivate oil palm
      independently. We suggest that economic integration of the
      local population seems to be most beneficial if investors aim
      at a mix of outgrower schemes and buying from independently
      managed plots. However, as the poorest people are often
      excluded from participation, it is not per se an instrument
      to reduce poverty. The fourth essay (Väth et al., 2014)
      focuses on overall subjective well-being as outcome variable
      to jointly capture monetary and non-monetary aspects of a
      contract. Thus, by controlling for income effects, the
      subjective well-being approach enables us to emphasise on
      security-related aspects and risk-reducing mechanisms. We
      find that outgrower schemes mainly enhance subjective
      well-being by fulfilling security needs, as property rights
      for land – which are also associated with increased security
      – play an important role for non-contract farmers but not for
      contract farmers. We identify a partially substitutive
      relationship between contract farming and secure property
      rights to land. However, we do not suggest that contracts can
      replace secure property rights to land; we rather claim that
      outgrower schemes can enhance subjective well-being,
      especially through security gains in a setting where existing
      local land rights are respected. Hence, this essay reveals
      that contract farming in the vicinity of a large-scale
      investment in land can have a beneficial effect as it helps
      farmers in our case study to overcome lacks of
      security.
description: In dieser kumulativen Dissertation
      werden qualitative und quantitative Analysemethoden
      angewendet um zu einem besseren Verständnis der grundlegenden
      Prozesse und Auswirkungen von großflächigen Landinvestitionen
      beizutragen. Die empirische Arbeit sensibilisiert den Leser
      für die Rückwirkungen, die großflächige Landinvestitionen auf
      das vorherrschende Landgovernancesystem in Ghana und Kenia
      haben. Darüber hinaus wird ein komplexes Zusammenspiel
      zwischen dem institutionellen Kontext und den Handlungen von
      Investoren sowie staatlichen und traditionellen Akteuren
      herausgearbeitet, welches unterschiedliche Auswirkungen auf
      verschiedene Bevölkerungsgruppen maßgeblich bestimmt und
      soziale Differenzierung beeinflusst. Ein Vergleich von
      Vertragsbauern und unabhängigen Ölpalmbauern zeigt, dass
      Teile der ländlichen Bevölkerung von Vertragslandwirtschaft
      im Umfeld einer großflächigen Landinvestition profitieren,
      weil diese ihnen die Akkumulation von Vermögenswerten, eine
      größere wahrgenommene zukünftige Sicherheit, sowie eine
      höhere Einkommensdiversifizierung durch eine Beschäftigung
      außerhalb des Agrarsektors ermöglicht. Dies spiegelt sich
      auch in einer höheren subjektiven Gesamtlebenszufriedenheit
      von Vertragsbauern wider, welche auf den risikomindernden
      Effekt von Vertragslandwirtschaft zurückgeführt werden kann,
      da sich sichere Landbesitzrechte, die ebenfalls mit
      reduziertem Risiko in Verbindung stehen, nur für
      Nicht-Vertragsbauern positiv auf die
      Gesamtlebenszufriedenheit auswirken, jedoch für
      Vertragsbauern keinerlei zusätzliche Effekte
      besitzen.