Table 1.2: Land tenure classification, Zambia, 1973 and 1987 (million hectares)
|
1973° |
1987" | |
|
State (formerly crown) Land: |
4,080,647 |
4,518,953 |
|
Freehold |
1,015,791 | |
|
Leasehold |
1,284,788 | |
|
Land under tribal occupation |
509,396 | |
|
Unalienated land |
125,102 | |
|
Inundated by water |
216,250 | |
|
Forest reserves |
546,570 | |
|
Protected forest reserves |
382,750 | |
|
Reserves° |
27,314,000 |
27,297,500 |
|
Trust Land' |
38,977,530 |
43,447,900 |
|
National parks and wildlife areas |
5,826,300 | |
|
Total |
76,198,477 |
75,264,353 |
a. International Rural Development Division, Swedish University of Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary
Medicare (Uppsala, April 1976), Zambia Sector Study, Preliminary Report, par. 3.1.1 (mimeo).
b. Includes 689,691 hectares of Protected Forest Areas.
c. Includes 4,250,889 hectares of Protected Forest Areas and 29,153 hectares of Forest Reserves.
d. Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, "Ministerial Statement in Parliament on 4th August, 1987 on Land
Alienation in Reserves and Trust Lands" (1987).
The mass emigration of Europeans, as in Mozambique, depleted the agricultural sector of
much of its skilled labor and capital. The Zambian government, in order to maintain the productivity
of the sector and to feed its heavily urbanized population and work force, undertook a variety of
agricultural programs. In some cases, parastatals took over land under leases for direct farming
operations. In other cases, settlement schemes were established which subdivided large commercial
operations (in some cases failed parastatal operations) into smaller units of widely varying size.
Bruce and Dorner (1982) provide data on the number, area, and size of leaseholds existing
at the end of the 1970s (precise years are unavailable due to inconsistent updating of data from four
separate cadastre strips from the mid-1970s through 1981) (table 1.3). Private leaseholds constituted
the largest share, representing 60.4 percent of the total. Government leases held by ministries and
parastatals represented the next largest category (26.5 percent). The remainder of the leasehold land
was held by settlement schemes (3.1 percent), cooperatives (0.3 percent), and religious/educational
institutions (2.2 percent), or were vacant (2.2 percent) or in nonagricultural uses (5.3 percent).
Following independence, the agricultural sector witnessed a rapid expansion in the number of
smaller "medium-scale" and "emergent" commercial farms (table 1.4). 5 As of 1989, the farming
sector comprised 740 large-scale farms (> 60 hectares), 25,230 medium-scale farms (20-60 hectares),
119,200 emergent commercial farms (10-19 hectares), and 387,000 smallholder and mainly
"subsistence" farms (1-9 hectares). The number of "emergent" farmers increased from 25,000 in 1965
5 Data reported on number of farms in chapter 3 (table 3.4) indicates farm numbers greatly in excess of these figures. No
information is available on the methodology for calculating these data.