In sub-Saharan Africa, most livestock are grazed on communal rangeland under open access or rather loosely controlled common property tenure. Herds are owned and managed by individuals and families. Overgrazing is widespread on communal pastures. In many places, overgrazing is contributing to permanent land degradation. For these reasons, legislation to reform land tenure is likely to emerge as a policy instrument which analysts must be prepared to evaluate thoroughly.
A tenure policy intervention often recommended by those who concentrate on the effects of communal grazing on range productivity and output is land legislation which converts communal tenure to individual tenure. However, we have seen that individual tenure may have implications for stability and equity objectives, and that given the extreme temporal and spatial variation of rainfall in many of Africa's pastoral zones, open access and common property tenure may result in higher long-term returns to livestock and range than individual tenure. Recognising this, other analysts have suggested interventions which attempt to achieve better control over how individual herders utilise communal rangelands. This would involve establishing more effective common property institutions in areas where open access or very loose common property prevails. Two case studies are presented below which review attempts to reform grazing land tenure. In Botswana, the policy instrument chosen was individual tenure; in Kenya, group ranches.
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Box 7.1: Botswana case study: The Tribal Grazing Land Programme and the establishment of individual rangeland tenure. Few African government have contemplated policies which would convert communal tenure to individual tenure. Only Botswana has attempted to implement a policy where extending individual tenure rights was seen as a key policy instrument for improving range productivity and conservation. The Tribal Grazing Lands Policy (TGLP) granted large stockholders exclusive lease rights to what were considered under-utilised and undeveloped grazing lands to the west of the more densely populated areas of eastern Botswana. The rationale for the policy was drawn directly from the tragedy of the commons critique of resource management under communal tenure. The TGLP provided that in areas zoned for commercial production individuals and small groups would be granted exclusive rights to ranches. Ranches would be about 6400 ha. Commercial areas were to be designated after the grazing land requirements of smallholders in communal zones were properly taken into account. Areas of reserve land for future expansion were also to be identified. Policy planners generally assumed that there was sufficient land in Botswana to accommodate the needs of different kinds of producers. Many potential benefits were expected to follow upon granting individual title to commercial producers. With exclusive rights, commercial producers would be more likely to undertake permanent investments in water development and fencing. These investments would increase range and livestock productivity. With exclusive rights, individual lease holders would be in a position to limit stock numbers at carrying capacity. Grazing pressure in overcrowded communal areas would be reduced, as largeholders would move their herds to commercial areas. Revenues generated by leases would be used for development purposes in communal areas. During policy implementation problems arose which emphasised the difficulties of pursuing conservation and economic efficiency objectives without regard to the impact upon stability and equity considerations. Some of the important outcomes are summarised below. · Most of those granted long-term individual rights to grazing land did not adjust their grazing practices so that stock numbers remained at grazing capacity. Large stockholders who were granted leases to ranches enjoyed exclusive grazing rights. But provisions that ranch holders graze their stock only on their ranches were not enforced. Many stockholders allowed their ranches to become overgrazed and shifted excess stock on to communal areas. By allowing holders to move stock between individual and communal areas, the new "mixed" tenure system was not providing a test of the benefits to range productivity attributed to the individual tenure model. Total livestock output may have increased due to the fact that loan capital for ranch development financed water development in previously unsettled areas. However, research found that livestock grazed on communal range in eastern Botswana were 95% more productive in terms of live-weight production equivalents than the commercial ranching systems, when measured on a per ha basis (Ridder and Wagenaar, 1984). · Rights of smallholders to rangeland were reduced. In areas where ranches were demarcated, an estimated 20,000 people, including smallholders, persons without stock and hunter-gatherers, lost their rights to utilise or occupy the land. Solomon Bekure and Dyson-Hudson (1982: p. 30) noted: "Virtually all persons so far allocated ranches dispossess the people [living] there;...for the ranchers exclusive use rather than commercial use best defines their immediate concern; [and] dispossessed people will be removed to already overcrowded communal areas." · In many cases, the ranches proved too small to provide herds with sufficient forage on a year-to-year basis. Some stockholders developed a seasonal strategy where they grazed stock in communal areas during the wet season and retreated to their exclusively-owned ranches in the dry season. Although the government sought to implement a balanced policy which would improve the management of communal grazing lands as well as those areas under individual tenure, the bulk of planning and development resources were, in practice, channelled to the commercial sector and to individual ranches. The policy did not contribute to a significant improvement in range management or livestock productivity. In some areas, it resulted in a reduction of smallholder welfare. |
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Box 7.2: Kenya case study: Maasai group ranches. In Kenya's Maasai areas, herd sizes are highly unequal. Rainfall is relatively low and variable in space and time. Periodic drought forces herders to move over extensive areas in search of grazing. Herders have worked out reciprocal arrangements with neighbouring and even distant herders to share available forage. Taking into account the environmental and production conditions in Maasailand, the Kenya Government designed a range development programme based on group ranches. Exclusive rights to defined grazing areas were granted to groups of users instead of individuals. Groups were composed of persons with traditional use rights to an area, as determined in an adjudication process which settled competing claims. Group ranches varied considerably in size. In Narok District, for example, the smallest group ranch was 891 ha with 43 members, while the largest was 78,700 ha with 200 members (Helland, 1977). Although group ranches were intended to preserve communal use rights, the rationale for the group ranch model was drawn from the tragedy of the commons model. The specific objectives of the group ranch programme were to: · Increase the productivity of rangelands by bringing them into commercial production. · Maintain production by keeping the stocking rates of the ranches within limits set by the carrying capacity of the rangelands. · Provide the human population of those areas with an adequate standard of living (Helland, 1977: p. 100-101). Range development plans stipulating overall stocking and culling rates were prepared by staff from technical agencies. Members of each ranch elected a management committee to supervise implementation. Committee responsibilities included: enforcing the grazing system and culling rate stipulated in the management plan, supervising construction and maintenance of facilities and supervising the purchase, distribution and fattening of steers purchased on credit. The key to success of a common property grazing system is the ability of the group's management structure to control how individual members utilise the resource. It was the intention of the programme designers that management committees would be able to limit stocking rates to the carrying capacity. Individual members were to be granted grazing quotas, basically a limit on the number of stock they would be able to graze on the ranch. Management committees immediately encountered difficulties in reaching agreement among ranch members over principles for assigning stock quotas. Largeholders favoured quotas based upon the existing distribution of livestock. This would have limited smallholders' herd sizes permanently. On some ranches, a compromise agreement was worked out, where all members were granted a minimum quota, large enough for an individual household to meet its basic income requirements. Additional allocations were given to wealthier members. The net effect was that richer members would have to reduce their holding. Some wealthier members agreed to cull their stock, but none actually did so. Elected management committees tended to be dominated by wealthy and influential stockholders. Technical agencies lacked sufficient staff and transport to provide management committees with up-to-date information on stocking rates and carrying capacity. As important, management committees had no social authority or legal sanctions necessary to enforce stocking limits. While Maasai have a long tradition of co-operating on herding and other management activities, the question of stock controls is a property rights issue, and private control over herd numbers and most other management decisions is sacrosanct to the Maasai. Management in other key respects did not change appreciably. For instance, Maasai still grazed beyond the area of their demarcated ranches when forage conditions warranted, using agreements which had long been in existence for sharing grazing. Of particular interest to the Maasai was that the groups received title to the ranches, forestalling competing claims to the land by neighbouring cultivator groups. Clarification of tenure rights was seen as a principal benefit of the group ranch scheme (Galaty, 1980). Why was it so difficult to achieve voluntary co-operation in setting overall stock limits and agreeing upon individual stock quotas? A partial answer might be that there may exist divergences between individual and social benefits if all costs (e.g. externalities) have not been properly accounted for. This may complicate the achievement of co-operative outcomes and make them difficult to secure. Individual assessments of optimum herd size and composition, and growth and development strategies will vary among individual producers for a number of reasons. For instance, Lawry et al (1984: p. 249) argued that the changing nature of intra-group economic relationships works against co-operative strategies. "A key aspect of economic change is the emergence of entrepreneurship, a term used in the broadest possible sense. Simply stated, as herd ownership becomes less constrained by collective economic and managerial controls, private rather than collective benefits are maximised. Or, put another way, the economic interests of the household or herd ownership unit are pursued with increasing reference to external market institutions, and commensurately less so to local social obligations. This process of increasingly autonomous decision-making reinforces the breakdown of local-level management controls". It is also possible that "opportunistic" strategies, which in the Maasailand environment allow herders to make optimum use of available forage production on a yearly basis, may, in fact, result in higher levels of long-term animal output than would be possible where controls limit stock numbers to a "conservative" stocking rate based on worst-year forage production. An opportunistic strategy is one which varies the number of livestock according to current forage availability, so that the extra forage available in good years can be converted into greater economic output (milk, meat) or into productive capital in the form of a bigger herd. A conservative strategy is one where livestock numbers are maintained at a relatively constant level yearly without overstocking. There may be less range degradation, but economic losses result also from under-utilisation of the forage available in relatively good rainfall periods (Sandford, 1982). The Maasai group ranches avoided some of the problems associated with individual tenure. Smallholders were incorporated into the scheme and ranches were sufficiently large so that, in most years, grazing needs were met within the confines of the individual group ranch. However, no range management institutions emerged to regulate individual herd sizes so that aggregate stocking rates approached or exceeded carrying capacity. Individual livestock owners continued to exercise management prerogatives over their herds, and especially over determination of herd size. The Kenya experience brings out some of the problems involved in extending a greater range of common property controls over individual range users. |
