The Protected Areas Working Group is a new and still evolving team of individuals who share an interest in Malawi’s protected areas. It started initially as an offshoot of the donor coordination committee for environment/natural resource management, but has since been broadened to include representatives of both the principal Government agencies concerned with land, forests and wildlife and also the NGO community. The group represents a considerable diversity of interests and it has not been easy to come to a common position for the purpose of this memorandum. The paper presented here is rather restricted in focus, being confined to the anticipated question "can any land within the existing protected areas be made available to help relieve the shortage of agricultural land, especially for smallholder farmers?" It does not deal with the management of protected areas, neither does it explore intermediate land use options in which both forest/wildlife conservation and some forms of agriculture are combined.

The working group is sensitive to the difficulty of the task faced by the Commission and also attaches significance to the fact that its recommendations may well see implementation during the period leading up to the next election. In full awareness of the harm done to the interests of protected areas (and indeed more generally to the management of natural resources) by irresponsible campaigning prior to the 1994 election, the group is anxious to bring to the discussion of protected areas a rational and objective assessment of their contribution to the national good.

Most of the views expressed in this paper are supported by all of the membership listed below, and all of these views are supported by some of the membership. That is about the best we can do at present. It should be repeated that within these limits, such support extends only to the individual members, and not to the institutions they represent. As of July 1997, the Protected Areas Working Group comprises:

• Dr. Simon Munthali, Department of National Parks and Wildlife (Chairman)
• Mr. John Ngalande, Forestry Department
• Mr. Geoffrey Nkhata, Ministry of Lands and Valuation
• Mr. Sam Mapila, Fisheries Department
• Dr. Zipangani Vokhiwa, Ministry of Research and Environmental Affairs
• Mr. Daulos Mauambeta, Wildlife Society of Malawi
• Mr. Ted Sneed, Wildlife Society of Malawi
• Mr. John Latham, SADC Forestry Sector Technical Coordination Unit
• Mr. Steven Machira, USAID
• Mr. John Snell, FAO
• Mr. Carl Bruessow, UNDP
• Mr. Leon Viljoen, South African High Commission; the Wildlife Producers and Hunters Association of Malawi
• Dr. Pickford Sibale, The World Bank
• Dr. Tony Seymour, Ministry of Research and Environmental Affairs

1. At eleven million, Malawi’s population has doubled in the past two decades and continues to grow at a frightening pace. Even the most optimistic projections forecast a population approaching twenty million by the year 2020 and thirty million by the year 2040. Eighty-five per cent of the population derive their livelihoods from rural occupations, mainly farming, and of these the great majority are smallholders who occupy land administered and allocated by traditional authorities in accordance with customary law. For these people population growth translates directly into increasing pressure on scarce land resources. This pressure is not distributed evenly. The pattern of human settlement has led to concentrations of population in those areas which were either the most fertile or most easily cultivated, and had adequate water supplies. Population density is therefore highest in the Shire Highlands, the plains of Mulanje and Phalombe, and parts of the Shire Valley, the southern lakeshore and the Central Region plateau. Here, the shortage of customary land has been experienced for many decades, leading to out-migration (from rural to urban, from the south to the centre) and, increasingly, to smallholder encroachment on lands under private or state ownership.

2. The problems of land pressure have been exacerbated by the progressive alienation of land from the customary sector into the more recent land tenure categories of private land (freehold and leasehold estates) and public land (mainly protected areas: National Parks, Wildlife and Forest Reserves). Thus, while the rural population has been increasing, the amount of land available to them has been declining. In economic terms, competitive interactions are most intense between smallholders and the estate sector, since both demand land of high agricultural potential. But increasingly there is competition between both the smallholder and estate sectors and the protected areas, particularly where the latter adjoin areas of high rural population density. Protected areas now comprise almost 2 million ha, or 21% of Malawi’s total land area. In regional terms this is not exceptional (the proportion of land area protected is 25% in Tanzania and 37% in Botswana), but in Malawi the high density of population means that, per capita, the area under protection exceeds that in any other southern African state.

3. The boundaries of many of Malawi’s protected areas were laid down long before land pressure had become a serious issue, and there has been no systematic attempt to assess their roles or performance for more than fifty years. In this context certain questions are no longer avoidable. What are the benefits of protection, and do they outweigh the benefits of other possible uses of land currently removed from agricultural production? Who are the beneficiaries of protection? Does continued protection in every case serve the best national interest? Conversely, what are the environmental and economic costs of poor land husbandry, and are there areas of customary land which should now be brought under protection? This paper will argue that a reassessment of the functions and future disposition of protected areas is now required as a part of the development of a new land policy, and will suggest a framework for rational decision-making.

4. It is essential to realise that land problems cannot be solved by land policy alone. In Malawi the most pressing land problem is experienced and usually presented as a shortage of land, particularly of land for smallholder farming, although it could equally well be viewed as a failure to improve the productivity of smallholder agriculture. As is generally the case with shortages, the first line of inquiry has concerned the supply of land, and in this context the redistribution of land between the public (state) and customary sectors featured prominently in political campaigning prior to the 1994 elections. Land redistribution, more specifically the assessment of whether or not there is justification for transferring land which is currently protected into the customary pool, is the subject of the remainder of this paper. But in the long term, given the projections for population growth and the finite nature of Malawi's land endowment, landlessness will inevitably be the lot of a growing proportion of the people. The recognition and acceptance of this fact is Government's responsibility and a challenge for economic planners. The alternative, to ignore the problem or to keep it at arm's length by resisting urbanisation, will incur heavy social, political and environmental costs as rural poverty deepens and the resource base declines. Land redistribution should have no place, therefore, outside of a balanced economic development strategy which includes:

• continued efforts to reduce population growth;
• planned urbanisation and, wherever possible, industrial development and the provision of urban workplaces, and, above all,
• agricultural intensification, with particular attention to improved land use, agroforestry, crop and livestock diversification, sustainable rural credit and the increased use of agricultural inputs.

5. Despite the high density of smallholder agriculture in Malawi there nevertheless exist tracts of land which to the public view appear idle or inefficiently used. Some cultivable land remains unallocated within the customary sector, but most visible are the areas of natural woodland on estates and in the protected areas, which stand out as islands of forest in a sea of cultivation. The redistribution of under-utilised land from estates or protected areas to the customary sector would seem an obvious way of relieving land pressure, although clearly it will not provide a lasting solution to the problem since population growth will soon absorb any advantage gained. Land redistribution could be viewed as a means of buying a short breathing space while other policies to reduce land pressure are put into effect. The projected duration of this respite depends very much on assumptions made about how much land is currently farmed by smallholders, how much additional land could be made available and the intrinsic rate of increase of the rural population. Annex 1 (page 15), illustrates three scenarios based on recently published estimates of the principal variables, and assuming in each case that the transfer could be effected immediately. In practice, given the regional differentials between land pressure and the availability of "under-utilised land", the transfer of almost one million hectares of land would take many years to put into effect, but the principle illustrated remains valid: under the most favourable circumstances the transfer into the customary sector of all lands currently believed to be "under-utilised" would accommodate smallholder population growth for a maximum of fifteen years. A more realistic estimate would be ten years, after which, unless alternative remedies had been successfully initiated, land pressures would have returned to present levels and would thereafter increase rapidly.

6. However transient the benefits to be derived from a redistribution of land it is clear that Malawi cannot afford inefficiencies in land use: the "transience" argument cannot be used to justify inefficiency. World-wide, redistribution from large land-holders to the land-poor has been much less successful than the transfer of state-owned land, because of the commercial and political resistance to change. But the circumstances in Malawi's leasehold estate sector are rather unusual, in that the land identified as "un-utilised" or "under-utilised" is not currently being farmed, merely held for possible future use; moreover, it is retained against a leasehold rent far below its informal market value or, in many instances, rent-free. An opportunity clearly exists therefore to precipitate the release of unproductive land merely by increasing the rent. Relinquished leasehold land would revert to state ownership, and although the Land Act does provide for the restoration of public land to the customary sector this currently requires the Minister's intervention, and a more streamlined mechanism would be required. We should be cautious, however, in assuming that unfarmed bush on estates serves no present purpose: according to Peters some estate forests in southern Malawi provide the only source of fuelwood for surrounding villages on customary land, as well as a wide variety of non-wood resources.