Preamble: the policy spectrum

In describing the nexus of environmental problems which beset modern Malawi it is tempting to make predictions by extrapolating current trends. It is possible, for instance, to predict that halfway through the next century the last tree will have been cut, that within three hundred years Lake Malawi will have been filled with soil washed from cultivated lands, and long before either the last antelope will have been shot and the last fish caught. Predictions of environmental catastrophe ignore the enormous capacity of human society to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, and forget the long learning process which accompanied population growth in the developed world. Malawi is undergoing a period of rapid change, in which new and more positive relationships between rural populations and the natural resources on which they depend are beginning to emerge. It would be foolish to underestimate the difficulties which lie ahead, but unhelpful to deny the real progress which is being made. The program of policy and legal reform in the natural resources sectors in which the Government is now engaged will play an important, perhaps a deciding role in that process.

The people - the resource users - cannot bring about the necessary changes by themselves. A romantic school of thought which permeates some development planning holds that prior to the colonial era the peoples native to Malawi lived in easy harmony with their natural resources, and exercised systems of management which, if government and outsiders would only step back, would reassert themselves. This is far from the truth. While management systems did exist, they were to a large extent concerned with control over access to resources which were relatively lightly exploited, and were instruments to reinforce the social hierarchy rather than to manage resources in the modern sense. We are now concerned with managing natural systems at or close to the maximum of sustainable production, a task which requires a broad range of technical skills and implies a major role for government into the foreseeable future.

The Malawi Constitution of 1995 lays a strong foundation for policy and legal reform in environmental governance. Section 13 declares:

The National Environmental Policy (NEP), developed from the National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) and approved by Cabinet in 1996, was the first clear statement by the Government of Malawi of the central principles of environmental and natural resource management policy, developing in more detail the provisions of the new Constitution. The policy elaborates the rights and responsibilities of individuals and communities in the management of the environment; states Government’s responsibilities in environmental planning, impact assessment, audit and monitoring, and outlines primary policy objectives and strategies in a number of key sectors. The development of the NEP as an umbrella or framework policy was well timed to precede policy reforms in most of the environment sectors, enabling sectoral reforms to proceed in a harmonised and co-ordinated fashion rather than as piecemeal developments.

The Environment Management Act (1996) is the instrument through which the NEP is implemented. It gives strength to the principles outlined in the NEP, to the extent that wherever sectoral legislation conflicts with the EMA the latter shall take precedence. It provides for the creation of regulations on all aspects of environmental management, so that gaps or inconsistencies in sectoral legislation may be easily rectified. It creates, for the first time, a firm legal framework for environmental impact assessment and environmental audit. Most importantly, it establishes a National Council for the Environment with considerable powers to mediate in situations of conflict, and it accords to the Environmental Affairs Department responsibility for the co-ordination of environmental monitoring, interventions and investments in the environment/natural resources sectors and environmental education and awareness-raising. Just as the NEP provides a structural framework for policy development across many sectors, so the EMA provides a legal framework for the development of new sectoral legislation.

Sectoral policies for natural resource management fall into three categories. Those which relate to the harvesting of biologically renewable resources - forests, wildlife and fish - share many common characteristics and are each concerned in part with maximising the sustainable productivity of the resource base and in part with conserving segments of the resource for other purposes, for instance catchment protection and the maintenance of ecosystem function and biodiversity Over-exploitation of biological resources has hitherto been associated with their open-access nature under state control, and it is here that policy reform aims to take radical corrective action by progressively transferring resource tenure, and the responsibility for resource management, from the state to the primary resource user. Associated secondary reforms concern the way in which government sets out to achieve sustainable utilisation, and are concerned with the development of public-private-NGO partnerships and the encouragement of private sector investment in natural resources.

Land use and management policies, more specifically those which relate to soil and water conservation, form a distinct second category which has changed little over the past three decades. Following a clear shift post-Independence from regulation to extension, and a more recent transfer of emphasis from conservation for its own sake to conservation as a means to improve productivity, there now appears little room for fundamental reform. Reform in the current context is therefore associated mainly with raising the profile of soil and water conservation in the agricultural agenda.

The third group of policies are not directed primarily at natural resource management but may in fact have more influence over the way in which resources are used than specific sectoral instruments. Foremost among these are land tenure policy, currently under review, and the liberalisation of agricultural production and markets. There are clear links between land tenure and the tenure of land-based resources, and also, although this has not been clearly demonstrated in Malawi, there may be a relationship between the security of land tenure and the degree of farmer investment in sustainable land management. The ongoing process of liberalisation in the agriculture sector has had a profound influence on cropping patterns and provides new opportunities - possibly even new incentives - for diversification, intensification and better land management, particularly in land-constrained areas.

Sectoral issues

Land

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. 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 land and land-based natural resources. Land policy, especially policies relating to land tenure and land use planning, clearly have a major influence on natural resource management, and the land policy reform process currently under way will to a large extent shape the future of Malawi’s natural resources.

The reform process comprises three parallel initiatives: technical and legal reviews conducted by the Ministry of Lands, Housing, Physical Planning and Surveys (MLHPS); political consultations and analysis carried out by a Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Land Policy Reform (LPRC) and supported by UNDP, Danida, FAO and the World Bank, and technical and socio-economic investigations financed by the DfID (UK Government: estate lands), the EU (customary lands) and USAID (public lands). The LPRC is expected to report to the President in May 1998, whereafter the finalization of the new policy will be guided by the MLHPS. The new land policy, however well-informed, should not be expected to solve all problems in the land sector. Just as in the past land tenure issues have been shaped largely by macro-economic and agricultural policies, the success with which a reformed land policy is able to address present and future land use problems will depend upon supporting changes in social and economic development strategy.

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.

Land policy issues which have a special bearing on the management of natural resources include the following:

• What is to be the economic future of Malawi’s rural population? Until now there has been no policy - the rapidly growing rural population has simply expanded into the space available to it. Agriculture is extensive and productivity low, and the expansion of smallholder farming into marginal or unsuitable lands has already had large negative impacts in increased soil erosion, the reduction of surface water supplies and siltation in rivers and Lake Malawi. Clearly this cannot go on indefinitely. Making more space available to smallholders will not solve the problem, merely defer it, and any policy to redistribute land should be viewed only as a short-term expediency to buy time while more radical policies for economic development are put into effect. A recent analysis of the prospects for economic growth performed by the World Bank (1997) concluded that in the longer term growth in both output and employment will have to be outside of agriculture, although in the short term the smallholder sector will be required to provide sufficient momentum to carry the economy beyond its historic agriculture-dependency: "while the ultimate destination may be a vibrant non-agricultural economy, the path to the destination leads through more emphasis on smallholder agriculture in the short run." It is important that we do not lose sight of the destination.

The growth of the landless class should not be resisted, but should rather be planned for and built into the nation's economic development through programmes of industrialisation, urbanisation and agricultural intensification. 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.

• What is the appropriate balance between estate and smallholder agriculture? The expansion of the estate sector (from 51,000 ha pre-Independence to 300,000 ha in 1979, 843,000 ha in 1989 and around 1.2 million ha in 1996), driven by successive peaks in world tobacco prices combined with an agricultural policy which denied smallholders access to burley tobacco production, displaced smallholders from areas of higher to areas of lower productive potential, and, more importantly, progressively reduced the area of land suitable for smallholder expansion. A more subtle indirect consequence of estate expansion has been the erosion of land tenure security in the customary sector. Many progressive smallholders now see land registration as the only way to secure the holdings they already farm, and the liberalisation of burley tobacco production appears to have had little impact on the growing demand for very small leasehold plots.

Of the land occupied by tobacco estates (about 95% of the total estate area), Gossage (1997) found that in 1996 almost one third had never been cleared from virgin bush, and a small proportion (3%) were abandoned or dormant. A crisis in the estate sector resulting from new competition from smallholder burley producers is likely to result in further abandonment or in low levels of utilisation among the less efficient operators. It has been suggested that a means should be found to restore such "under-utilised" land to the customary sector. 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 (Gaiha, 1993). But the circumstances in Malawi's leasehold estate sector are rather unusual, in that the land identified as "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 (and collecting) 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 many non-wood resources.