Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in the Malthusian trap

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of an in-depth case study of a highly densely populated area in northwest Rwanda which has been conducted during the period 1988–1993. It demonstrates that acute competition for land in a context characterized by too slow expansion of non-agricultural income opportunities has resulted in increasingly unequal land distribution and rapid processes of land dispossession through both operation of the (illegal) land market and evolution of indigenous tenure arrangements. It is also shown that pervasive incidence of land disputes and the threat of landlessness have led to rising tensions in social relations and even within the core of family life, thus paving the way for evermore overt expressions of disharmony and violence. A connection between these ominous conditions and the civil war that broke out in 1994 is established.

Introduction

Under the influence of Boserup's seminal work, an evolutionary theory of land rights has gained increasing currency among development scholars (see Platteau, 1996for a recent survey). According to this theory, there exists an evolutionary path along which new techniques and institutional arrangements are adopted by farmers living in areas subject to growing pressure on available lands as a result of population growth and/or increasing commercialization of agriculture. These new techniques or land use patterns as well as the newly emerging land tenure arrangements are appropriate because they are well adapted to the evolving factor endowments in the agricultural sector. On the one hand, the new agricultural techniques and land use patterns aim at economizing on the scarce resource and, on the other hand, land rights develop in the direction of increasing individualization, which is precisely what is required by intensification of agricultural production and preservation of soil fertility (since, with more and more complete private property rights, farmers are both more willing and able to invest).

This paper sets out to question the relevance of such an optimistic view in the light of the experience of Rwanda, one of the most densely populated countries of the African continent. It is true that the evidence to be presented undoubtedly confirms the oft-made observation that when pressure on land rises as a result of population growth and growing commercialization of agriculture, indigenous land systems evolve towards increasingly individualized forms of tenure (see, e.g. Noronha, 1985, Downs and Reyna, 1988, Migot-Adholla et al., 1991, Platteau, 1992, Bassett and Crummey, 1993, Peters, 1994)¹. Yet, emphasis is simultaneously put on the serious strains and stresses that are bound to occur (1) when there are rising inequalities in landholding and land access as a result of the twin processes of individualization and marketization of land rights; (2) when the productivity effects following from the emergence of de facto private property rights are too weak to stave off the operation of diminishing returns as labour intensity of agriculture increases and to maintain output per capita in the long run; and (3) when off-farm employment tends to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, growing economic (land access) inequities within the rural sector.

On the basis of highly suggestive empirical material, the story told below documents how the “Malthusian trap” can result in bitter tensions within families, intra-community hatreds and violence, and serious questioning of the evolving regime of market-allocated, individualized property rights. These adverse effects which corrode the very core of community life are shown to have been at work in the course of events that led to the truly horrifying bloodshed that took place in Rwanda during 1994. In other words, our findings provide a striking echo to Gérard Prunier's comment that “all these people who were about to be killed had land and at times cows. And somebody had to get these lands and those cows after their owners were dead. In a poor and increasingly overpopulated country this was not a negligible incentive” (Prunier, 1995, p. 142).

An important objective pursued in this paper is, therefore, to call into question the dominant view according to which the agricultural sector, thanks to the beneficial operation of virtuous evolutionary forces inducing technological and institutional progress, is able to generate adequate responses to the new challenges arising from rapidly growing land pressure. Also, we hope to help fill up a serious gap in the literature on land tenure in Sub-Saharan Africa since this literature has been excessively focused on productivity issues (more specifically, on the relationship between individualization of land tenure on the one hand, and use of credit, land improvements and yields on the other) while largely ignoring the equity aspects of the inevitable transformation of land rights in regions subject to rapid population growth². As shall be seen, growing land concentration and rising poverty do not only take place through disequalizing market transfers but also through the gradual erosion of customary social protection following the commoditization of land (when land is acquired through the market, it becomes exempt from customary rules and restraints).