Table 1 presents summary statistics overall (col. 1) and by size class (col. 2-4). Almost 95% of interviews were conducted with the farm owner and 87% of farms are fully owner operated. With an average size of about 26 ha (with the largest farm in the sample having 6,670 ha), the size of Zambian large farms remains modest by international standards. More than 75% of large farms (with 29% of the area) own less than 20 ha while 18% (with 22 % of the area) own 20-50 ha; 5% (with 13% of the area) own 50-100 ha, and 2 % of farms (with 37% of area) own more than 100 ha.<sup>21</sup> The data also show that traditional institutions remain the dominant source of land for large farms with 45% of farms having acquired land through chiefs or headmen; followed by government agencies, mostly Ministries of Lands, Agriculture, or Resettlement (20%); inheritance (19%); and purchase (13%).<sup>22</sup> Some 40% have formal documentation either in the form of title (25%) or offer letter (16%); 43% have a document or consent from traditional authorities; and 17% no document.

To appreciate land acquisition dynamics, we construct bins for all 5-year periods after the 1995 land law came into force. Using these suggests that, after responding to supposedly pent-up demand after 1995, the pace of land acquisition has slowed consistently: while 17% of current large farms acquired their land in 1996-2000, this share declined to 11% in 2001-2010 and 9% and 7% in 2011-15 and 2016-20, respectively. The lack of a visible response to the 2008-09 commodity price boom indicates that domestic institutions have an important role in translating exogenous shocks into effective demand by investors with the means and know how to improve agricultural performance. To probe if the nature of large farm establishment in Eastern Province differs significantly from that in the rest of the country, we aggregate data on the number of farms and the area they cultivate from the Zambia Integrated Land Management Information System (ZILMIS), the country’s (as of yet incomplete) electronic registry by district and year of farm establishment for the period 2000-2017 inclusive and, in addition to an indicator variable for the post-2008 period, include an interaction term between Eastern Province and post-2008 dummies to test for significant differences in the post-2008 trend in either of these variables between Eastern Province and the rest of the country. Results, as reported in appendix table 1, point towards a positive trend post-2008 in both variables presumably due to greater use of the digital system, but they do not allow us to reject equality of trends in Eastern Province and the rest of the country based on existing registry data. We thus have no basis to assume that the time pattern of large farm establishment outside of Eastern Province is different from that found here. With only 3% of farms reporting to have acquired more land (through rental or sale) after

> 21 While there are some discrepancies between own estimate and mapped area, the fact that the software used did not allow immediate crosschecking of polygons caution us against over-interpretating these.

> 22 Central Government institutions administer land that had been converted to state land long time ago (e.g., under resettlement schemes) whereas land received from chief implies a recent conversion.

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