The name is absent

74

When government passes land on to outside investors, they should bear the cost of
making the land available. Similar costs should not be placed on local land users and
their communities when they seek title to land they already use, in recognition of their
land rights under customary law.

32. There should be a systematic review of leaseholds or parcels in the Trust and Reserve Lands 50
hectares or larger held by government, and over 100 hectares held by private individuals or
companies. Where this land is unused, government should consider retaking it and returning it to local
communities unless the communities can agree with the ministry on some other use for the land.

Too often, local communities have been asked (and pressured) to provide land for ill-
conceived development efforts (e.g., the Council Farms), then watch the land sit idle
for years. Where such land exists and cannot be put to the use for which it was
provided, it should be returned. This would do a good deal for the ministry's poor
credibility in the rural areas. In each case, the displacement of traditional users should
be noted, and they should be given priority to return to the land.

33. Broad local consultations should be undertaken by the ministry to help it think through the future
of tenure in the Trust and Reserve areas.

Those consultations should be linked to educational activities; framed to allow a
genuine exchange on the pros and cons of leaseholds and their grant to either local
people, outside investors, or both; and framed to include farmers and other productive
land users as well as officials and traditional authorities. Participatory rural appraisal
methods and focus group approaches would be useful. The recent national
consultations on land policy in Tanzania by the Presidential Commission on Land
Matters which reported in 1992 should be examined as a model.

34. The ministry should consider further work on systematic titling activities in some quite limited
Trust and Reserve areas with good market access where a lack of title may be a binding constraint on
investment.

See recommendation 13 above.

35. A program of studies should be undertaken in several carefully selected areas to explore new
approaches to customary tenure and local organization for the administration of land.

Our information base on customary land administration is very poor. Each area should
include the lands of a group of three or four villages in a district, and the studies
should examine not only rights and dealings in farmland but rights in common-
property resources shared by community members and by more than one community.

The studies should utilize a variety of methodologies: participatory rural appraisal,
dispute studies, and household surveys. The studies should develop plans for follow-
up pilot work on land rights and administration in these areas.

36. A comprehensive study of the terms of access by women to productive resources should be carried
out.

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