Conditions for rural development

Non-industrialised countries with extensive densities of population are sitting on a time bomb. Recent examples of explosion are the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which was staged by land hungry Kikuyu against white farmers in the so-called white Highlands of Kenya, more recent was the genocides of Rwanda.

The time bomb can be diffused if appropriate measures are taken and higher living standards are attained by a large fraction of the population.

The recent history of Taiwan and mainland China are testimonies to this. In less developed countries most people live in rural centres cultivating their land or as tenants and employees. It is in rural centres that the poorest people live with a disproportionate fraction of the poor being women.

Rural poverty can be reduced or eliminated only if there is rural development. Economists identify the following as conditions for rural development.

Land reform. One of the major causes of rural economic stagnation is the model of landownership or land rights. There are basically two agrarian systems. Those in which the cultivator is the owner of the land, and those in which the cultivator is a share cropper and a fee paying tenant.

For the tenant to be productive and conservation minded will depend on how secure he feels. If the landlord can evacuate him any time, he is not likely to engage in long-term development work. In this case, land reform involves giving the cultivator permanent stake in the land.

The tenant may deliver part of his harvest to the landlord, pay an agreed fee or as in the history of Malawi offer labour rent called thangata.

I read in one of our popular papers that a political party is in the offing which will introduce the feudal system into the Malawi economy. One wonders whether the architects of this party know how the feudal system operated in Europe in what are alternatively called Middle or Dark Ages and whether they know that feudalism was introduced in Malawi at the beginning of the colonial era.

Under the European system the principle landlord was the king or whatever the head of State was called. The king granted big chunks of the land to win favourite nobles in return for raising armies to defend the land.

These big landlords sub-let their land to lesser landlords called vassals. The majority of the people owned no land but cultivated the land of the vassals as tenants. Those tenants were called serfs, they were only a step below slavery.

In Malawi, just before colonisation, some gullible chiefs foolishly sold big chunks of tribal lands in the Southern Region districts of Blantyre, Zomba, Chiradzulu, Thyolo and Mulanje.

People who had been dwelling on tribal land since time immemorial, one day woke up to be told that they were dwelling on the land of certain white people or the British Central Company, Bruce Estates and so on. To remain on the land they had to cultivate the landlords land for two months without pay.

The conditions were harsh. The system called thangata was one of the causes of the Chilembwe uprising.

Where land is owned by a few people reforms are straightforward though not painless. The land is split and handed to the tenants. This happened in Kenya after independence and in Zimbabwe recently. Did these reforms result in immediate green revolutions such as those of Asia? I do not have the facts.

In a country like Malawi what can land reforms mean? Already land is in the hands of millions of people most of whom due to lack of skills, capital and price incentives are failing to give themselves and the nation perpetual food security and a variety of cash crops.

Land reforms that take the form of dispossessing some of the small farmers without providing alternative forms of living are recipe for civil disorder.

There is need for caution and expert advice.