out challenges to be confronted. This is particularly relevant to be aware of the challenges to be confronted in implementing the recently passed land Bills.

# **2.1 The evolution of Malawi’s agrarian structure and land tenure system**

Malawi has a dualistic farm structure that juxtaposes freehold or leasehold estates focused on ‘commercial’ activity with a customary sector emphasizing food crops. With 177 persons per km<sup>2</sup> in 2014, population density is high. During colonial times, cultivation of tobacco, the country’s main cash and export crop, was restricted to white settlers who had preferential access to land, labor, and credit (Binswanger _et al._ 1995), and guaranteed market access via a quota system (Mataya and Tsonga 2001). After independence in 1964, estate land was transferred to Malawians (Jaffee 2003) with direct and indirect public support:<sup>2</sup> Until 1994, only estates were allowed to produce tobacco and smallholders had to sell output to the marketing board at low prices. The surplus thus generated was funneled to estate owners in the form of soft loans, thus providing an implicit subsidy that reinforced the dualistic structure of the country’s agriculture (Kydd and Christiansen 1982). Thereafter, tobacco quotas were gradually extended to smallholders by licensing clubs of 10-30 members. Rapid take-up led to marked improvements in socio-economic indicators (Jaffee 2003) and soon brought small farmers’ share in tobacco production to some 70% (Lea and Hanmer 2009).

Although debated since the mid-1990s, no corresponding changes were made in the country’s land system. To accommodate pent-up demand for land to cultivate commercial crops, 30,000 to 50,000 estates of 1030 hectares each were carved out of what was deemed unutilized customary land and transferred to aspiring farmers in the late 1980s, largely via 21-year leaseholds (Devereux 1997),<sup>3</sup> before a 1994 moratorium to stop new estate establishment.<sup>4</sup> With records on paper only, data on the size and performance of the estate sector, including the amount of land leased to estates, total land rent owed to government, and levels of land utilization, remained scant,<sup>5</sup> making it difficult to design policy to fully utilize the sector’s potential.<sup>6</sup>

# **2.2 Efforts to improve tenure security**

Malawi’s customary sector, long characterized by egalitarian of land access and great diversity between different inheritance systems, has come under strain due to population growth, land scarcity (Ricker-Gilbert _et al._ 2014) and urban expansion that increased prices <mark>(Takane 2008). La</mark> nd transactions with outsiders not

> 2 Transactions were directly supported through loans from the Farmers Marketing Board (FMB), a successor to the Native Tobacco Board, later transformed into the Agricultural Development and Marketing Cooperative (ADMARC). Indirect support came from restricting tobacco cultivation by smallholders and from establishing ADMARC as the sole marketing option with a power to fix prices (Mandondo and German 2015).

> 3 As access to a minimum of 12 ha of land was required to access tobacco marketing quotas, an unknown number of so-called ‘ghost estates’ was established, often in office-based processes without corresponding to actual land on the ground.

> 4 Failure to recognize customary rights –reinforced by subsidies that benefit the rich (Chinsinga and Poulton 2014)– was a key reason why even _prima facie_ successful expansion of tobacco cultivation may have had mixed socio-economic impacts (Mandondo and German 2015). 5 A 1997 study that aimed to obtain more precise figures faced difficulties due to the parlous state of records. It estimates that leasehold estates cover less than 1 mn. ha while smallholders on customary land account for the remainder of the country’s agricultural area (Gossage 1997).

> 6 A resettlement program to partly address this increased beneficiaries’ food security but may have jeopardized women’s rights (Mueller _et al._ 2014). Little is known about the extent to which this program addressed the issue of ‘idle estates’ or was the most cost-effective way for doing so.

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