Development through dualism? : land tenure, policy, and poverty in Malawi

Inherited from a colonial past, this dualistic system was designed and justified as propelling growth through agriculture. Estate-based, export-oriented agriculture was to be the national growth pole. Malawi"s early record was viewed as testimony to the success of this strategy. With agriculture composing more than 40% of Gross Domestic Product and directly generating more than 70% of the country"s export revenues, per capita growth performance in the 1970s reached 3.9% per year. In contrast, the Africa region"s mean per capita growth rate was 1.1% during this period, with Malawi ranking seventh highest of 30 countries for which such data are available. The 1980s, though, have cast a shadow on this record and raised some troubling questions. In particular, Malawi"s average annual GDP growth rate in the 1980s was recorded at -1.5%, which made Malawi rank only twenty-fifth out of 36 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries with respect to growth performance over the past decade (Table 1). Its growth was slower than the mean regional rate of -0.5% per year. Consequently, Malawi remains one of the poorest countries in the region. With a per capita GDP of only $176 per year, Malawi ranks thirty-fourth out of the 38 countries in economically impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. The general constraints of low aggregate incomes are compounded by the inequality of the income distribution (Pryor 1988). Poverty remains present and pervasive. The issue in Malawi is not whether the land and associated agricultural policies have meant an inherent trade-off between growth and poverty. Rather, the issue is whether this policy set has compromised both poverty and growth. This paper argues that the poverty problem in Malawi has, in fact, been critically defined by the dualistic tenurial structure inherited from the colonial era and reinforced by government policies. Land and related agricultural policies have played a crucial role in determining both the aggregate economic performance and the livelihood of the pervasively poor rural population in Malawi. Moreover, the structural duality of agriculture, imposed by the rules and regulations applicable to land use, continues to be a current constraint to poverty alleviation, to productivity, and to growth itself. (Author abstract)