Volume 5, Number 1
July 1999

Women, Land, and Trees

Agnes Quisumbing of IFPRI initiated a discussion on women, land, and trees by summarizing a paper she wrote with Ellen Payongayong, J.B. Aidoo, and Kei Otsuka. The findings of the paper, "Women's Land Rights in the Transition to Individualized Ownership: Implications for Tree Resource Management in Western Ghana" (available from m.hoffman@cgiar.org), run counter to the popular notion that individualization of land rights necessarily leads to a deterioration of women's land rights.

In the study site, a major cocoa-growing region of Ghana, Akan households have traditionally practiced uterine matrilineal inheritance. Land is transferred from the deceased man to his brother or nephew (sister's son) in accordance with the decision of the extended family. Wives do not have secure rights to their husbands' land in the case of death or divorce. Recently, however, husbands have often transferred land to wives and children as inter vivos gifts after planting trees. Quisumbing et al. postulate that giving land as gifts increases in areas where population pressure is high and matrilineal inheritance is the norm because those gifts strengthen individual land rights.

The study, based on a survey of 420 households (7 households each in 60 villages in the Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, and Western Regions), shows that customary land tenure institutions have evolved toward individualized systems, which provide incentives to invest in tree planting. The individualization of land tenure has strengthened women's land rights through inter vivos gifts and the practice of the Intestate Succession Law. Passed in 1985, the law provides for a specific division of the estate among the widow, children, and the extended family: three-sixteenths to the surviving spouse, nine-sixteenths to the surviving children, one-eighth to the surviving parent, and one-eighth to the matriclan of the deceased. Actual practice usually differs, with a third going to the wife, a third to the children, and a third to the matriclan.

Many husbands are also circumventing traditional practice by giving "gifts" directly to their wives and children, a practice that confers strong permanent individual rights to land. These gifts are interpreted as rewards to wives for helping their husbands plant and cultivate cocoa, because cocoa production is very labor-intensive. In the early years of cocoa cultivation, foodcrops are grown under the young trees, and weeding (usually done by wives) is important to ensure the proper growth of the cocoa tree.

The study finds that it is not necessarily land tenure security but expected changes in land tenure security that affect incentives to invest in tree planting and management. These expected changes differ by gender. Women farmers typically have to plant a larger proportion of parcels to cocoa before they receive land as a gift. Statistical evidence indicates that incentives to increase cocoa area by planting trees and increase cocoa yield by intensive management differ. This finding clearly indicates that the incentive structure to invest changes with investment in trees. While women and men may have equal probabilities of planting cocoa, the significantly lower yields of women parcel owners may indicate credit and other constraints faced by women, including their responsibility to provide food for their families. The comparative profitability of food and cocoa needs to be analyzed using detailed household-level data sets.

Given the need for agricultural intensification due to increasing population pressure, a major question is what types of policies can assist such evolutionary changes in a manner compatible with efficient and equitable development of rural areas. While land titling is feasible only if land rights are sufficiently individualized, implementation of land titling programs feasible only if land rights are sufficiently individualized, implementation of land titling programs must pay special attention to the gender issue. If men are traditionally owners of land, as in Western Ghana, land titling may strengthen their land rights at women's expense. To be fair, men and women should be equally qualified for acquiring land titles, or titles could be awarded jointly to husband and wife. Judging from the experience of Ghana, the promulgation of the Intestate Succession Law, which stipulates how property should be bequeathed to the spouse, children, and other family members, is likely to be an effective policy option for facilitating less gender-biased land inheritance systems. Transferring ownership of land to women, however, is unlikely to raise productivity if access to and use of gender equity and improved efficiency and productivity of women farmers unless other constraints faced by women are also addressed.

In response to this summary Patricia Alexander (P.Alexander@sussex.ac.uk) commented that although she has not conducted rigorous studies on the subject, she has found in Lao PDR that women may be losing land through titling programs. In Lao PDR, some women traditionally hold land in their own right—particularly in the case where the task of caring for elderly parents falls to the youngest daughter. In recognition of this responsibility, she frequently inherits her parents' land, whether she marries or not.

When land is titled—required by the multilaterals under financial sector reforms, so that land can be used as collateral—there is no tradition that enables women to step forward and sign documents. These women have not been acknowledged as owners. Many have thus been effectively disinherited. Lao NGOs have raised this point, and there has been some consideration of it during a World Bank-assisted land titling project, but Alexander did not know the final outcome.

Dianne Rocheleau (drochele@black.clarku.edu) suggested that land titling can work for or against various groups of women depending on the context. It is not always for the better or the worse. Over the long term privatizing everything can help to separate a lot of people from access to land and resources. She is aware of powerful examples of people using land tenure reform or land struggles followed by land registry to regain control of community turf, one tiny plot at a time, through private property parcels. This strategy is not an ideal, however; it is but one strategy among several that might help to mitigate prior land alienation. There are also some horror stories out of common property systems run by lineages that have been weakened or where a few big men run the show as a patron-client operation (that is, they hijack the commons and run it as their own). Rick Schroeder's work cites this. He has a new book out and great articles in Economic Geography and a chapter in Liberation Ecologies by R. Peet and M. Watts as well as a recent article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

In another message, Rocheleau added that Sara Berry (African Studies program at The Johns Hopkins University) has specific evidence that says that propertied women do better under individualized tenure in Nigeria while producing cocoa. For Rocheleau it's very much a cash crop issue and, furthermore, some women, not all, benefit from land tenure. She suggested finding out how the changes in tenure compare for women land managers and owners versus women who garden, produce staple foods, or gather some tree products but don't grow cocoa.

Michael Kevane (MKevane@scu.edu), from the department of economics at Santa Clara University, noted that Quisumbing et al.'s findings resonated quite strongly with some thoughts and reflections he has had on the subject (see some of his papers with coauthor Leslie Gray that can be found at www-acc.scu.edu/~mkevane). In one of those papers, Kevane and Gray say that women may increasingly be acquiring individual rights in southwestern Burkina Faso in part because their rights are not all that strong. In particular instances it may be in the interest of individuals to reallocate parcels to women on an individual basis. This highlights the need to talk about the quality of rights and also the incidence of rights as they change over time.

Women may indeed acquire new rights, rather than always losing them (and Quisumbing et al. correctly point out that this should be the starting point for much analysis). But those new rights are not always the same, qualitatively or in incidence, as those of men.

Bola Akanji (akanji@ibadan.skannet.com), senior research fellow, Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research, added that she had fairly recent evidence on land tenure from Nigeria. Her post-structural-adjustment-era study of women in the cocoa economy, carried out in southwest Nigeria, corroborates Sara Berry's earlier studies in the same area. Land rights clearly affect land use practices of women in this subsector. And it is clear that individualized rights to land lead to women in cocoa production having better farm structures in subcultures where they have been at the forefront of agriculture and commerce. Greater access by women to their husband's purchased land, rather than to his family-allocated land, positively affects land use practices (for example, a higher cocoa-to-foodcrop ratio). Part of this report, "Economic Appraisal of the Roles and Status of Women in the Cocoa Economy of South West Nigeria," (1994) is available from the IDRC, which sponsored it.

David Edmunds (d.edmunds@cgnet.com) asked (1) what happens to women's access rights to trees when land is individualized? This is especially important for poor women with little access to land of their own. And (2) will individualization work equally well for poor women as for women within wealthier or better-connected households? Before any broad recommendations on individualization can be made, these issues should be explored. Still, Edmunds found Quisumbing et al.'s findings quite interesting because they show that for those interested in gender equity, possibilities exist even within legislation that has thus far been thought of as harmful to women's interests.

In Uganda, according to Edmunds, individualization of land tenure was often associated with a decline in women's access rights to on that land, for fuelwood or plants and other non-resources. Men were far more likely to have individualized tenure and they used their "titles" (whether sanctioned by a slip of paper signed by local authorities or by a formal freehold title registered at the district headquarters) to try to prevent others, often women, from exercising customary rights to collect tree products. The attempt to individualize tree resources in this way (which often accompanies the individualization of land, but need not) was resisted by many men and women in the community, and the outcome of any particular attempt was not easy to predict. In the area where Edmunds worked, the local Resistance Committees (RC) were sympathetic to women's customary access rights. If the to collect products from his land. If the owner had friends among the police, he might be able to punish women he caught collecting products from his land, and deter exercise of customary access rights. The trend towards individualized land tenure was thus cause for concern among women in the community who relied heavily on collecting tree products from land farmed and "owned" by others. Not surprisingly, poorer women are often quite dependent on this sort of access. At the same time, however, legislation in Uganda explicitly permitting women to inherit land was being used by some in the community to gain access. Again, the outcome of any particular claim was never certain. One woman had to fight a subcounty chief who opposed her inheritance of land on the grounds that men can work land more effectively. She was able to enlist the aid of the RC and protect her claim, at least during Edmunds' stay there. Edmunds noted that Dianne Rocheleau has found similar situations in Kenya, where fathers are designating land for daughters with failed marriages. In Uganda, few women knew of their legal rights to inherit land, however, a situation which is quite common in West Africa as well. Edmunds questioned if the loss of access to tree products on the part of women who didn't own land, or owned little land, was factored in, would the overall impact on women's welfare be positive or negative? Edmunds' guess is that some women would benefit, especially those from better off households, but poorer women would lose out.

Regarding land titling, Edmunds asked if title can be granted to a group, whether a women's group or a cooperative or some other collective body? He thought this was happening in some areas of Africa to allow women to circumvent restrictions on owning land as individuals. Edmunds also noted that the Intestate Succession Law would facilitate less gender-biased inheritance systems provided women knew about the legislation and that it was enforced effectively. Will poor women be able to enforce their claims in court if they can't afford court fees?

Ruth Meinzen-Dick noted her appreciation of David Edmunds' comments regarding what happens to poor women's customary access rights when land and trees are privatized or individualized. According to Meinzen-Dick, Louise Fortmann, Camille Antinori, and Nontokozo Nabane (in "Fruits of Their Labors: Gender, Property Rights, and Tree Planting in Two Zimbabwe Villages," Rural Sociology 62 (No. 3, 1997) also have an interesting related article on women's tenure and tree planting in Zimbabwe. The article makes the point that women may rely on common property (including access to trees on private land) as a fallback against tenure insecurity when their access to land is conditional on marriage and, hence, threatened by widowhood or divorce.

There are also moves to privatize and even allow trading of water rights. Unfortunately, these programs usually acknowledge the main users of the water (often male farmers using irrigation) and do not consult with or compensate women or other "marginal" users who depend on water for other uses. Maximizing the efficiency of one use of a resource doesn't necessarily improve overall "efficiency," let alone deal with livelihood security issues. Meinzen-Dick added that it was essential to undertake studies like the one by Quisumbing et al. and others that look empirically at how tenure changes are taking place, how they are shaped by government policy and local action, and who benefits and loses in different contexts. A universal prescription on these issues does not exist as yet, and so we need to accumulate (and share) the evidence of what is going on in a number of different contexts to build understanding.

Quisumbing thanked everyone for sharing their findings from their own work and suggestions for future work, and responded to the four main points that were raised, noting at the outset that the discussion for the most part had focused on Sub-Saharan Africa.