establishment, the dynamism of Zambia’s large and medium farm sector and the extent of land market functioning are clearly limited.

While listing survey data provides information on the amount of land owned by farms greater than 5 ha, translating this into a share of the total requires an estimate of the area cultivated by small farmers. To get such an estimate, we use micro data from the 2014/15 post-harvest survey by the Zambia Statistical Agency which puts the total area cultivated by farmers below 5 ha in Eastern Province at 502,852 ha (with the 95% confidence interval between 481,529 and 524,174 ha). Based on table 1, the total area owned by large farms in the province amounts to 175,753.<sup>23</sup> Survey evidence suggests farmers below 5 ha cultivate virtually all the land they own (Ali _et al._ 2020) compared to between a third or about half of the area (measured by imagery or farmers’ own estimate) for farms greater than 5 ha. This would imply that large farms account for at most 26% of the total area owned by farmers in Eastern Province, though only about 12% of cultivated area,<sup>24</sup> an estimate of owned area well below the more than 50% of land that recent studies suggest is held by farms in the 5-100 ha group nationally by (Jayne _et al._ 2014a). If these estimates are correct, large farms would need to hold well above 50% of agricultural land in other provinces.

# **3.2 Linking census data to administrative records**

As official cadastral data include spatial information only for a subset of the properties located in Lusaka and neighboring provinces, comparing _de facto_ property rights (i.e., area occupied) to _de jure_ ones (sketch maps or survey plans attached to official deeds) requires digitization of survey plans and sketch maps. Doing so suggests a total area under digitized parcels for which _de jure_ rights have been assigned of 275,625 ha of which 231,758 ha is clustered in farm blocks or resettlement schemes.<sup>25</sup> Of these, 107,700 ha overlap with area found as cultivated in our survey, implying that a significant share of the land to which formal rights have been awarded is not utilized in the way it was intended to.

Table 2 panel A reports results from overlaying digitized with listed parcels overall (col. 1) and by type of documentation (cols. 2-5). The extent of overlap between registered and cultivated parcels is, with about one-third, limited. It is higher (57%) for land with formal documentation, i.e., either title or offer letter. Yet, the fact that about 35% of the parcels or 11,061 ha of listed and mapped area located in a registered block has either no or only an informal document suggests state land may revert back to informality, possibly

> 23 Note that the total area of listed parcels given in table 2 includes only mapped parcels at the time of the survey. Some parcels were not mapped due to distance from the place of interview and inability of respondent to identify the location on the high-resolution imagery used as a base map. 24 Total area owned by large farms is 6,703*26.24 = 175,753 ha which is 25.7% of the estimated total area owned of 677,130 ha. The estimate of area owned by large farms would be lower if small farmers cultivated only part of their holding. Of course, the share of land cultivated by large farms would be much smaller, amounting to 11.96% (65,086/544,410) where 65,086 = 6703*9.71 as the average area cultivated by larger farms. 25 Blocks consist of contiguous piece of recorded parcels ranging from 6 to 942 parcels with total area between 892 and 76,450 ha.

11