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Highest and best use?
Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 181-195, 1996 Copyright© 1996ElsevierScienceLtd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0264-8377/96 $15.00 + 0.00
Land Use Policy,
Pergamon S0264-8377(96)00006-3
Highest and best use? Access to urban land for semi-subsistence food production
Daniel G Maxwell
Pressures on urban policy-makers in Africa to formalize land tenure and land delivery systems are mounting, while at the same time there is increased demand for informal access to urban land for subsistence production and lowcost housing. In Kampala, Uganda, semi-subsistence agriculture is an important component of the urban economy, yet it is a technically illegal form of land use and largely misunderstood by urban authorities and policy-makers. This paper analyzes the means of access to land, much of it informal, and discusses possible policy responses to competing demands over urban and peri-urban land. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd The author is with the International Food Policy Research Institute, 1200 17th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA. He was formerly on the staff of the Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA I am grateful for the excellent research assistance of Gertrude Atukunda of Makerere Institute of Social Research, and for comments of earlier drafts of this paper from John Bruce of the Land Tenure Center, Jennifer Kaggwa of the Center for Basic Research, the late Emmanuel Nabuguzi of Makerere Institute of Social Research, as well as from two anonymous reviewers. Funding for this research came from a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and from the National Science Foundation, USA. I am also grateful for the institutional support of Makerere Institute of Social Research during fieldwork. All errors or omissions are my own. continued on page 182
'Highest and Best Use' may be defined as that use which brings the largest net return in money and amenities over a period of time. Nowhere is the competition of land uses greater or more noticeable than in cities. 2 The crisis of urban development in Africa has been directly equated with the question of urban land tenure and land use. 3 The limited evidence from scattered empirical studies of urban and peri-urban land in Africa indicates that several trends have emerged over the past two decades. The first is concentration of ownership, and the narrowing of family or clan rights in land. 4 Increased landlessness is a growing problem and is nowhere more evident than on the peri-urban fringe, 5 where there is intense competition between agricultural and residential land usesJ ~ A second trend is the rapid growth of a land market but with relatively weak legal institutions underpinning that market. 7 Mabogunje s characterizes this situation as one of 'strong societies and weak states'. A third trend is that, in spite of the breakdown of lineage or clan control over land, transactions in urban land continue to be subject to personalized relations between owners and occupants, or buyers and sellers. The political formation of entire urban neighborhoods may be underpinned by such relations. '~ Following the first generation of structural adjustment programs in Africa in the 1980s, which tended to give priority to agriculture and viewed cities through the lens of 'urban bias', I° the contemporary policy environment affords greater attention to urban problems. None have attracted greater urgency than the problems of land tenure and land m a n a g e m e n t , lj with key emphasis on the formalization and individualization of property rights in land, simplification of urban land m a n a g e m e n t , the development of land delivery systems that promote the most economic use of scarce urban land, and the potential for raising municipal revenue from urban land. ~2 At the same time, however, the combination of urban economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s and the continued rapid growth of urban 181
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell continued from page 181
1Dorau, H and Hinman, G Urban Land Economics McGrath Publishing Company, College Park, MD (1928) 215 2Ely, R and Wehrwein, G Land Economics University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wl (1940) 138 3Mabogunje, A Perspectives on Urban Land and Urban Management Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa World Bank Technical
Paper Number 196, World Bank, Washington, DC (1992) 4Dickerman, C 'Urban land concentration' in Downs and Reyna (eds) Land and Society in Contemporary Africa University Press of New England, Hanover, NH (1988) 5Swindell, K and Mamman, A 'Land expropriation and accumulation on the Sokoto periphery, Northwest Nigeria' Africa 1990 60 173-187 6Both, M, Francisco, A and Boucher, S Land Markets, Employment and Resource Use in the Per#Urban Green Zones of Maputo, Mozambique Land Tenure Cen-
ter, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wl (1995) 7Aronson, D 'Capitalism and culture in Ibadan urban development' Urban Anthropology 1978 7 253-267; Mabogunje up cit Ref 3 8Mabogunje up cit Ref 3 9Barnes, S Patrons and Pewee Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos
Manchester University Press, Manchester (1986) 1°Bates, R Markets and States in Tropical Africa University of California Press, Berkeley (1981); World Bank Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa World Bank, Washington, DC (1981) 1~Farvacque, C and McAuslan, P Reforming Urban Land Policies and Institutions in Developing Countries Urban Management
Program Paper Number 5, World Bank, Washington, DC (1992); Mabogunje, A 'A new paradigm for urban development' in Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics
World Bank, Washington, DC (1991) ~2Kituuka, S 'Urban land management in Uganda' Mimeo, UN Centre for Human Settlements, Nairobi (1992); Nordberg, L and Nsamba-Gayiiya, E Report on Land Defvery Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Kampala (1991); NsambaoGayiiya, E Report of the National Workshop on Urban Land Policy and Management Ministry of Lands, Housing and
Urban Development, Kampala (1993) 13Stren, R and White, R African Cities in Crisis Westview, Boulder, CO (1989) 14Maxwell, D 'Labor, land, food and farming: a household analysis of urban agriculture in Kampala, Uganda' PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wl (1995) ~SLado, C 'Informal urban agriculture in Nairobi, Kenya' Land Use Policy 1990 7 257-266; Lee-Smith, D, Manundu, M, Lamba, D and Gathuru, K Urban Food continued on page 183
182
populations has led to increasing reliance on livelihood strategies in African cities characterized as 'straddling', or relying on both cash income and subsistence production for direct consumption. Despite the concentration and individualization of land ownership, sizable areas of high-value urban land are being used for relatively low-value agricultural production. Not only does economic theory suggest that low-value land uses will be forced out by market competition, but the use of land for farming is technically illegal in many African cities. What explains the apparent contradiction of the informal use of urban land for semi-subsistence farming in the face of both market forces and urban bylaws banning urban farming? What are the means of accessing urban land for such activities? Stated differently, what are the social relations that permit and protect informal urban land use? These questions confront not only urban land use planners, but also development practitioners more generally in the face of continued rapid urban population expansion, growing urban poverty and unemployment, and a rapidly emerging urban environmental crisis. J3 At the root of these questions lie the issues of land access, land rights, and land use--and how to accommodate competing demands for land use in urban areas and on the rapidly changing peri-urban fringe. This paper analyzes access to land for urban farming in Kampala, the capital and largest city of Uganda. The study took place during 1992-1993 and consisted of 40 comparative household case studies and a two-round survey of 350 households in three areas of the city, selected into a multistage random sample. Key informant interviews and focus group discussions supplemented these two primary data sources.la The location of survey enumeration areas is shown on Map 1. Case studies were conducted throughout the city.
Farming in the city Urban farming and the use of urban land for agricultural purposes has long been a common practice in Kampala and in other African cities. Only in the past decade has urban agriculture in Eastern African cities been systematically researched.~S Most of this research portrays urban agriculture as a household survival strategy, one of the many ways in which urban families have redeployed their labor and other resources in the struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile urban economic environment. Many of these studies note the constraint of access to land for urban farming and observe that land used for urban cultivation is mostly not owned or even legally accessed by the urban farmer. Sawio j~' shows that over half of his respondents either inherited or bought their farmland--part of the evidence he presents suggesting that better-off urban residents are the ones who are able to farm. However, 'buying' in this case does not necessarily mean a transfer of a deed or title. Rakodi w notes that 57% of farmers in Lusaka do not know whose land they are using. Lade TM states that 'squatting', or the use of land without permission for urban agriculture in Nairobi, is 'seasonal and ephemeral' and notes that such usage may shift from one user to another, implying an institutional vacuum over access to such land. Evidence from other studies suggests that 'squatting' is also a long-term strategy of land access. Freeman suggests that squatting as a land access strategy amounts to a form of moral economy. ") But institutional questions regarding access to land that is not formally owned and the way in which
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
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Map 1, The administrative divisions of Kampala: (1) Kiswa Parish; (2) Najjanankumbi Parish; (3) Luwafu Parish (enumeration areas are highlighted). continued from page 182 Production and the Cooking Fuel Situation in Urban Kenya Mazingira Institute, Nairobi (1987); Maxwell, D and Zziwa, S 'Urban agriculture in Kampala: indigenous adaptive response to the economic crisis' Ecology of Food and Nutrition 1993 29 (1) 91-109; Rakodi, C 'Urban agriculture: research questions and the Zambian evidence' Journal of Modem African Studies 1988 26 (3) 495-515; Sanyal, B 'Urban continued on page 184 Table 1. Land use in Kampala. Land use category
Area (ha)
Proportion
Residential Commercial Mixed Institutional Open green space Transport, utilities Agriculture Forest, wetland, water
4 945 596 572 1 112 279 230 11 942 1 624
23.2% 2.8% 2.7% 5.2% 1.3% t .t % 56.1% 8.6%
Source: Department of Physical Planning City of Kampala: Revision of Structure Plan Ministry of Land, Housing and Urban Development, Kampala (1992)
°l . . . . . . ° • °...o..
2~22;."
access to such land is maintained over time are mostly either not addressed by previous research or addressed in a speculative manner• Kampa|a is comprised of 213 square kilometers (21 300 hectares). The most recent estimate puts agricultural land use at a total of 11 942 hectares, or 56•1% of the total land area of the city (Table 1). A multistage random sample survey in Kampala revealed that 35% of Kampala households are engaged in some form of agriculture within the city. While the overwhelming majority of labor in urban farming is that of women, data suggest that both men and women are involved in the acquisition of land. 2° Two historically distinct forms of land use for urban agriculture exist in Kampala. The first, occurring mostly within the built-up center of the city, is a fairly recent phenomenon. The second, occurring in peri-urban areas, represents the continuation of traditional uses of customary land holdings even as the city expands outward to incorporate these areas. Farming may be done on the same parcel of land as the residence, it may be nearby, or it may be some distance from the residence• Crops grown away from the residence are almost exclusively low-value root crops; maize and plantains are grown on the same parcel as the household. The most commonly cited immediate reason given for farming is the need to provide a source of food for direct consumption by the 183
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
household, although there is a small number of commercial farmers, and some food is sold by primarily subsistence producers--either when they have perishable surpluses or an urgent need for cash. Of several major reasons that people did not engage in farming, the first and most obvious was the issue of access to land: a number of respondents noted that they had previously farmed in Kampala but had lost access to their land, so they were no longer producing any of their own food within the city. Others were simply unable to acquire land at all. Sharp differences exist depending on how land was accessed and the land tenure category into which the land falls, differences in rights, in security of tenure, and in agricultural practices.
Categories of land tenure in Kampala
continued from page 183 agriculture: who cultivates and why?' Food and Nutrition Bulletin 1985 7 (3) 15-24; Sawio, C 'Feeding the urban masses? Towards an understanding of the dynamics of urban agriculture in D a r e s Salaam, Tanzania' Unpublished PhD dissertation, Clark University, Worcester, MA (1993); Mbiba, B Urban Agriculture in Zimbabwe Avebury, Aldershot (1995) lSSawio op cit Ref 15 lrRakodi op cit Ref 15 18Lade op cit Ref 15, 263 19Freeman, D A City of Farmers: Informal Urban Agriculture in the Open Spaces of Nairobi, Kenya McGill University Press, Toronto (1991) 2°Maxwell, D 'Alternative urban food security strategy: a household analysis of urban agriculture in Kampala' World Development 1995 23 (10) 1669-1681 ~Nordberg and Nsamba-Gayiiya op cit Ref 12; Kituuka op cit Ref 12
184
Four different major categories of land tenure are found within the city, overlaid by numerous forms of informal access, varying from outright 'squatting' to land borrowing, the purchase and sales of informal use rights, and the illegal subdivision of plots. Various tenancy arrangements are also common. The land use planning and enforcement capacity of city and local government eroded badly during the Amin era and the chaotic years that followed, giving rise to numerous land disputes that make it very difficult to sort out ownership and occupancy rights. On the one hand, this situation has created numerous informal opportunities for occupation of urban land for various purposes, This informal use of urban land is by no means restricted to the urban poor, but it has created niches in which the poor have been able to survive through very low-cost housing, production of some of their food needs, or both. On the other hand, it has created a confoundingly confused tenure system in which rights to land and even to improvements on the land are not always secure. It has also led to an urban land delivery system rife with opportunity to make a greater profit from information and access to bureaucratic procedure or from speculation and landhoarding than from productive activities, which effectively keeps land off the market. 2~ Donors and some domestic pressure groups are now pressing for reforms in the administration and ownership of urban land. Proposed reforms would streamline the land delivery system in Kampala, enable investors to gain secure rights to land, and increase the amount of land available for development while cutting down on opportunities for rent-seeking. The four major categories of land tenure that prevail in Kampala today are public land and three categories of de facto privately held land--freehold land, mailo land, and Kabakaship land--despite the fact that the 1975 Land Reform Decree formally converted privately owned land to leaseholds and transferred ownership of all private land to the state. Public land (Crown land prior to independence) dominates the central and eastern parts of the city. Planning control over such land has been greater in these areas than on privately held land, but administration broke down during the Amin era. In spite of having been abolished by the Land Reform Decree, some amount of freehold land continues to be recognized and administered as such. The majority of this land in Kampala is held by religious institutions. Mailo tenure is a de facto form of private, individual ownership, despite having also been abolished. Mailo tenure is a modified form of freehold introduced during the colonial era with some restrictions on alienation. Strong institutions of
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell Table 2. Categories of land tenure and occupancy in Kampala. Tenure category
Tenure sub-category
Informal access
Public land
Public institutional Rental
'Squatting'
Leased Customary tenancy
(Bibanja) 'Unoccupied' Freehold land
Private institutional Private owner Leased Customary tenancy
(Bibanja)
Mailo land
Owner occupancy Rental Leased (expatriates) Customary tenancy
(Bibanja) Unoccupied
Kabakaship land
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Sales of use rights 'Squatting' 'Squatting'
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Sales of use rights Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Lending/borrowing Sales of use rights
Kingdom Institutional Leased
Customary tenancy
(Bibanja) Source: Author's case studies (1993)
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Sales of use rights
long-term tenancy are associated with mailo tenure, and a substantial amount of mailo land in Kampala is effectively held by tenants and 'squatters'. An additional category of land that should be treated separately, simply because of its recent history, is Kabakaship land, owned by the King of Buganda. It was mailo land prior to the abolition of the Kingdoms in 1966, with the office of the Kabaka as the owner, but all this land was confiscated and administered as public land by Kampala City Council until t993, and now it has been returned to the Kabaka. However, between 1966 and 1993, the buying, selling and subdivision of such land was essentially not under the supervision of any controlling authority and not registered anywhere unless a buyer sought a formal lease from Kampala City Council. The land was formally returned to the Kabaka in 1993, but it is now occupied by people who 'bought' parcels and believe themselves to be the rightful owners. Table 2 depicts these four categories of land tenure in Kampala, as well as formal occupancy and informal access categories. Informal access is more prevalent in some categories of formal occupancy than in others. The various categories are described in detail below.
Access to urban land for agriculture While the policy debate over urban land use is largely concerned with housing and other 'urban' land uses, agriculture has continued to occupy various niches in urban land. Categories of land access for agriculture do not correspond directly to categories of land tenure in Kampala. They vary from formal, legal occupancy to a range of informal and technically 185
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell illegal forms of occupancy. Categories of land access for urban agriculture are briefly outlined in the following section.
Owner occupancy Before the return of the Kabakaship land, de facto private ownership of mailo land prevailed on about 45% of Kampala's land area. 22 The most common form of agricultural land usage on private land is simply the owner of a plot engaging in some cultivation on his or her own land, although owners often permit others to cultivate unused land, and uninvited 'squatters' often simply help themselves if land is unoccupied. Leaseholder occupancy Prior to the return of the Kabakaship land, over half the land within the city limits of Kampala was public land, on which an applicant can be allocated a long-term, renewable leasehold. While few people acquire a leasehold on land for purely agricultural purposes, farming is a widespread practice on land leased for housing. Leases are also often granted to individuals or organizations on institutional freehold land, and occasionally to non-Ugandans on mailo land. Leasehold occupancy of Kabakaship land continues to be honored after the return of such property to the Kabaka. Renewable annual rentals Major areas of the eastern part of the city are devoted to city council housing estates, in which houses are rented to both civil servants and the general public. Most of these houses have small plots, which today are covered in gardens and plantations. Formally, these are annual leases, but in practice, people who occupied the houses 20-30 years ago may still be found there. Bibanja 23
22Department of Physical Planning City of Kampala: Revision of Structure Plan Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Kampala (1992) eaKibanja is literally translated simply as a plot or piece of ground. Bibanja is the plural.
186
Under the mailo tenure system in Buganda, where Kampala is located, kibanja meant a grant of long-term use rights in plots of land to a tenant by a private landowner, or by a chief or official of the Kabaka's government in return for a fixed annual rent. In later years, landlords actually began selling kibanja rights to a tenant, and this is the more commonly implied sense of the term 'kibanja' as it is used in Kampala today. After the Land Reform Decree, both mailo and Kabakaship bibanja holders (technically public land at the time) were stripped of secure rights to their land and made subject to eviction on short notice. Much of the privately owned land in the parts of Kampala where mailo land exists is occupied by kibanja holders. Technically, the buying and selling of bibanja is not legal, but the practice continues, and in fact much of the land used for agriculture is under this category of occupancy. Customary tenants on public land also refer to their land as bibanja, and much of the Kabakaship land is occupied by tenants without legal documentation, but who describe themselves as bibanja holders. Bibanja were earlier granted on freehold land owned by religious institutions as well.
Unauthorized subdivision The subdivision and sale of bibanja without the permission of owners or planners on all three types of privately owned land have led to the proliferation of unplanned slum areas, which, in appearance, resemble
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell squatter settlements in other cities. However, occupants have usually either paid the former occupant for a subdivided kibanja, or had been given the right to settle on the land by a chief if it was Kabakaship land, and therefore do not consider themselves as squatters (even though they may be called such). Under these conditions, use of land for farming has slowly been displaced by other forms of land use in the more densely populated area, especially in recent years, because access to land for housing is much cheaper on bibanja than on private or leased land. Nevertheless, in certain areas, much of this land is used for agricultural purposes.
Borrowing Land borrowing is a very common form of land access for agricultural purposes. It offers access to land with the consent of the owner or caretaker (someone named by the owner to look after the land) and the assurance that even if future use rights are withdrawn, the labor invested in a given year's crops will not be lost due to summary eviction. In some cases, a small amount of money is paid to the caretaker; more commonly, some of the food harvested is given as a token of thanks or 'rent'. In the case of private land that is held for speculative purposes, such arrangements serve the owner's interests by keeping the land occupied by people who will leave without compensation when the land is sold or developed. In fact, continuous occupancy of the land is an obligation in the case of borrowing and constitutes the landlord's major rationale for permitting use of land at sub-market rents. In the words of one such owner: '[Borrowers] are looking after the land. T h e y actually help you to ward off unwanted trespassers or squatters.'
'Squatting' Informal occupancy without permission occurs on both public and private land in Kampala. However, by respondents' own estimation, it would be very difficult to acquire land by such a means in Kampala t o d a y - - m o s t of this group had been cultivating on the same piece of land since the mid to late 1970s. Most such respondents agreed that it would be very difficult to obtain land by such means today. Transfer of such land today is likely to take place under the category of purchasing use rights.
Purchasing use rights There remain in the city large tracts of land, both public and private, that are not built up, and that the owner has reasons for not wanting to sell. The use of such land for urban agriculture is often tolerated, and the primary means of original access was 'squatting'. However, in areas where such tolerance has long been practiced, an, informal land market in buying and selling use rights has emerged, but it has emerged between users, not between owners and users. Although 'prices' for such land are low, reflecting the unknown quantity of tenure-security, use rights and exclusionary rights are quite strong in practice. Some respondents reported making a token payment to the owner or caretaker in order to borrow land; most reported making small payments either in cash or in kind as token 'rent' to maintain their right of access. Squatter's rights as outlined depend entirely on the absence of the assertion of any superior legal claim to the land, but cases were
187
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell Table 3. Frequency of land access/tenure categories (by land parcel). Access/tenure category
1
Enumeration area a 2 3
Total
Owner occupancy (titled mailo) Purchased:
1 2
-
6 3
7 5
3 5
2b 2°
-
5 7
1
2
3
6
2 7 7
-
2 1 -
4 8 7
Mailo: Public:
21
-
1 -
t 21
Borrowed:
23
8
3
34
3
17
3
23
4
2
2
8
79
33
24
136
Inherited: Laaseholdar occupancy (leased public) Purchased: Inherited:
Rented: Bibanja (used by kibanja holder) Purchased: a Enumeration areas: (1) Luwafu, a rapidly growing low- to middle-income peri-urban area; population density less than 30 people/ha in the enumeration area; (2) Kiswa, a low-income, densely populated inner-city slum; population density around 190 people/ha in the enumeration area; (3) Najjanankumbi, an older, mixed-income residential suburb; population density around 70 people/ha in the enumeration area. b Leases have all expired, land ownership in
legal question. Source: Author's survey (1993)
Inherited: Customary grant:
Subdivided bibenja (sold without owner's permission)
• 'Squatted' (occupancy without permission):
Purchased use rights: Total
documented in which such land had been in continuous use by the same household for 20 years. Cases were also documented in which land originally accessed through such a means had been turned into 'borrowed' land, or land on which use rights had been sold. Squatters or borrowers must maintain some kind of physical presence on such land year-round in order to protect their claim of prior occupancy to it. Therefore, crops are planted at several different times over the entire parcel, so that there is always something growing. On borrowed land, the rationale of the owner or caretaker is to prevent unwanted 'squatters' from staking any claim to the land, hence use rights will be withdrawn if the borrower does not maintain presence on the parcel. As one land borrower notes: 'We make sure we use the entire piece so the owner does not give it away to someone else.' Similar statements were made by other land borrowers. The caretaker of such land may also occasionally demand some 'payment' from the land; always having some crops growing ensures the borrower can meet such 'rent' demands. On land accessed without any permission, the claim to use rights is based on prior occupancy. Lack of continuous use constitutes an opening for someone else to claim prior occupancy, even on land for which use rights have been purchased, unless neighbors look out for each others' interests. The first five categories of access may be associated with the farmer's place of residence; the last three are exclusively for agricultural usage. Table 3 presents the frequency of access categories by enumeration areas in the city. The formal categories of land tenure in Kampala do not adequately explain actual practices on the ground in terms of accessing and holding land for agricultural purposes. Some theoretical interpretations of informal access to urban land are offered in the next section, followed by a discussion of empirical evidence from Kampala.
Interpretations of informal land access Reinvention of a customary 'moral economy' In attempting to explain how urban residents are able to use land they 188
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell do not own for farming activities that are illegal, Freeman z4 suggests that what may be happening is the reinterpretation of pre-colonial customary land law in a contemporary urban setting. His study is focused on urban agriculture in Nairobi. To explain the de facto arrangements that make possible the informal use of urban land for agriculture, he examines the customary tenure system of the area before colonial rule and the subsequent land reform were superimposed. Under Kikuyu customary law, a tenant (ahoi) acquired an estate for an indefinite period, and even if the landlord terminated the tenancy, the ahoi was allowed to harvest all of his crops and was reimbursed for improvements such as trees and perennial crops. While this customary law has passed out of usage because of Kenya's sweeping land reform, the rights of the ahoi are still recalled. To explain informal occupation of urban land for farming, Freeman suggests the reemergence of a contemporary, urban ahoi, reasserting the right of the landless Kikuyu peasant to the means of subsistence in traditional village life. He further suggests that by largely ignoring the illegal occupancy and use of such land, urban authorities are tacitly respecting this assertion. Clientelism Mabogunje 25 raises the issue of patron/client relations governing access and informal use of urban land, in lieu of investigating formal class relations. His thesis is that, in the post-independence era in Africa, certain individuals have been able to control the use of urban land not through ownership per se, but through their positions of authority within, or connections to, municipal councils or other bureaucracies. They have used their positions to control access to public urban land in return for political clientelism. Lemarchand has described patron/client relations as: • . . dyadic bonds between individuals of unequal power and socio-economic status; they exhibit a diffuse, particularistic, face-to-face quality strongly reminiscent of ascriptive solidarities; unlike ascriptive ties, however, they are voluntarily entered into and derive their legitimacy from expectations of mutual benefits. 26 Mabogunje argues that these invisible networks mitigate the emergence of class conflict over urban land because they obfuscate who owns the land, who has access to it, and what the process of access is. With regard specifically to activities such as urban agriculture, one of the forces driving the relationship is the extent to which 'client' households must rely upon multiple means to survive and reproduce. Mabogunje links the obfuscation of class consciousness in African cities to what he calls 'straddling', or the reliance on wage labor and trading income as well as subsistence income-in-kind. 2"Freeman op cit Ref 19 2SMabogunje, A 'Urban planning and the post-colonial state in Africa: a research overview' African Studies Review 1990 33 (2) 121-203 26Lemarchand, R 'Comparative political clientelism: structure, process, and optic' in Eisenstadt, S and Lemarchand, R (eds) Political Clientelism, Patronage, and Development Sage, Beverly Hills (1981) 15 27Aronson op cit Ref 7 28Barnes op cit Ref 9 29Mabogunje op cit Ref 3
Ethnicity and kinship Aronson e7 and Barnes 28 show differing ways in which ethnic and kinship linkages can be instrumental in gaining access to urban land, or in strengthening a claim to urban land. In a sense, this literature could be characterized as similar to Mabogunje's 29 analysis, except that where Mabogunje was primarily concerned with public land under urban administration, this literature is primarily concerned with the conversion of clan or lineage rural land to individually held urban land. To the extent that patron/client relationships are based to some degree on kinship or ethnicity, these categories may overlap• Where they do, they 189
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
may partly serve to protect ethnic or kin group interests. But there is also an obvious element of means-ends rationality on the part of the 'patron' in maintaining or recreating these relations and a clear asymmetry of power that permits it. Aronson details the process of how one faction within an extended family combines instrumental manipulation of other family factions and ethnic linkages outside the family to break up and sell off family land in a rapidly urbanizing area near Ibadan. The resulting disputes over ownership are settled to the satisfaction of the new owners, but the less powerful factions of the family that held the land under customary tenure gained nothing from the subdivision and sale of the land and lost their access rights in the process. Hence, even while relying on reciproc~/1 and ethnic relationships, this process is oriented toward the individualization of land-holding--to the clear benefit of some parties and the detriment of others. Aronson characterizes these 'personalized ties within a capitalist system' as an example of 'the distinctly Yoruba social processes that persist as the land law changes. '3° Dickerman 3j describes this process as the narrowing of rights in family or lineage land in urbanizing areas, and notes that it is a continent-wide process. Exploitation
a°Aronson op cit Ref 7, 265, 253 (emphasis added) al Dickerman op cit Ref 4 a2Leys, C Underdevelopment in Kenya University of California Press, Los Angeles (1975) 33Portes, A and Walton, J Labor, Class and the International System Academic Press, New York (1981) 3"Mamdani, M 'Uganda: contradictions of the IMF Programme and perspectives' Development and Change 1991 21 427-467 35Kasfir, N 'Are African peasants selfsufficient?' Development and Change 1986 1"7 351 a~Dickerman, C Urban Housing and Land Markets: Bujumbura, Burundi LTC Research Paper Number 97, Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wl (1988)
190
A somewhat more malevolent interpretation of the same evidence presented by Freeman would imply that state tolerance of informal land use and the violation of municipal bylaws is evidence that such activities serve as a 'safety valve" or subsidy for low wages paid by the state to civil servants and by industry to wage earners--a view congruent to some extent with the interpretation of the entire informal sector as put forward by Leys 32 and Portes and Walton, 33 and by Mamdani 34 with regard to economic restructuring in Uganda, though not with particular reference to urban land use. Much of the discussion of patron/client relations or ethnic and kinship links could also be analyzed in terms of inequality or class relations. As Kasfir has noted with regard to social relations in rural Uganda, 'patronage is an expression of class relations. The medium of exchange may be cultural, but the motive is material.'35 However, given their reciprocal nature, and the 'indeterminacy in situating class interest' referred to by Mabogunje in relation to the pursuit of multiple economic strategies, these relations are perhaps better understood in terms of clientelism rather than class, provided that it is made very clear that 'reciprocal' does not imply 'equal'. With a few exceptions, 36 any discussion of g e n d e r - - a prevalent theme in the literature on both rural land and the urban informal economy--is surprisingly absent from the literature on urban land tenure in Africa. The available literature then seems to suggest forms of social relations over land that both modernization theory and Marxian political economy predict would disappear in urban society. Similar explanations of land access were noted in Kampala.
Empirical evidence from Kampala Clientelism
There is widespread evidence of patron/client relationships governing informal access to mailo land. The very nature of the link between mailo owner and kibanja tenant suggests a patron/client kind of relationship. It should be noted, however, that there is effectively no landlord/tenant
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
S°T NoSocialObligations
Figure 1. Borrowing private land.
ialibligation~
CARETAKER
ExclusionofSquatters
:J:y::
relationship on some mailo land in the city, for example, in situations where the kibanja tenant occupies the land and the owner has not been heard from since busuulu (rent) payments were abolished in 1975 by the Land Reform Decree. In other cases, the landlord/tenant relationship is between the kibanja holder and the occupants of housing constructed on the kibanja. With regard to mailo land borrowed or accessed without permission for agricultural use, evidence of patron/client exchange has already been mentioned: petty 'rent' payments in cash and in kind for short-term use of privately held land; privileged usage of fairly large tracts of land granted by owners to certain individuals and summary eviction of others from tiny plots, depending on the social circumstances of the user; and, in particular, landowners granting permission to use land for farming in exchange for keeping unwanted occupants out while land values rise steeply. Hence, while the user gets the short-term benefit of farming the land, landowners effectively control what people can have access to land in an area and accumulate the rapidly increasing value of that land. Most importantly, in return for use of the land, cultivators are expected to keep uninvited 'squatters' off the land before it is built up or sold (Figure 1). In the meantime, such land not only rapidly inflates in value, it is also good collateral for bank loans. While owners often have a relative serving as a caretaker to look after the land, the borrowers are most commonly not people to whom the landowner has any kinship obligations. Data in Table 3 indicate that borrowing is the single most common mode of access to land for farming in the city. While landowners and occupants may be of the same ethnic group, respondents rarely expressed the relationship in terms of ethnicity. Rather, the system of land borrowing that has developed in the suburbs and peri-urban areas of Kampala suits the short-term interests of both the owner and the borrowers. Intra-household relations and gender Women had directly accessed land for cultivation in 31% of the households interviewed; among only the most informal access categories the proportion is 43%. The vast majority of farming in the city is carried out by women, but women are either dependent on men for access to land, or gain access on their own through the least formal and least secure arrangements. Yet these informal categories of access are the most important in terms of improving the food security and 191
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell Table 4. Land access and income group.
Income group Category Formal ownership Rental Bibanja Unauthorized subdivision Informal access
Notes: Chi-square = 21.87; df = 12; p = 0.04 Source: Author's survey (1993)
Total
Very low
0 1 2 4 17
Low 17 2 13 9 40
24
81
Lower middle
3 2 3 8 8 24
Upper middle/ high
4 1 1 0 1 7
Total 24 7 19 21 66 136
nutritional status of the urban poor. Women often actively protect each other's claims to land under circumstances of informal access.
Exploitation A clear relationship was noted between mode of land access and income group, as depicted in Table 4. Upper-income groups rely much more heavily on formal access to land, and the lowest-income group rarely can afford formal access. These results, however, only underline the obvious fact that formal access to urban land is expensive; they do not support the thesis that exploitation at the individual level is the logic driving the issue of access to urban land for farming. At the level of the city as a whole, it is clear that the usage of a significant proportion of urban land for agriculture provides a major buffer or safety valve against rapid fluctuations in prices on the urban food market. However, there is little evidence to suggest that individuals' access to land is the result of either an intentional subsidy to keep a lid on discontent over low wages, or a deliberate policy outcome in terms of the 'moral economy' explanation.
Land policy debates in Kampala
3ZKampala City Council Land Management Policy Kampala City Council, Kampala (1990); Kampala City Council Kampala Development Plan, 1972: Structure Report Kampala City Council, Kampala (1972) aSAgricultural Policy Committee Tenure and Control of Land Bill, 1993 Agricultural Policy Committee, Bank of Uganda, Kampala (1993) 39Kampala City Council op cit Ref 37; Nordberg and Nsamba-Gayiiya op cit Ref 12; Nsamba-Gayiiya op cit Ref 12; Kituuka opcitRef 12; van Nostrand, J etalKampala Urban Study, Phase I Report John van Nostrand Associates, Kampala (1993)
192
Given the confusing array of land tenure arrangements within the city, the overlapping rights of various parties in mailo land, and the unplanned subdivision and fragmentation of land holdings, urban planners in Kampala have long been concerned with the land tenure/land management nexus and, in particular, with the question of how to make sufficient land available for urban development purposes. 37 Currently, proposed land legislation affecting the entire country proposes that a uniform tenure system be introduced throughout Uganda, converting all land to freehold, with the exception of land leased to foreigners. This would apply in both rural and urban areas. On previously unoccupied urban land, some development restrictions would apply, and land would initially be granted on the basis of a five-year lease, converting to freehold after five years if development conditions had been fulfilled. 3s Since 1990, at least five different reports have been submitted on ways to streamline or formalize urban land administration in Kampala. Problems mentioned in nearly all of these reports include confused and overlapping administrative structures; the multiplicity of tenure systems; problems of defining ownership of mailo land; the inability of urban authorities to plan and control land use; rampant unplanned and unregistered subdivision of tenanted land; incentives for bureaucratic rent-seeking; land speculation; and low institutional capacity. 39 Discussion of the relative merits of freehold versus leasehold tenure is quite common in these reports: while there is clearly a consensus that freehold
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
offers greater security of tenure, more incentives for investment and fewer for corruption, the history of unauthorized subdivision of plots and the uncontrolled sprawl to which it has led on mailo and freehold land lead to the fear that problems of planning and controlling land use under a freehold system would be greater than under a leasehold system in which centralized authorities would retain greater control over land use. No consensus has emerged about protecting access to land for the urban poor. The general intent is towards increasing formalization and privatization of urban tenure, but there is not complete agreement on modalities.
Urban land policy and urban agriculture
4Olbid
Until the present, urban agriculture has been viewed as a problem by both land use planners and urban managers more generally. In their report on problems of land delivery in Kampala, Nordberg and Nsamba-Gayiiya4° note that agricultural land use in the city is predominantly the result of customary tenancy on public land. While they call it a 'grave' problem, they are referring to the tenure rules of customary tenancy in the city and not to the land use p er se. But the implication is that if the rules of access reflected the value of the land, people who wanted to farm would at least be displaced to the periphery of the city, and land closer to the city center would be used for other purposes. Agriculture in the city, as already noted, is technically illegal. However, the central issue to be addressed by urban land policy is not the prevalence of any given use of land, whether technically legal or illegal. Rather, the issue is the prevailing informal institutional arrangements and personalized social relations governing access to urban land. Most land lent to urban farmers is privately owned land, and the use of privately owned land is widely perceived to be outside the realm of either municipal or national government intervention. While direct restrictions on development (or sanctions for leaving urban land 'undeveloped') would probably be politically impossible to impose and practically impossible to enforce, taxation of urban land and especially a capital gains tax on the rapidly inflating value of urban property could make holding 'undeveloped' land economically unfeasible. From a broader perspective, there are valid reasons for this type of taxation. At a very local level, however, such taxes would have a negative impact on low-income urban farmers who depend on borrowed land. The consequences of tenure formalization for urban land use practices in Kampala will undoubtedly entail a loss of land for agriculture. It is clear from the above discussion of land access that urban cultivators have taken advantage of interstitial institutional space created in urban land both by the complexities of multiple tenure systems, tax laws and tenancy arrangements prevailing in the city, and. by the administrative turmoil of the Amin and post-Amin eras. Formalization of tenure will not necessarily spell the end of farming in the city, but to the extent that land access and occupancy are made to conform to more formalized rules, urban farming will be increasingly difficult for the group of people who cannot afford to buy land--the very group now most dependent on urban agriculture for access to food. Irrespective of the manner in which land was accessed for the purposes of farming, food from urban farming currently constitutes a part of many low-income households' food entitlements, and, more
193
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
"1Sen, A K Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation Clarendon Press, Oxford (1981) "2Maxwell op cit Ref 20 43Walton, J and Seddon, D Free Markets and Food Riots: The Poh'tical of Global Adjustment Blackwell, Oxford (1994) "4Doebele, W 'The evolution of concepts of urban land tenure in developing countries' Habitat International 1988 11 (1) 721
194
importantly, a direct entitlement rather than an exchange entitlement-that is, food directly produced by the consumer household, not acquired via the market. 4' Access to such food is entirely dependent upon continued access to land. Current proposals within Kampala City Council and before the national government would likely change the rules of land access, making urban farming a much more difficult undertaking, introducing a threat to the food security of a sizable portion of the urban population. While any such reform would take a long time to implement, it would be important that loss of such entitlements be compensated. In particular, the value of use rights in land needs to be recognized and compensated, not simply the value of improvements on the land. The fact that a large proportion of urban households derive part of their food needs from urban farming has created a situation in which there is some systemic logic in analyzing urban agriculture as a buffer against both fluctuating personal or household income and fluctuating prices, and in considering urban land use practices in such a light. Detailed evidence on this matter is presented elsewhere. 42 In brief, among low-income urban residents, access to land for farming (irrespective of how the land was accessed) is an extremely important determinant of both household food security and child nutritional status. Hence, from the point of view of the city's poor, access to land is extremely important. From a political view point, the question is the extent to which the partial reliance of a sizable proportion of the city's population on urban agriculture as a source of food permits the imposition from above of economic austerity measures without the risk of violent protest, as has been common in other African cities under the strain of structural adjustment. 43 In the abstract sense, this issue presents a profound dilemma for the debate over urban land policy, particularly in the short term. On the one hand, the international financial institutions, the Ministries of Planning and Commerce, and the Uganda Investment Authority, see the overlapping tenure systems, the bureaucratic opportunities for rent-seeking, the insecurity of ownership rights, and, above all, tenant 'encumbrances' on both public and private land as major fetters on investment and urban development, particularly foreign investment in commercial and industrial activities in the city. These parties want a regularized urban land delivery system, based on fair market values for land in which ownership rights would be permanent. On the other hand, it is fairly clear that one of the reasons that harsh austerity measures instituted under structural adjustment have not caused greater political protest in Kampala is precisely because informal access to land in the city has permitted people to survive the decaying economic conditions that preceded adjustment and to survive the wage cutting, retrenchment and cost of living increases resulting from adjustment. In short, the debate over the use of land for agriculture in an urban area goes back to the fundamental issue of balancing efficiency and equity in land access, 44 or, in this case, balancing overall economic growth at the system level with economic survival at the individual or household level. As suggested above, this argument has both economic and political elements. At a minimum, to protect the interests of the low-income urban residents who currently rely on informal access to land for subsistence production, changes in urban land administration should encourage localized land use planning and should guarantee
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
4SSmit, J and Nasr, J 'Urban agriculture for sustainable cities: using waste and idle land and water bodies as resources' Environment and Urbanization 1992 4 (2) 141-151
timely and adequate compensation for the loss of access to land, particularly under customary tenancy arrangements. While formalizing the administration of informal economic practices is difficult, possibilities are suggested from experience elsewhere for the permanent or semi-permanent zoning of agricultural land use areas within cities. 45 The use of some urban land for farming has recently been formally permitted by the Kampala City Council. The implications of this discussion are broader than simply the use of a specific amount of land in or around a specific city for a specific kind of agricultural practice. The concentration of land ownership and landlessness in high population-density urban and peri-urban areas in subSaharan Africa go hand-in-hand with the rise of livelihood strategies in those areas that rely on both cash income and subsistence. So long as low-income urban and peri-urban residents lack the ability to formally own land, but are unable to make ends meet from wage or trade income alone, there will continue to be strong demand for informal access to and usage of urban and peri-urban land for subsistence. So long as there exist incentives to private landowners and weak administration of public land, informal access practices are likely to continue. Interventions by the state or municipal governments that attempt to quickly formalize access to land or regulate land use practices without providing alternative livelihoods or higher wages are likely to be met with resistance or provoke political protest.
195
Land Use Policy,
Pergamon S0264-8377(96)00006-3
Highest and best use? Access to urban land for semi-subsistence food production
Daniel G Maxwell
Pressures on urban policy-makers in Africa to formalize land tenure and land delivery systems are mounting, while at the same time there is increased demand for informal access to urban land for subsistence production and lowcost housing. In Kampala, Uganda, semi-subsistence agriculture is an important component of the urban economy, yet it is a technically illegal form of land use and largely misunderstood by urban authorities and policy-makers. This paper analyzes the means of access to land, much of it informal, and discusses possible policy responses to competing demands over urban and peri-urban land. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd The author is with the International Food Policy Research Institute, 1200 17th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA. He was formerly on the staff of the Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA I am grateful for the excellent research assistance of Gertrude Atukunda of Makerere Institute of Social Research, and for comments of earlier drafts of this paper from John Bruce of the Land Tenure Center, Jennifer Kaggwa of the Center for Basic Research, the late Emmanuel Nabuguzi of Makerere Institute of Social Research, as well as from two anonymous reviewers. Funding for this research came from a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and from the National Science Foundation, USA. I am also grateful for the institutional support of Makerere Institute of Social Research during fieldwork. All errors or omissions are my own. continued on page 182
'Highest and Best Use' may be defined as that use which brings the largest net return in money and amenities over a period of time. Nowhere is the competition of land uses greater or more noticeable than in cities. 2 The crisis of urban development in Africa has been directly equated with the question of urban land tenure and land use. 3 The limited evidence from scattered empirical studies of urban and peri-urban land in Africa indicates that several trends have emerged over the past two decades. The first is concentration of ownership, and the narrowing of family or clan rights in land. 4 Increased landlessness is a growing problem and is nowhere more evident than on the peri-urban fringe, 5 where there is intense competition between agricultural and residential land usesJ ~ A second trend is the rapid growth of a land market but with relatively weak legal institutions underpinning that market. 7 Mabogunje s characterizes this situation as one of 'strong societies and weak states'. A third trend is that, in spite of the breakdown of lineage or clan control over land, transactions in urban land continue to be subject to personalized relations between owners and occupants, or buyers and sellers. The political formation of entire urban neighborhoods may be underpinned by such relations. '~ Following the first generation of structural adjustment programs in Africa in the 1980s, which tended to give priority to agriculture and viewed cities through the lens of 'urban bias', I° the contemporary policy environment affords greater attention to urban problems. None have attracted greater urgency than the problems of land tenure and land m a n a g e m e n t , lj with key emphasis on the formalization and individualization of property rights in land, simplification of urban land m a n a g e m e n t , the development of land delivery systems that promote the most economic use of scarce urban land, and the potential for raising municipal revenue from urban land. ~2 At the same time, however, the combination of urban economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s and the continued rapid growth of urban 181
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell continued from page 181
1Dorau, H and Hinman, G Urban Land Economics McGrath Publishing Company, College Park, MD (1928) 215 2Ely, R and Wehrwein, G Land Economics University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wl (1940) 138 3Mabogunje, A Perspectives on Urban Land and Urban Management Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa World Bank Technical
Paper Number 196, World Bank, Washington, DC (1992) 4Dickerman, C 'Urban land concentration' in Downs and Reyna (eds) Land and Society in Contemporary Africa University Press of New England, Hanover, NH (1988) 5Swindell, K and Mamman, A 'Land expropriation and accumulation on the Sokoto periphery, Northwest Nigeria' Africa 1990 60 173-187 6Both, M, Francisco, A and Boucher, S Land Markets, Employment and Resource Use in the Per#Urban Green Zones of Maputo, Mozambique Land Tenure Cen-
ter, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wl (1995) 7Aronson, D 'Capitalism and culture in Ibadan urban development' Urban Anthropology 1978 7 253-267; Mabogunje up cit Ref 3 8Mabogunje up cit Ref 3 9Barnes, S Patrons and Pewee Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos
Manchester University Press, Manchester (1986) 1°Bates, R Markets and States in Tropical Africa University of California Press, Berkeley (1981); World Bank Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa World Bank, Washington, DC (1981) 1~Farvacque, C and McAuslan, P Reforming Urban Land Policies and Institutions in Developing Countries Urban Management
Program Paper Number 5, World Bank, Washington, DC (1992); Mabogunje, A 'A new paradigm for urban development' in Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics
World Bank, Washington, DC (1991) ~2Kituuka, S 'Urban land management in Uganda' Mimeo, UN Centre for Human Settlements, Nairobi (1992); Nordberg, L and Nsamba-Gayiiya, E Report on Land Defvery Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Kampala (1991); NsambaoGayiiya, E Report of the National Workshop on Urban Land Policy and Management Ministry of Lands, Housing and
Urban Development, Kampala (1993) 13Stren, R and White, R African Cities in Crisis Westview, Boulder, CO (1989) 14Maxwell, D 'Labor, land, food and farming: a household analysis of urban agriculture in Kampala, Uganda' PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wl (1995) ~SLado, C 'Informal urban agriculture in Nairobi, Kenya' Land Use Policy 1990 7 257-266; Lee-Smith, D, Manundu, M, Lamba, D and Gathuru, K Urban Food continued on page 183
182
populations has led to increasing reliance on livelihood strategies in African cities characterized as 'straddling', or relying on both cash income and subsistence production for direct consumption. Despite the concentration and individualization of land ownership, sizable areas of high-value urban land are being used for relatively low-value agricultural production. Not only does economic theory suggest that low-value land uses will be forced out by market competition, but the use of land for farming is technically illegal in many African cities. What explains the apparent contradiction of the informal use of urban land for semi-subsistence farming in the face of both market forces and urban bylaws banning urban farming? What are the means of accessing urban land for such activities? Stated differently, what are the social relations that permit and protect informal urban land use? These questions confront not only urban land use planners, but also development practitioners more generally in the face of continued rapid urban population expansion, growing urban poverty and unemployment, and a rapidly emerging urban environmental crisis. J3 At the root of these questions lie the issues of land access, land rights, and land use--and how to accommodate competing demands for land use in urban areas and on the rapidly changing peri-urban fringe. This paper analyzes access to land for urban farming in Kampala, the capital and largest city of Uganda. The study took place during 1992-1993 and consisted of 40 comparative household case studies and a two-round survey of 350 households in three areas of the city, selected into a multistage random sample. Key informant interviews and focus group discussions supplemented these two primary data sources.la The location of survey enumeration areas is shown on Map 1. Case studies were conducted throughout the city.
Farming in the city Urban farming and the use of urban land for agricultural purposes has long been a common practice in Kampala and in other African cities. Only in the past decade has urban agriculture in Eastern African cities been systematically researched.~S Most of this research portrays urban agriculture as a household survival strategy, one of the many ways in which urban families have redeployed their labor and other resources in the struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile urban economic environment. Many of these studies note the constraint of access to land for urban farming and observe that land used for urban cultivation is mostly not owned or even legally accessed by the urban farmer. Sawio j~' shows that over half of his respondents either inherited or bought their farmland--part of the evidence he presents suggesting that better-off urban residents are the ones who are able to farm. However, 'buying' in this case does not necessarily mean a transfer of a deed or title. Rakodi w notes that 57% of farmers in Lusaka do not know whose land they are using. Lade TM states that 'squatting', or the use of land without permission for urban agriculture in Nairobi, is 'seasonal and ephemeral' and notes that such usage may shift from one user to another, implying an institutional vacuum over access to such land. Evidence from other studies suggests that 'squatting' is also a long-term strategy of land access. Freeman suggests that squatting as a land access strategy amounts to a form of moral economy. ") But institutional questions regarding access to land that is not formally owned and the way in which
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
d
I
UBAGA
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.~°,
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o.i...
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Map 1, The administrative divisions of Kampala: (1) Kiswa Parish; (2) Najjanankumbi Parish; (3) Luwafu Parish (enumeration areas are highlighted). continued from page 182 Production and the Cooking Fuel Situation in Urban Kenya Mazingira Institute, Nairobi (1987); Maxwell, D and Zziwa, S 'Urban agriculture in Kampala: indigenous adaptive response to the economic crisis' Ecology of Food and Nutrition 1993 29 (1) 91-109; Rakodi, C 'Urban agriculture: research questions and the Zambian evidence' Journal of Modem African Studies 1988 26 (3) 495-515; Sanyal, B 'Urban continued on page 184 Table 1. Land use in Kampala. Land use category
Area (ha)
Proportion
Residential Commercial Mixed Institutional Open green space Transport, utilities Agriculture Forest, wetland, water
4 945 596 572 1 112 279 230 11 942 1 624
23.2% 2.8% 2.7% 5.2% 1.3% t .t % 56.1% 8.6%
Source: Department of Physical Planning City of Kampala: Revision of Structure Plan Ministry of Land, Housing and Urban Development, Kampala (1992)
°l . . . . . . ° • °...o..
2~22;."
access to such land is maintained over time are mostly either not addressed by previous research or addressed in a speculative manner• Kampa|a is comprised of 213 square kilometers (21 300 hectares). The most recent estimate puts agricultural land use at a total of 11 942 hectares, or 56•1% of the total land area of the city (Table 1). A multistage random sample survey in Kampala revealed that 35% of Kampala households are engaged in some form of agriculture within the city. While the overwhelming majority of labor in urban farming is that of women, data suggest that both men and women are involved in the acquisition of land. 2° Two historically distinct forms of land use for urban agriculture exist in Kampala. The first, occurring mostly within the built-up center of the city, is a fairly recent phenomenon. The second, occurring in peri-urban areas, represents the continuation of traditional uses of customary land holdings even as the city expands outward to incorporate these areas. Farming may be done on the same parcel of land as the residence, it may be nearby, or it may be some distance from the residence• Crops grown away from the residence are almost exclusively low-value root crops; maize and plantains are grown on the same parcel as the household. The most commonly cited immediate reason given for farming is the need to provide a source of food for direct consumption by the 183
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
household, although there is a small number of commercial farmers, and some food is sold by primarily subsistence producers--either when they have perishable surpluses or an urgent need for cash. Of several major reasons that people did not engage in farming, the first and most obvious was the issue of access to land: a number of respondents noted that they had previously farmed in Kampala but had lost access to their land, so they were no longer producing any of their own food within the city. Others were simply unable to acquire land at all. Sharp differences exist depending on how land was accessed and the land tenure category into which the land falls, differences in rights, in security of tenure, and in agricultural practices.
Categories of land tenure in Kampala
continued from page 183 agriculture: who cultivates and why?' Food and Nutrition Bulletin 1985 7 (3) 15-24; Sawio, C 'Feeding the urban masses? Towards an understanding of the dynamics of urban agriculture in D a r e s Salaam, Tanzania' Unpublished PhD dissertation, Clark University, Worcester, MA (1993); Mbiba, B Urban Agriculture in Zimbabwe Avebury, Aldershot (1995) lSSawio op cit Ref 15 lrRakodi op cit Ref 15 18Lade op cit Ref 15, 263 19Freeman, D A City of Farmers: Informal Urban Agriculture in the Open Spaces of Nairobi, Kenya McGill University Press, Toronto (1991) 2°Maxwell, D 'Alternative urban food security strategy: a household analysis of urban agriculture in Kampala' World Development 1995 23 (10) 1669-1681 ~Nordberg and Nsamba-Gayiiya op cit Ref 12; Kituuka op cit Ref 12
184
Four different major categories of land tenure are found within the city, overlaid by numerous forms of informal access, varying from outright 'squatting' to land borrowing, the purchase and sales of informal use rights, and the illegal subdivision of plots. Various tenancy arrangements are also common. The land use planning and enforcement capacity of city and local government eroded badly during the Amin era and the chaotic years that followed, giving rise to numerous land disputes that make it very difficult to sort out ownership and occupancy rights. On the one hand, this situation has created numerous informal opportunities for occupation of urban land for various purposes, This informal use of urban land is by no means restricted to the urban poor, but it has created niches in which the poor have been able to survive through very low-cost housing, production of some of their food needs, or both. On the other hand, it has created a confoundingly confused tenure system in which rights to land and even to improvements on the land are not always secure. It has also led to an urban land delivery system rife with opportunity to make a greater profit from information and access to bureaucratic procedure or from speculation and landhoarding than from productive activities, which effectively keeps land off the market. 2~ Donors and some domestic pressure groups are now pressing for reforms in the administration and ownership of urban land. Proposed reforms would streamline the land delivery system in Kampala, enable investors to gain secure rights to land, and increase the amount of land available for development while cutting down on opportunities for rent-seeking. The four major categories of land tenure that prevail in Kampala today are public land and three categories of de facto privately held land--freehold land, mailo land, and Kabakaship land--despite the fact that the 1975 Land Reform Decree formally converted privately owned land to leaseholds and transferred ownership of all private land to the state. Public land (Crown land prior to independence) dominates the central and eastern parts of the city. Planning control over such land has been greater in these areas than on privately held land, but administration broke down during the Amin era. In spite of having been abolished by the Land Reform Decree, some amount of freehold land continues to be recognized and administered as such. The majority of this land in Kampala is held by religious institutions. Mailo tenure is a de facto form of private, individual ownership, despite having also been abolished. Mailo tenure is a modified form of freehold introduced during the colonial era with some restrictions on alienation. Strong institutions of
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell Table 2. Categories of land tenure and occupancy in Kampala. Tenure category
Tenure sub-category
Informal access
Public land
Public institutional Rental
'Squatting'
Leased Customary tenancy
(Bibanja) 'Unoccupied' Freehold land
Private institutional Private owner Leased Customary tenancy
(Bibanja)
Mailo land
Owner occupancy Rental Leased (expatriates) Customary tenancy
(Bibanja) Unoccupied
Kabakaship land
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Sales of use rights 'Squatting' 'Squatting'
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Sales of use rights Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Lending/borrowing Sales of use rights
Kingdom Institutional Leased
Customary tenancy
(Bibanja) Source: Author's case studies (1993)
Unauthorized subdivision Lending/borrowing 'Squatting' Sales of use rights
long-term tenancy are associated with mailo tenure, and a substantial amount of mailo land in Kampala is effectively held by tenants and 'squatters'. An additional category of land that should be treated separately, simply because of its recent history, is Kabakaship land, owned by the King of Buganda. It was mailo land prior to the abolition of the Kingdoms in 1966, with the office of the Kabaka as the owner, but all this land was confiscated and administered as public land by Kampala City Council until t993, and now it has been returned to the Kabaka. However, between 1966 and 1993, the buying, selling and subdivision of such land was essentially not under the supervision of any controlling authority and not registered anywhere unless a buyer sought a formal lease from Kampala City Council. The land was formally returned to the Kabaka in 1993, but it is now occupied by people who 'bought' parcels and believe themselves to be the rightful owners. Table 2 depicts these four categories of land tenure in Kampala, as well as formal occupancy and informal access categories. Informal access is more prevalent in some categories of formal occupancy than in others. The various categories are described in detail below.
Access to urban land for agriculture While the policy debate over urban land use is largely concerned with housing and other 'urban' land uses, agriculture has continued to occupy various niches in urban land. Categories of land access for agriculture do not correspond directly to categories of land tenure in Kampala. They vary from formal, legal occupancy to a range of informal and technically 185
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell illegal forms of occupancy. Categories of land access for urban agriculture are briefly outlined in the following section.
Owner occupancy Before the return of the Kabakaship land, de facto private ownership of mailo land prevailed on about 45% of Kampala's land area. 22 The most common form of agricultural land usage on private land is simply the owner of a plot engaging in some cultivation on his or her own land, although owners often permit others to cultivate unused land, and uninvited 'squatters' often simply help themselves if land is unoccupied. Leaseholder occupancy Prior to the return of the Kabakaship land, over half the land within the city limits of Kampala was public land, on which an applicant can be allocated a long-term, renewable leasehold. While few people acquire a leasehold on land for purely agricultural purposes, farming is a widespread practice on land leased for housing. Leases are also often granted to individuals or organizations on institutional freehold land, and occasionally to non-Ugandans on mailo land. Leasehold occupancy of Kabakaship land continues to be honored after the return of such property to the Kabaka. Renewable annual rentals Major areas of the eastern part of the city are devoted to city council housing estates, in which houses are rented to both civil servants and the general public. Most of these houses have small plots, which today are covered in gardens and plantations. Formally, these are annual leases, but in practice, people who occupied the houses 20-30 years ago may still be found there. Bibanja 23
22Department of Physical Planning City of Kampala: Revision of Structure Plan Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Kampala (1992) eaKibanja is literally translated simply as a plot or piece of ground. Bibanja is the plural.
186
Under the mailo tenure system in Buganda, where Kampala is located, kibanja meant a grant of long-term use rights in plots of land to a tenant by a private landowner, or by a chief or official of the Kabaka's government in return for a fixed annual rent. In later years, landlords actually began selling kibanja rights to a tenant, and this is the more commonly implied sense of the term 'kibanja' as it is used in Kampala today. After the Land Reform Decree, both mailo and Kabakaship bibanja holders (technically public land at the time) were stripped of secure rights to their land and made subject to eviction on short notice. Much of the privately owned land in the parts of Kampala where mailo land exists is occupied by kibanja holders. Technically, the buying and selling of bibanja is not legal, but the practice continues, and in fact much of the land used for agriculture is under this category of occupancy. Customary tenants on public land also refer to their land as bibanja, and much of the Kabakaship land is occupied by tenants without legal documentation, but who describe themselves as bibanja holders. Bibanja were earlier granted on freehold land owned by religious institutions as well.
Unauthorized subdivision The subdivision and sale of bibanja without the permission of owners or planners on all three types of privately owned land have led to the proliferation of unplanned slum areas, which, in appearance, resemble
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell squatter settlements in other cities. However, occupants have usually either paid the former occupant for a subdivided kibanja, or had been given the right to settle on the land by a chief if it was Kabakaship land, and therefore do not consider themselves as squatters (even though they may be called such). Under these conditions, use of land for farming has slowly been displaced by other forms of land use in the more densely populated area, especially in recent years, because access to land for housing is much cheaper on bibanja than on private or leased land. Nevertheless, in certain areas, much of this land is used for agricultural purposes.
Borrowing Land borrowing is a very common form of land access for agricultural purposes. It offers access to land with the consent of the owner or caretaker (someone named by the owner to look after the land) and the assurance that even if future use rights are withdrawn, the labor invested in a given year's crops will not be lost due to summary eviction. In some cases, a small amount of money is paid to the caretaker; more commonly, some of the food harvested is given as a token of thanks or 'rent'. In the case of private land that is held for speculative purposes, such arrangements serve the owner's interests by keeping the land occupied by people who will leave without compensation when the land is sold or developed. In fact, continuous occupancy of the land is an obligation in the case of borrowing and constitutes the landlord's major rationale for permitting use of land at sub-market rents. In the words of one such owner: '[Borrowers] are looking after the land. T h e y actually help you to ward off unwanted trespassers or squatters.'
'Squatting' Informal occupancy without permission occurs on both public and private land in Kampala. However, by respondents' own estimation, it would be very difficult to acquire land by such a means in Kampala t o d a y - - m o s t of this group had been cultivating on the same piece of land since the mid to late 1970s. Most such respondents agreed that it would be very difficult to obtain land by such means today. Transfer of such land today is likely to take place under the category of purchasing use rights.
Purchasing use rights There remain in the city large tracts of land, both public and private, that are not built up, and that the owner has reasons for not wanting to sell. The use of such land for urban agriculture is often tolerated, and the primary means of original access was 'squatting'. However, in areas where such tolerance has long been practiced, an, informal land market in buying and selling use rights has emerged, but it has emerged between users, not between owners and users. Although 'prices' for such land are low, reflecting the unknown quantity of tenure-security, use rights and exclusionary rights are quite strong in practice. Some respondents reported making a token payment to the owner or caretaker in order to borrow land; most reported making small payments either in cash or in kind as token 'rent' to maintain their right of access. Squatter's rights as outlined depend entirely on the absence of the assertion of any superior legal claim to the land, but cases were
187
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell Table 3. Frequency of land access/tenure categories (by land parcel). Access/tenure category
1
Enumeration area a 2 3
Total
Owner occupancy (titled mailo) Purchased:
1 2
-
6 3
7 5
3 5
2b 2°
-
5 7
1
2
3
6
2 7 7
-
2 1 -
4 8 7
Mailo: Public:
21
-
1 -
t 21
Borrowed:
23
8
3
34
3
17
3
23
4
2
2
8
79
33
24
136
Inherited: Laaseholdar occupancy (leased public) Purchased: Inherited:
Rented: Bibanja (used by kibanja holder) Purchased: a Enumeration areas: (1) Luwafu, a rapidly growing low- to middle-income peri-urban area; population density less than 30 people/ha in the enumeration area; (2) Kiswa, a low-income, densely populated inner-city slum; population density around 190 people/ha in the enumeration area; (3) Najjanankumbi, an older, mixed-income residential suburb; population density around 70 people/ha in the enumeration area. b Leases have all expired, land ownership in
legal question. Source: Author's survey (1993)
Inherited: Customary grant:
Subdivided bibenja (sold without owner's permission)
• 'Squatted' (occupancy without permission):
Purchased use rights: Total
documented in which such land had been in continuous use by the same household for 20 years. Cases were also documented in which land originally accessed through such a means had been turned into 'borrowed' land, or land on which use rights had been sold. Squatters or borrowers must maintain some kind of physical presence on such land year-round in order to protect their claim of prior occupancy to it. Therefore, crops are planted at several different times over the entire parcel, so that there is always something growing. On borrowed land, the rationale of the owner or caretaker is to prevent unwanted 'squatters' from staking any claim to the land, hence use rights will be withdrawn if the borrower does not maintain presence on the parcel. As one land borrower notes: 'We make sure we use the entire piece so the owner does not give it away to someone else.' Similar statements were made by other land borrowers. The caretaker of such land may also occasionally demand some 'payment' from the land; always having some crops growing ensures the borrower can meet such 'rent' demands. On land accessed without any permission, the claim to use rights is based on prior occupancy. Lack of continuous use constitutes an opening for someone else to claim prior occupancy, even on land for which use rights have been purchased, unless neighbors look out for each others' interests. The first five categories of access may be associated with the farmer's place of residence; the last three are exclusively for agricultural usage. Table 3 presents the frequency of access categories by enumeration areas in the city. The formal categories of land tenure in Kampala do not adequately explain actual practices on the ground in terms of accessing and holding land for agricultural purposes. Some theoretical interpretations of informal access to urban land are offered in the next section, followed by a discussion of empirical evidence from Kampala.
Interpretations of informal land access Reinvention of a customary 'moral economy' In attempting to explain how urban residents are able to use land they 188
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell do not own for farming activities that are illegal, Freeman z4 suggests that what may be happening is the reinterpretation of pre-colonial customary land law in a contemporary urban setting. His study is focused on urban agriculture in Nairobi. To explain the de facto arrangements that make possible the informal use of urban land for agriculture, he examines the customary tenure system of the area before colonial rule and the subsequent land reform were superimposed. Under Kikuyu customary law, a tenant (ahoi) acquired an estate for an indefinite period, and even if the landlord terminated the tenancy, the ahoi was allowed to harvest all of his crops and was reimbursed for improvements such as trees and perennial crops. While this customary law has passed out of usage because of Kenya's sweeping land reform, the rights of the ahoi are still recalled. To explain informal occupation of urban land for farming, Freeman suggests the reemergence of a contemporary, urban ahoi, reasserting the right of the landless Kikuyu peasant to the means of subsistence in traditional village life. He further suggests that by largely ignoring the illegal occupancy and use of such land, urban authorities are tacitly respecting this assertion. Clientelism Mabogunje 25 raises the issue of patron/client relations governing access and informal use of urban land, in lieu of investigating formal class relations. His thesis is that, in the post-independence era in Africa, certain individuals have been able to control the use of urban land not through ownership per se, but through their positions of authority within, or connections to, municipal councils or other bureaucracies. They have used their positions to control access to public urban land in return for political clientelism. Lemarchand has described patron/client relations as: • . . dyadic bonds between individuals of unequal power and socio-economic status; they exhibit a diffuse, particularistic, face-to-face quality strongly reminiscent of ascriptive solidarities; unlike ascriptive ties, however, they are voluntarily entered into and derive their legitimacy from expectations of mutual benefits. 26 Mabogunje argues that these invisible networks mitigate the emergence of class conflict over urban land because they obfuscate who owns the land, who has access to it, and what the process of access is. With regard specifically to activities such as urban agriculture, one of the forces driving the relationship is the extent to which 'client' households must rely upon multiple means to survive and reproduce. Mabogunje links the obfuscation of class consciousness in African cities to what he calls 'straddling', or the reliance on wage labor and trading income as well as subsistence income-in-kind. 2"Freeman op cit Ref 19 2SMabogunje, A 'Urban planning and the post-colonial state in Africa: a research overview' African Studies Review 1990 33 (2) 121-203 26Lemarchand, R 'Comparative political clientelism: structure, process, and optic' in Eisenstadt, S and Lemarchand, R (eds) Political Clientelism, Patronage, and Development Sage, Beverly Hills (1981) 15 27Aronson op cit Ref 7 28Barnes op cit Ref 9 29Mabogunje op cit Ref 3
Ethnicity and kinship Aronson e7 and Barnes 28 show differing ways in which ethnic and kinship linkages can be instrumental in gaining access to urban land, or in strengthening a claim to urban land. In a sense, this literature could be characterized as similar to Mabogunje's 29 analysis, except that where Mabogunje was primarily concerned with public land under urban administration, this literature is primarily concerned with the conversion of clan or lineage rural land to individually held urban land. To the extent that patron/client relationships are based to some degree on kinship or ethnicity, these categories may overlap• Where they do, they 189
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may partly serve to protect ethnic or kin group interests. But there is also an obvious element of means-ends rationality on the part of the 'patron' in maintaining or recreating these relations and a clear asymmetry of power that permits it. Aronson details the process of how one faction within an extended family combines instrumental manipulation of other family factions and ethnic linkages outside the family to break up and sell off family land in a rapidly urbanizing area near Ibadan. The resulting disputes over ownership are settled to the satisfaction of the new owners, but the less powerful factions of the family that held the land under customary tenure gained nothing from the subdivision and sale of the land and lost their access rights in the process. Hence, even while relying on reciproc~/1 and ethnic relationships, this process is oriented toward the individualization of land-holding--to the clear benefit of some parties and the detriment of others. Aronson characterizes these 'personalized ties within a capitalist system' as an example of 'the distinctly Yoruba social processes that persist as the land law changes. '3° Dickerman 3j describes this process as the narrowing of rights in family or lineage land in urbanizing areas, and notes that it is a continent-wide process. Exploitation
a°Aronson op cit Ref 7, 265, 253 (emphasis added) al Dickerman op cit Ref 4 a2Leys, C Underdevelopment in Kenya University of California Press, Los Angeles (1975) 33Portes, A and Walton, J Labor, Class and the International System Academic Press, New York (1981) 3"Mamdani, M 'Uganda: contradictions of the IMF Programme and perspectives' Development and Change 1991 21 427-467 35Kasfir, N 'Are African peasants selfsufficient?' Development and Change 1986 1"7 351 a~Dickerman, C Urban Housing and Land Markets: Bujumbura, Burundi LTC Research Paper Number 97, Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wl (1988)
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A somewhat more malevolent interpretation of the same evidence presented by Freeman would imply that state tolerance of informal land use and the violation of municipal bylaws is evidence that such activities serve as a 'safety valve" or subsidy for low wages paid by the state to civil servants and by industry to wage earners--a view congruent to some extent with the interpretation of the entire informal sector as put forward by Leys 32 and Portes and Walton, 33 and by Mamdani 34 with regard to economic restructuring in Uganda, though not with particular reference to urban land use. Much of the discussion of patron/client relations or ethnic and kinship links could also be analyzed in terms of inequality or class relations. As Kasfir has noted with regard to social relations in rural Uganda, 'patronage is an expression of class relations. The medium of exchange may be cultural, but the motive is material.'35 However, given their reciprocal nature, and the 'indeterminacy in situating class interest' referred to by Mabogunje in relation to the pursuit of multiple economic strategies, these relations are perhaps better understood in terms of clientelism rather than class, provided that it is made very clear that 'reciprocal' does not imply 'equal'. With a few exceptions, 36 any discussion of g e n d e r - - a prevalent theme in the literature on both rural land and the urban informal economy--is surprisingly absent from the literature on urban land tenure in Africa. The available literature then seems to suggest forms of social relations over land that both modernization theory and Marxian political economy predict would disappear in urban society. Similar explanations of land access were noted in Kampala.
Empirical evidence from Kampala Clientelism
There is widespread evidence of patron/client relationships governing informal access to mailo land. The very nature of the link between mailo owner and kibanja tenant suggests a patron/client kind of relationship. It should be noted, however, that there is effectively no landlord/tenant
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
S°T NoSocialObligations
Figure 1. Borrowing private land.
ialibligation~
CARETAKER
ExclusionofSquatters
:J:y::
relationship on some mailo land in the city, for example, in situations where the kibanja tenant occupies the land and the owner has not been heard from since busuulu (rent) payments were abolished in 1975 by the Land Reform Decree. In other cases, the landlord/tenant relationship is between the kibanja holder and the occupants of housing constructed on the kibanja. With regard to mailo land borrowed or accessed without permission for agricultural use, evidence of patron/client exchange has already been mentioned: petty 'rent' payments in cash and in kind for short-term use of privately held land; privileged usage of fairly large tracts of land granted by owners to certain individuals and summary eviction of others from tiny plots, depending on the social circumstances of the user; and, in particular, landowners granting permission to use land for farming in exchange for keeping unwanted occupants out while land values rise steeply. Hence, while the user gets the short-term benefit of farming the land, landowners effectively control what people can have access to land in an area and accumulate the rapidly increasing value of that land. Most importantly, in return for use of the land, cultivators are expected to keep uninvited 'squatters' off the land before it is built up or sold (Figure 1). In the meantime, such land not only rapidly inflates in value, it is also good collateral for bank loans. While owners often have a relative serving as a caretaker to look after the land, the borrowers are most commonly not people to whom the landowner has any kinship obligations. Data in Table 3 indicate that borrowing is the single most common mode of access to land for farming in the city. While landowners and occupants may be of the same ethnic group, respondents rarely expressed the relationship in terms of ethnicity. Rather, the system of land borrowing that has developed in the suburbs and peri-urban areas of Kampala suits the short-term interests of both the owner and the borrowers. Intra-household relations and gender Women had directly accessed land for cultivation in 31% of the households interviewed; among only the most informal access categories the proportion is 43%. The vast majority of farming in the city is carried out by women, but women are either dependent on men for access to land, or gain access on their own through the least formal and least secure arrangements. Yet these informal categories of access are the most important in terms of improving the food security and 191
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell Table 4. Land access and income group.
Income group Category Formal ownership Rental Bibanja Unauthorized subdivision Informal access
Notes: Chi-square = 21.87; df = 12; p = 0.04 Source: Author's survey (1993)
Total
Very low
0 1 2 4 17
Low 17 2 13 9 40
24
81
Lower middle
3 2 3 8 8 24
Upper middle/ high
4 1 1 0 1 7
Total 24 7 19 21 66 136
nutritional status of the urban poor. Women often actively protect each other's claims to land under circumstances of informal access.
Exploitation A clear relationship was noted between mode of land access and income group, as depicted in Table 4. Upper-income groups rely much more heavily on formal access to land, and the lowest-income group rarely can afford formal access. These results, however, only underline the obvious fact that formal access to urban land is expensive; they do not support the thesis that exploitation at the individual level is the logic driving the issue of access to urban land for farming. At the level of the city as a whole, it is clear that the usage of a significant proportion of urban land for agriculture provides a major buffer or safety valve against rapid fluctuations in prices on the urban food market. However, there is little evidence to suggest that individuals' access to land is the result of either an intentional subsidy to keep a lid on discontent over low wages, or a deliberate policy outcome in terms of the 'moral economy' explanation.
Land policy debates in Kampala
3ZKampala City Council Land Management Policy Kampala City Council, Kampala (1990); Kampala City Council Kampala Development Plan, 1972: Structure Report Kampala City Council, Kampala (1972) aSAgricultural Policy Committee Tenure and Control of Land Bill, 1993 Agricultural Policy Committee, Bank of Uganda, Kampala (1993) 39Kampala City Council op cit Ref 37; Nordberg and Nsamba-Gayiiya op cit Ref 12; Nsamba-Gayiiya op cit Ref 12; Kituuka opcitRef 12; van Nostrand, J etalKampala Urban Study, Phase I Report John van Nostrand Associates, Kampala (1993)
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Given the confusing array of land tenure arrangements within the city, the overlapping rights of various parties in mailo land, and the unplanned subdivision and fragmentation of land holdings, urban planners in Kampala have long been concerned with the land tenure/land management nexus and, in particular, with the question of how to make sufficient land available for urban development purposes. 37 Currently, proposed land legislation affecting the entire country proposes that a uniform tenure system be introduced throughout Uganda, converting all land to freehold, with the exception of land leased to foreigners. This would apply in both rural and urban areas. On previously unoccupied urban land, some development restrictions would apply, and land would initially be granted on the basis of a five-year lease, converting to freehold after five years if development conditions had been fulfilled. 3s Since 1990, at least five different reports have been submitted on ways to streamline or formalize urban land administration in Kampala. Problems mentioned in nearly all of these reports include confused and overlapping administrative structures; the multiplicity of tenure systems; problems of defining ownership of mailo land; the inability of urban authorities to plan and control land use; rampant unplanned and unregistered subdivision of tenanted land; incentives for bureaucratic rent-seeking; land speculation; and low institutional capacity. 39 Discussion of the relative merits of freehold versus leasehold tenure is quite common in these reports: while there is clearly a consensus that freehold
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
offers greater security of tenure, more incentives for investment and fewer for corruption, the history of unauthorized subdivision of plots and the uncontrolled sprawl to which it has led on mailo and freehold land lead to the fear that problems of planning and controlling land use under a freehold system would be greater than under a leasehold system in which centralized authorities would retain greater control over land use. No consensus has emerged about protecting access to land for the urban poor. The general intent is towards increasing formalization and privatization of urban tenure, but there is not complete agreement on modalities.
Urban land policy and urban agriculture
4Olbid
Until the present, urban agriculture has been viewed as a problem by both land use planners and urban managers more generally. In their report on problems of land delivery in Kampala, Nordberg and Nsamba-Gayiiya4° note that agricultural land use in the city is predominantly the result of customary tenancy on public land. While they call it a 'grave' problem, they are referring to the tenure rules of customary tenancy in the city and not to the land use p er se. But the implication is that if the rules of access reflected the value of the land, people who wanted to farm would at least be displaced to the periphery of the city, and land closer to the city center would be used for other purposes. Agriculture in the city, as already noted, is technically illegal. However, the central issue to be addressed by urban land policy is not the prevalence of any given use of land, whether technically legal or illegal. Rather, the issue is the prevailing informal institutional arrangements and personalized social relations governing access to urban land. Most land lent to urban farmers is privately owned land, and the use of privately owned land is widely perceived to be outside the realm of either municipal or national government intervention. While direct restrictions on development (or sanctions for leaving urban land 'undeveloped') would probably be politically impossible to impose and practically impossible to enforce, taxation of urban land and especially a capital gains tax on the rapidly inflating value of urban property could make holding 'undeveloped' land economically unfeasible. From a broader perspective, there are valid reasons for this type of taxation. At a very local level, however, such taxes would have a negative impact on low-income urban farmers who depend on borrowed land. The consequences of tenure formalization for urban land use practices in Kampala will undoubtedly entail a loss of land for agriculture. It is clear from the above discussion of land access that urban cultivators have taken advantage of interstitial institutional space created in urban land both by the complexities of multiple tenure systems, tax laws and tenancy arrangements prevailing in the city, and. by the administrative turmoil of the Amin and post-Amin eras. Formalization of tenure will not necessarily spell the end of farming in the city, but to the extent that land access and occupancy are made to conform to more formalized rules, urban farming will be increasingly difficult for the group of people who cannot afford to buy land--the very group now most dependent on urban agriculture for access to food. Irrespective of the manner in which land was accessed for the purposes of farming, food from urban farming currently constitutes a part of many low-income households' food entitlements, and, more
193
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"1Sen, A K Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation Clarendon Press, Oxford (1981) "2Maxwell op cit Ref 20 43Walton, J and Seddon, D Free Markets and Food Riots: The Poh'tical of Global Adjustment Blackwell, Oxford (1994) "4Doebele, W 'The evolution of concepts of urban land tenure in developing countries' Habitat International 1988 11 (1) 721
194
importantly, a direct entitlement rather than an exchange entitlement-that is, food directly produced by the consumer household, not acquired via the market. 4' Access to such food is entirely dependent upon continued access to land. Current proposals within Kampala City Council and before the national government would likely change the rules of land access, making urban farming a much more difficult undertaking, introducing a threat to the food security of a sizable portion of the urban population. While any such reform would take a long time to implement, it would be important that loss of such entitlements be compensated. In particular, the value of use rights in land needs to be recognized and compensated, not simply the value of improvements on the land. The fact that a large proportion of urban households derive part of their food needs from urban farming has created a situation in which there is some systemic logic in analyzing urban agriculture as a buffer against both fluctuating personal or household income and fluctuating prices, and in considering urban land use practices in such a light. Detailed evidence on this matter is presented elsewhere. 42 In brief, among low-income urban residents, access to land for farming (irrespective of how the land was accessed) is an extremely important determinant of both household food security and child nutritional status. Hence, from the point of view of the city's poor, access to land is extremely important. From a political view point, the question is the extent to which the partial reliance of a sizable proportion of the city's population on urban agriculture as a source of food permits the imposition from above of economic austerity measures without the risk of violent protest, as has been common in other African cities under the strain of structural adjustment. 43 In the abstract sense, this issue presents a profound dilemma for the debate over urban land policy, particularly in the short term. On the one hand, the international financial institutions, the Ministries of Planning and Commerce, and the Uganda Investment Authority, see the overlapping tenure systems, the bureaucratic opportunities for rent-seeking, the insecurity of ownership rights, and, above all, tenant 'encumbrances' on both public and private land as major fetters on investment and urban development, particularly foreign investment in commercial and industrial activities in the city. These parties want a regularized urban land delivery system, based on fair market values for land in which ownership rights would be permanent. On the other hand, it is fairly clear that one of the reasons that harsh austerity measures instituted under structural adjustment have not caused greater political protest in Kampala is precisely because informal access to land in the city has permitted people to survive the decaying economic conditions that preceded adjustment and to survive the wage cutting, retrenchment and cost of living increases resulting from adjustment. In short, the debate over the use of land for agriculture in an urban area goes back to the fundamental issue of balancing efficiency and equity in land access, 44 or, in this case, balancing overall economic growth at the system level with economic survival at the individual or household level. As suggested above, this argument has both economic and political elements. At a minimum, to protect the interests of the low-income urban residents who currently rely on informal access to land for subsistence production, changes in urban land administration should encourage localized land use planning and should guarantee
Highest and best use?: D G Maxwell
4SSmit, J and Nasr, J 'Urban agriculture for sustainable cities: using waste and idle land and water bodies as resources' Environment and Urbanization 1992 4 (2) 141-151
timely and adequate compensation for the loss of access to land, particularly under customary tenancy arrangements. While formalizing the administration of informal economic practices is difficult, possibilities are suggested from experience elsewhere for the permanent or semi-permanent zoning of agricultural land use areas within cities. 45 The use of some urban land for farming has recently been formally permitted by the Kampala City Council. The implications of this discussion are broader than simply the use of a specific amount of land in or around a specific city for a specific kind of agricultural practice. The concentration of land ownership and landlessness in high population-density urban and peri-urban areas in subSaharan Africa go hand-in-hand with the rise of livelihood strategies in those areas that rely on both cash income and subsistence. So long as low-income urban and peri-urban residents lack the ability to formally own land, but are unable to make ends meet from wage or trade income alone, there will continue to be strong demand for informal access to and usage of urban and peri-urban land for subsistence. So long as there exist incentives to private landowners and weak administration of public land, informal access practices are likely to continue. Interventions by the state or municipal governments that attempt to quickly formalize access to land or regulate land use practices without providing alternative livelihoods or higher wages are likely to be met with resistance or provoke political protest.
195