closer proximity to the boundary of estates with non-expired leases. While further exploration of this issue with better data would be warranted, this suggests that any indirect benefits from estates will be quite limited. Non-parametric regressions for profits in maize and tobacco in figure 4 also support this notion, although wide confidence intervals point towards enormous heterogeneity especially far from estate boundaries.

# **5. Conclusion and policy implications**

A decade after the emergence of high demand for large scale agricultural land acquisition, no consensus has yet emerged on how to analytically tackle the issue of large farm investment. Our paper contributes to this debate from a methodological and a substantive point of view. Methodologically, we show how combining administrative records with georeferenced survey data and remotely sensed imagery can help address many of the issues that traditionally impeded routine monitoring of large agricultural investments’ performance that could then trigger swift action in case of deviations. Substantively, we find that Malawian estates, most formed in the late 1980s to ‘commercialize’ the agricultural sector, failed to live up to their potential using 2006/07 data: With few exceptions yields were below and input use above those of smallholders who as a result seem to have derived few spillover benefits, either in terms of technology or market access. Detailed investigation of land records suggests that loss of public revenue and tenure insecurity emanating from expired lease records, most of which were of low quality to start with, may be a key contributing factor by making it difficult for government to collect ground rent revenue, encouraging speculative instead of productive land use, and -via tenure insecurity- lower intensity and productivity of land use. A failure to maintain and use administrative data not only undermines generation of the revenue to deal with the issue but may also give rise to a collective action problem whereby each private lessee will not have an incentive to keep records up to date although society would greatly benefit from it.

To unleash the potential of properly run estates to contribute to the diversification of Malawi’s agricultural sector, there is need to renew, cancel, or renegotiate existing estate leases in a systematic process that could then form the basis for continued monitoring of lease performance in near real time. Policy decisions on procedures for lease renewal, in particular setting levels of ground rent that are realistic and procedures on how to deal with accumulated ground rent arrears are one precondition for such a process to be feasible. A second precondition is that a clear hierarchy of evidence among competing claims be established and procedures developed to ascertain and adjudicate rights in a way that deals with discrepancies, or overlaps through administrative mechanisms be developed.

The recent approval of a set of Land Acts creates enormous opportunities to link clarification of estate leases to securing smallholder land rights, but also holds a risk of unintended consequences whereby, instead of improving tenure security, sporadic adjudication processes will add yet another layer of complexity to a set of land records that already contains numerous overlaps and thus exacerbate tenure 14