Limits on land availability are evident from the fact that only 11% or 31% of villages still have uncultivated or unallocated land available and that in 11% of villages, households have moved out to escape land shortage. Village land is no longer exclusively used by villagers either, as 37% have village land owned by outsiders and 34% rent village land to them (21% where outsiders own and rent village land). Higher outside demand for land is also visible from the fact that 11% and 15% of villages had, in the last 5 years, sold or given land to outsiders, sometimes (14%) failing to respect the village head’s authority. Land conflict is becoming more frequent: 29% and 20% of villages reported conflict among village families or with neighboring villages, respectively. Some 24% of villages are located within walking distance from estates and in more than a fifth of these cases, land conflicts with neighboring estates are reported. Infrastructure access remains limited with only 35% of villages connected to an all-season road.

# **3.2 Comparison of land use and productivity between smallholders and estates**

Our survey comprises small and large farms. We can thus compare the intensity and productivity of land use between smallholders and estates to assess the long-term impact of land transfers to estates as well as the extent to which rental or sales markets can attenuate dualistic structures and equalize returns between different types of producers. Doing so allows us to see if, as some have claimed, studies of the relationship between farm-size and productivity that rely on household samples may miss a significant part of the distribution and thus come to erroneous conclusions (Jayne _et al._ 2015).

Comparing smallholder with estate data provides interesting insights in a number of respects. Mean age for the 868 estates with data is 19 years with largest estates the oldest (table 4). Most (68%) are owned by natural persons of Malawian nationality, 16% by ‘others’ -most likely legal persons- and 10% by expatriates. Expatriates’ ownership share peaks at the 100-500 ha size while that of government and ‘others’ peaks in the greater than 500 category. In contrast to smallholders, almost all estates (87%) use fertilizer and close to two-thirds (61%) purchase pesticide or seeds, a practice more prevalent for larger sizes in both cases. With about a third of estates having tenants; the share of estates with tenants peaks at close to 50% in the 10-100 size category. Compared to large farms in other countries that produce bulk commodities and often generate little employment (Ali _et al._ 2015), many of Malawi’s estates are quite labor intensive. Permanent or temporary male (female) labor is hired by 60% (25%) and 66% (52%) of estates respectively. For these, demand for permanent labor per ha cultivated is almost equal to the amount of labor spent by smallholders based on the 2010/11 LSMS-ISA survey (Deininger _et al._ 2015). It increases with size to about 0.9 males and 0.6 females in the largest category though the pattern for temporary labor is more volatile.

Claims about un- or underused estate land recurred in Malawi’s policy debate (Holden _et al._ 2006). While our sample was not designed to provide conclusive evidence on this, data suggest that for surveyed estates, 8