45
inadvertently displaced. In the process, a second or third group might be displaced, leading
to a new round of movement, displacement, and acquisition. 97
Smallholders, both men and women, have reported gaining access to land through a
variety of means, including clearing virgin land, inheritance, borrowing, marriage, lease, and
purchase. Where population concentration is highest, lively markets for land or land rights
exist, and smallholders are active participants in these markets. In most areas where research
was conducted, smallholders who needed land negotiated directly with a "land abundant"
family or with the local customary authority.
Women's access to land in rural areas continues to be determined by local custom.
However, in some cases it appears that women are having greater difficulty maintaining land
rights with the return of displaced populations and with the increase in commercialized
landholders. In the southern province of Gaza, where patrilineal descent is more common,
women have claimed losing control over land to returning husbands and nonlocal private
interests. It is not clear whether they have been pushed off the land or simply have had their
powers over day-to-day decisions reduced. At the same time, many women said that they
could not move to new locations (i.e., from centers of accommodation or the areas to which
they were displaced during the war) without their husbands' approval. It is not clear if this
is an indication of the weakness of women's rights with regard to land access and tenure
security, or if it signifies some other social dynamic within the household. Other interesting
examples are noted in the case studies that follow. In general, with regard to land access,
female smallholders appeared to be more vulnerable than male smallholders. Further research
is needed on the composition of—and relations within—the household unit with regard to land
access and tenure security in the postwar period.
There are two additional methods outside the customary system by which a sizable
number of smallholders have gained access to land. The first of these methods is exploitation
of the formal political structure and, by extension, of the formal tenure system. Many
smallholders, particularly in the peri-urban areas and in the Green Zones, have gained access
to land through agricultural cooperatives. These cooperatives secure their members' rights
to land in a variety of ways as individual or communal rights-holders. Since a large
percentage of cooperative members are women, women have taken the lead in directing the
political development of these organizations. Cooperatives, particularly in Maputo and Beira,
have experienced increasing land tenure insecurity as the state and courts have been unwilling
to defend or recognize their rights in the face of commercial encroachment. 98
The second way in which smallholders gain access to land apart from the customary
tenure system is squatting. Smallholders squat on both state and private land in a number of
localities. Squatting is often a tactic used where land is scarce, but increasingly smallholders
settle on land that is better endowed, even when bush or fallow land is available. In some
cases smallholders are squatting on family or community land that has been acquired by
97. This process of postwar displacement and the creation of a new group of refugees was recently noted
in Noticias, 17 December 1993.
98. See Garvey (1994); and Weiss and Myers (1994)