Topic: Indigenous Land Rights
Country: Malawi
Delegate Name: Veronica Boomers
School: Forest Hills Eastern High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Malawi position papers GLIMUN 2009 committees
Global strategy should not be to use land as security to have access to credit or for better management and utilization of the same, but land should be used to generate capital and assets that can be used as collateral. Trees should been grown on land and sold at very high prices by smallholder farmers to the government that reflect the cost of deforestation. In this manner the government retains its noble role of redistributing wealth. The government cannot run away from this noble cause. It is has done well in the fertilizer subsidy and it can do well in creating wealth from the land. To use land as collateral is to remove the very basic factor of production from the ‘poor’ and thus defeats efforts to make progress. Land tenure in Malawi had been under customary system up until the colonial times, when alien land ownership was introduced in the country. This new system was based on medieval land ownership in the West, where there were landlords and tenants. Tenants by their very nature did not own land. The situation found in Malawi is different. Land was inherited and was a birth right rather than a privilege. Children inherited land from parents either under patrilineal, matrilineal or both systems.
In the development perspective the basic assumption was/is that the Malawian land tenure system was/is retarding development. It is considered that land ownership is not properly defined, limiting the possibility of investment and development and resulting in over exploitation of the land. This view is promoted in the light of land ownership based on the Western ways of knowing. For them land to developed and investment to be made on it, ownership has to be adequately defined in their ways of knowing, like a deed. Since this was not the case in Malawi land therefore is not owned in a manner that would foster development and agricultural productivity.
