Spatial records are also of poor quality: 28% of agricultural estates have at least 20% of their area overlap with another estate, an issue affecting a total of 137,064 ha; and less than 5% of estates have a remaining lease term of more than 10 years, and thus a time horizon long enough to make longer-term investments, which may also reduce productivity directly. Linking spatial records to georeferenced farm survey data and satellite imagery allows us to show that weak record maintenance also affects performance. First, survey data suggest that for all crops with the exception of cassava, smallholders’ yields are significantly above those by estates. As estates use consistently more inputs than smallholders, this implies a negative relationship between farm size and productivity on the land area actually cultivated. Second, overlaying recorded estate boundaries with land use categories from supervised classification of medium-resolution satellite imagery implies that only about 40% of estate land is used for crop cultivation. While we lack data on soil quality, the fact that estate land was the best makes this rather surprising (and of course they could rent out to smallholders). Finally, and not surprisingly in light of the above, estates fail to act as a motor for the rural economy and a source of positive spillovers for neighboring smallholders, a function they were expected to perform when established.

Our findings are particularly policy relevant because in late 2016, after protracted debate, Malawi passed a series of Land Bills that aim to increase security of customary land users’ rights and overcome the dualism of the country’s post-independence tenure system among others by allowing sporadic registration of customary land under so-called ‘customary estates’. Literature suggests that low-cost, participatory, and systematic land tenure regularization can encourage investment and effectiveness of land use (Fenske 2011; Lawry _et al._ 2016), empower women (Ali _et al._ 2016a; Newman _et al._ 2015), and improve scope for lease markets to transfer land to more efficient operators (Ali _et al._ 2014). A sporadic approach that fails to first clarify the boundaries of land currently under estates; the status of rights to such land; and the ultimate owner of unutilized estate land (i.e. if it is government land that can be transferred to investors or reverts to the traditional domain) may -contrary to intentions- increase tenure insecurity, conflict, and inequality.

The paper is organized as follows: Section two situates the paper in the debate on large scale agricultural investment by highlighting the challenge of assessing productive efficiency by large agricultural enterprises and provides background on the evolution of Malawi’s estate sector. Section three discusses administrative and remotely-sensed data sources, using them to quantify the evolution of Malawi’s agricultural estates, to identify challenges to the quality of the textual and spatial land records, and to draw out implications in terms of public revenue and intensity of land use. Section four compares productivity between smallholders and estates and explores the extent to which the presence of estates benefits neighboring small farmers via technology or market access spillovers. Section five concludes with implications for policy and research.

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