traditional land management area (TLMA). The Customary Land Act defines mechanisms for registration of customary estates, formalizes the role of chiefs in land allocation and conflict resolution, and mandates establishment of land committees and land tribunals at the TA, district, and national level to perform this role.<sup>8</sup> It allows for systematic identification and recording of parcel boundaries to be followed by adjudication of rights that is impossible without key policy decisions having been made about renewal/cancellation of leases for existing estates.<sup>9</sup> The Survey Act creates opportunities to use general boundaries and modern technology, opening the door for using low-cost (US$ 5-6 per parcel) approaches as in neighboring countries (Nkurunziza 2015). It also provides for surveying of TLMAs as part of national spatial data infrastructure. Also, the Registration Act decentralizes registries to district level, and stipulates filing requirements including provision of registry maps to chiefs. The Physical Planning Act expands the reach of planning beyond urban areas.

# **2.3 Earlier evidence on estate sector performance**

The 1997 Estate Lands Utilisation Study or ELUS remains a key source of information on the estate sector (Ministry of Lands and Valuation 1997). The fact that records were incomplete and paper-based made drawing a sample difficult. Eventually the study sample was drawn listing all estates in 59 10x10 km blocks in 9 districts which, according to official records, had the highest concentration of estates.<sup>10</sup> On this basis, the universe was estimated to comprise 29,000 estates with an area of 916,815 ha. Some 57% of estate land was found to have been newly cleared with the remainder having been used as customary land before; in fact a sizeable share of estate owners seem to have converted land they previously farmed under customary tenure, either to be able to grow tobacco (the most prevalent reason in the Center) or to increase tenure security (the most prevalent reason given in the North and South). Despite Malawi’s relative land scarcity, 75% of estate owners reported to have suitable land that they did not utilize. In tobacco estates, 29% of suitable land was not utilized, a share that varied between 50% in the North and 25% in the Center. Economic performance in terms of yield per ha was best in the size groups below 20 ha or above 500 ha. Interestingly, good performance was strongly positively correlated with land use intensity. About half of owners are absentee ones and 25% indicated that they rarely visited their estates. This may encourage

> 8 So-called Traditional Land Management Areas (TLMAs) at Group Village Headman (GVH) level, as identified in a certificate and map of customary land (CCL), are established as basic spatial units. In each TLMA, a customary Land Committee (CLC) with six elected members (half women) and chaired by the GVH chair will be supported by a Land Clerk, an employee of the local assembly. The CLC, in collaboration with the TA, can grant individuals customary estates of indefinite duration and register rights to these.

> 9 This requires policy decisions on (i) how to define an estate, how to define idle land, and what to do with land that had been leased to estates but is no longer used as an estate (e.g. subsistence farming as a result of sub-division or transfer); (ii) what action to take in case of lessees’ failure to comply with lease conditions (either in terms of non-compatible land uses or failure to pay ground rent); (iii) how to adjust estate boundaries in case of imprecise original surveys and expansion or contraction of the originally leased area; and (iv) lease terms including levels of ground rent to be charged for renewal of leases on land that is lawfully occupied by estates; and (v) procedures for re-allocating unused estate land, in particular the role of TAs and other local institutions in this process.

> 10 These districts are Rumphi, Mzuzu, Kasungu, Dowa, Lilongwe, Nkhotakhota, Mangochi, Machinga, and Zomba. The listing yielded a total of 3,908 estates out of which some 500 were chosen for a more detailed survey.

7