Community-based Rural Land Development Project

T he average smallholder farmer in Malawi is tasked to feed a family of five on a farm of less than one hectare in size (NSO, 2008). The intensification of land through, for example, fertilizer use plays a prominent role in Malawi’s policy to increase the productivity potential of smallholder farmers. With the population almost doubling in the last twenty years (NSO, 2008), additional measures are needed to accommodate the growing number of young, landless Malawians and relieve land constraints for the remainder. The government of Malawi with financial support from the World Bank created a land reform project to address exactly this concern in 2005. The Community-Based Rural Land Development Project (CBRLDP) targets households facing severe land shortages, to provide them opportunities to obtain larger farms in adjacent communities. To date, the program has 15,000 participating households. In 2011, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) collected data for the final round of a panel survey to evaluate how the resettlement project affected the food security of program participants in the long term. Although programs like the CBRLDP appear in other African countries, few quantitative evaluations measure the shortor longterm impact of resettlement policies. However, great lessons can be learned from ongoing research on this matter in terms of the roles of land reform and migration in improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa.