5. TENURE ON THE HOLDING THE MULTI-TENURE HOLDING

The concept of a socio-ecological niche has been used here to break up the landscape into a set of different areas of opportunity for forestry. Different opportunities are offered because different land use and management systems are employed in the different niches. Because these niches exhibit broadly characteristic tenure patterns, they have been referred to here as types of tenure niche: the holding, the commons and the reserve.

In this section we deal with the holding as a tenure niche. The majority of farming units in most countries are household farms operating a "holding," an area in which a household and its members generally have exclusive rights--the right to exclude others from use of the land. Tree planting on the holding takes a variety of forms, e.g., commercial monocropping of trees, alley-cropping, or windbreaks. While the household management pattern implicit in the notion of a holding has fundamental tenure implications, there is also considerable diversity among the tenures which households have over land, trees and other resources in their holding.

The holding for a particular household will commonly consist of several parcels of land, and some of the parcels may have different uses; for instance, a home garden with fruit trees on one parcel and more distant maize fields under shifting cultivation on other parcels. These parcels may well be under different tenures, first, because different uses have different tenure requirements--the home garden with perennials calls for more durable tenure than the maize field under shifting cultivation. Second, society sometimes assigns to certain land support roles for various institutions in the society--the shrine, the mosque, or perhaps the chief--and these support roles are enshrined in the tenure rules for that land. Its use will be conditioned on such support roles. The rights of the institution in the land serves to produce revenue for the institution which another society might obtain through a more generalized method of taxation. For an example of a multi-tenure holding pattern from highland Tigray in Ethiopia, see the Bruce insert on the following page. Third, particular members of a household will often have specific tenure rights in particular parcels and in fields within parcels. This is often particularly pronounced in situations where the production unit includes a number of households or in the case of polygamous households where wives are assigned separate individual fields. Fourth, at any point in time certain parcels in the holding may be held under tenure acquired by contract, such as leasehold, while other parcels which belong to the household may be encumbered with such contractual obligations. Such transactions in effect pass some of the household's "bundle of rights" in land to others for a period of time.

INTERVIEWING FOR THE HOLDING

So we begin with the bad news, bad from the rapid reconnaissance point of view, with its time constraints: to deal meaningfully with tenure one must deal with it at the parcel or field level, because important tenure distinctions exist even within the household's holding. While most variability in tenure can be captured at the parcel level, it is only at the field level that one can be certain of capturing variations in tenure by field managers within the household and so explore what may be important genderbased issues.

On the brighter side, the particular context within which one operates will often be simpler than the potential for diversity indicated here. Only some of these distinctions will exist on holdings in any given tenure system. Moreover, because differences in tenure are often based on differences in land and tree use, these distinctions can be approached initially through the same progression from observed use to tenure that this paper has urged throughout.

This paper has already indicated the need for detailed interviews with at least a half dozen or perhaps a dozen households. Because we wish to deal with tenure and tenure can vary down to the field level, this interviewing must deal with use at a field level. There is no way to design a form or question schedule which will accommodate all situations. A sample question schedule is given on the next two pages, but it has its limitations. It is designed to bring out distinctions in use between owner and manager of the land and between husband and wife or wives within the household. It would work fairly well in a mixed farming system, and gives considerable attention to trees if these constitute a part of the system. It would capture less adequately, however, the different uses of family members in a biologically diverse and highly integrated tropical garden, or where one parcel was cultivated communally for general homestead or compound needs. The usefulness of the question schedule given here is as a starting point in drafting a more locally relevant instrument.

From completed tables on a number of fields, some consistent relationships will begin to stand out, for example, clusters of specific uses vested in particular classes of users, including men and women, and relationships between land tenure and tree tenure. For each class of, users (men or women, owners or tenants, whatever may be relevant in the locale) of a species, the interviewer should ask:

1. Are tree planters and users viewed as having a right to plant and use trees or could someone bar them from use? If the latter, who and why?

2. If it is a right, do they have it because of their rights in the land on which the tree stands? If so, is the tenure the same?

3. Or is it a right which exists because of some other factor, such as the act of planting or provision of the seedling?

4. Do such rights last for the life of the tree or are they limited in time?

5. Can such rights be transferred by: Sale? Gift? Loan? With the land? Separately from the land?

6. Can such rights be inherited? If so, by whom? If not, whose rights do they become and why? Can such rights be willed? If so, to anyone? If not to anyone, to whom?

7. Can the right-holder exclude other uses of the tree and are there others who have a right to use the tree?

Sample Field Question Schedule

Interview no.________________________ Date:_________________________

Locale:__________________________________________________________

Field identification:_________________________________________________

HH tenure in field:__________________________________________________

Manager tenure field:_______________________________________________

Approximate size field:____________ Distance from residence:______________

Go to table on next page and complete. Then continue:

Explanations and comments, including "other" responses, by column in Table:

Sample Field Question Schedule - cont.

A-C		D- Q		R		S
1:	Highest	1:	Manager	1:	Neighbors	1:	Browsing by animals
2:	Mayor	2:	Manager's spouse	2:	Other local	2:	Gather fallen wood
3:	Significant	3:	Owner If not manager or manager's spouse	3:	Itinerant users	3:	Lop leaves/branches
4:	Minor	4:	Shared by (combined numbers: 2/3)	4:	Other	4:	Pich fruit
5:	None	5:	Other	5:	Not applicable	9:	Other
		e:	Not applicable			6:	Not applicable

THE KEY ISSUE: SECURITY OF TENURE

Why do we care what rights people have in trees, so long as we know that they in fact do plant them, use them, etc.? The question of rights. concerns security of tenure. Granted that a user is practicing a certain use, is the user secure in it? Does the user have a right to it, or can someone turn him or her out and deprive them of the use, or interfere with it to an extent that it loses much of its value? If there is no security of tenure there will be little incentive to invest cash in seedlings or fencing, to invest labor in tree planting, to forego income from other uses of land which would offer a return in the shorter term, or even to keep the seedlings from becoming "goat salad."

How important is this security? In certain circumstances it may determine the success or failure of a community forestry initiative focused on the holding. But security of tenure comes into play in a number of different ways, some of which we are just beginning to understand.

The literature on land tenure in developing countries is replete with references to the relationship between land tenure and investment in the land. The simplest relationship, most often noted, is that insecure tenure discourages investment because the farmer cannot be confident of the opportunity to reap the returns from investment. While the planting of a new annual crop is an investment in the land, it is usually excluded from such analysis. Most crops take only a few months to mature, and after all, a farmer must plant crops even in the face of some insecurity if the household is to survive. From where the right to the land is lost, the loser may still have the right to reap crops already in the ground so that there is no risk in planting them (Bruce and Noronha 1985).

The investments which concern us, however, are the planting and conservation of trees. Trees are so slow-maturing that they must be treated differently from annual crops. Seedling costs may represent a substantial investment, especially for fruit or other income-generating trees. When trees take up land that would have been used for other crops, there are opportunity costs involved, costs which will perhaps only be recouped in the long run. At least in terms of the relationship of land tenure to investment in the holding, most tree planting resembles more closely a permanent improvement in the holding such as the digging of a well or the construction of a fence more closely than the planting of annual crops (Bruce 1986: 28, 87; Brokensha and Castro 1984).

Authors directly concerned with encouraging agroforestry on farmers' holdings in developing countries such as Nigeria, Haiti and Jamaica have stressed the importance of clear tenure rules, assuring the farmer that the trees planted on the holding will belong to the farmer (Adeyoju 1976; Murray 1982; Blaut et al. 1973: 63). The potential sources of insecurity of tenure are varied. A traditional tenure system which involved annual redistribution of parcels, such as that reported by Uzozie (1979: 344) of the Igbo of Nigeria, clearly poses problems for on-farm forestry. Where the state has legislated state ownership of trees growing on the holding and requires cutting permits to protect such trees, as under forestry codes in the Sahel, the principal consequence may be a loss of landholder incentives to plant trees on the part of the landholder (Thompson 1982; Lai and Khan 1986; Elbow 1988).

Perhaps the most straightforward evidence of the impact of tenure on tree-planting is provided by studies of farmers who have access to a number of parcels of land under different tenures. The cash crops of farmers in Tucurrique, Costa Rica, include coffee and peach palm and their tenure arrangements include ownership, relatively secure use rights, tenancy, land-borrowing and. squatting. Survey research by Sellers found that farmers were growing trees on land held in more secure tenure and annual food crops on less secure landholdings. An excerpt is provided. In St. Lucia tenure considerations explain why trees are planted on soils andd in ecological niches for which they are not best suited, with farmers utilizing individually titled valley bottom land for trees and hillside land under the somewhat ambiguous "family land tenure" regime for food crops (White 1986: 83). In Haiti, recent research by the Land Tenure Center (excerpted below) found parcel tenure was an important consideration in determining where trees were planted.

There are cautions to be observed in reference to security of tenure as a determinant of tree planting. First, it is essential to remember that even if tenure in the land in which the trees are planted is weak, tenure rights in the trees may be clear and strong. There has already been a discussion of tree tenure, in Chapter 1.

Second, tenure systems and a perceived lack of security are sometimes blamed for a lack of receptivity to tree planting opportunities which have been poorly framed in other ways; where, for example, a locally unattractive species has been promoted. Murray (1987) cautions against this approach, which at its worst becomes the blaming of local "culture" for farmers' failure to adopt what are in fact inappropriate species and technologies. The incentive effect of tenure is not of course unrelated to other economic incentives. No tenure arrangement can make attractive the growing of trees for which there is no demand, and a very high level of profitability may lead a farmer to take the risks implicit in insecure tenure.

TREES MAY SECURE TENURE IN LAND

The normally presumed relationship between security of tenure in land and the planting of trees can be stood on its head in certain circumstances. There is clear evidence that tree-planting can sometimes increase security of tenure in land.

In certain cases this is simply a consequence of tree tenure and the fact that control of trees often confers (for most practical purposes) control of land on which they stand, at least if they are thickly planted. A farmer may thus obtain, de facto if not de jure, longer-term control over land by planting trees. In other cases tree-planting may actually give rise to land rights under customary tenure systems, because the planting of trees is seen as amounting to ownership, proof of an intention to assert a right which, if unchallenged, ripens into conclusive proof of right. For example, palm planting is proof of ownership of land under several customary laws in Tanzania (James and Fimbo 1973: 301, 353). It is in these circumstances that land-owning groups, to avoid creation of permanent rights to land, may resist attempts by members to plant, trees. Colonial extension workers found this to be the case in Tanzania (Brain 1980). In Lesotho permission from a chief was traditionally required (Duncan 1960: 95). The problem of community opposition was more recently encountered by alley-cropping trials in south-eastern Nigeria, where tree planting would have disrupted a community-managed system of rotation (Francis 1987).

There is a similarly complex relationship between trees and tenure where the farmer enjoys only derivative, temporary rights in land, such as leasehold. Sellers (1977), writing of Costa Rica, notes that where tenure rights are ambiguous, trees can provide a means of prolonging the tenant's possession of a parcel. Landowners often seek to protect themselves from this possibility by refusing to allow tenants to plant trees, regarding this as an attempt on the part of the tenant to tie down the land indefinitely. In the developing world tenancy arrangements are often not arm's-length bargains freely negotiated by the parties involved but instead institutionalized conquest, with those whose ancestors owned the land now working it as tenants for members of the victorious group. Tree-planting may be a way for a subject group to reassert claims to land. Arabs established extensive estates on the Malindi Coast of Kenya in the eighteenth century, during slave-raiding times. Giriama cultivators were reduced to tenants. But as early as 1937 they began to plant cashewnut trees on the Arab-owned land, thereby claiming long-term rights to land use and generating disputes that troubled both the colonial administration and later the government of independent Kenya (Shambi 1955).

A somewhat different dynamic operates in cases where the modern state is the owner of the land in which tenure is to be secured by planting trees. Here one is commonly dealing with tenure systems in which land is subject to allocation by the state to others if "unused," in which case tree-planting can be motivated by a desire to incontestably establish use, as a defense. Cocoa and coffee planting in a development project in Liberia in the early 1980s was apparently driven by such a dynamic, as reported by Harbeson in the excerpt which follows. Equally, tenure systems which authorize grants of more secure rights based on demonstrated use can encourage tree-planting as an unambiguous demonstration of use. This dynamic has been cited as central to the Ivory Coast's impressive record in expansion of smallholder cocoa, having led both to the clearing of virgin forest and the planting of tree crops (Hecht 1983: 33). On the other hand, it has been suggested that natural forest has been destroyed on a more extensive scale than would otherwise have been economical, because more extensive land rights could thereby be established (Tiffen forthcoming). Serious tensions exist between forest conservation and tree commercialization objectives under such systems.

WHOSE TENURE, EXACTLY: A GENDER ISSUE

Finally, we must always ask: "Whose tenure, exactly?" At certain levels, most assessors do in fact ask this question. Where a tenant is to plant trees, assessors will ask what tenure the tenant has; and if the owner is to plant trees, about the tenure of the owner. But at another level, within the household, analysts tend to ignore important gender-based tenure differences.

Women's labor is important to trees on the holding. First, women are major users and managers of trees. The division of labor in many societies places on women the responsibility for obtaining food, fuelwood, and fodder, products that are obtained, at least in part, from trees (Hoskins 1979; Hoskins 1980; Hoskins 1983; Williams 1984; Cecelski 1985; Molnar 1985a; Chen 1986; Fortmann 1986). Second, no matter who plants trees, women's cooperation and labor are crucial for keeping them alive. It is often women in their role as livestock managers who teach their children to keep small stock from eating the young saplings (Molnar 1985a).

What are women's use rights in trees? Can women use the full range of tree species that grow locally or are they prohibited from using certain kinds of trees that might otherwise be useful in fulfilling their responsibilities? Do women have access to all trees planted on the holding or are they restricted to certain niches, such as the garden-plot near the house?

Women may want to increase their security or convenience of access to trees by planting their own trees. This raises additional practical questions. Will they be allowed to plant trees at all? Will women be allowed to plant the species they want? Will they control the trees they plant? Does this depend on where they plant them? Rocheleau points out in the excerpt which follows that land used by women includes several niches, in some of which (such as the garden plot near the household) women are better positioned tenurially than in others.

The security of tenure model developed thus far assumes a landholder who is also the farm manager. Some policy-makers, if not the model itself, tend to assume that this holder/manager is also male. While this is often true in farm households, it cannot be assumed to be the case, especially in many developing country situations. The household's landholding, even if "owned" by a male, may consist of several plots, each managed fairly independently by a wife. Insofar as the wife makes the management decisions, whose security of tenure matters, hers or her husband's? If she is the one who must make the decisions concerning trees and bear the cost of planting trees, certainly her own security of tenure is critical.

This is cause for concern because in most African societies, whether inheritance is patrilineal or matrilineal, most women do not inherit land. If they do inherit land, they tend to inherit it in lesser amounts. While on a few cases women acquire land through transactions, most have access to land only by virtue of their rights to use part of their husband's land (Fortmann 1986; Cloud and Knowles 1988; Davison 1988). A wife's security of tenure may depend in part upon her husband's security of tenure, but it will be subject to additional limitations; for instance, a husband may be entitled to shift plots among wives as he chooses. Recent land tenure research in Senegal has sought to analyze the security of tenure of field managers rather than only parcel "owners" (Golan 1988). The tenure situation is of course by no means static. A tree planting project can alter women's rights, sometimes for the better, as in the Liberian case reported by Holsoe in the excerpt which follows.

Insecurity of access for women can also result from lifecycle changes (marriage, childbirth, divorce, widowhood) and changes in national policies such as land registration (Rocheleau 1988), as well as from changes in technology and the value of tree products. Widowhood is probably the most significant life cycle event in terms of security of property rights. A widow may retain a portion of her husband's land and tree rights (Chubb 1961; Hoben 1973: 146-148; Obi 1963: 89-94) or she may lose them altogether as occurred in the case of a Peruvian cooperative (Skar et al. 1982).

Many social forestry projects address women's problems--e.g., the scarcity of fuelwood and fodder--but they do not necessarily benefit women. Women's tenure may seriously affect the level of response to a community forestry initiative, as shown in the excerpt by Francis which follows. A first step is to begin to adjust our tenure analysis to treat discretely the rights of women managers and users of land and trees. While the degree of independence of field management by women farmers will differ substantially from case to case, it is no longer tenable simply to assume that security of tenure for a male head of household translates into incentives for his wife or wives to plant trees.

To summarize, the issue of tenure on the holding and its impact on tree planting must be approached during-household interviewing at both the field level and by species. Use patterns must first be discovered, then the relationships between uses and classes of users. It must then be established whether land use is founded on rights of use, and how secure these rights are. Security must be examined in relation to the farmer who is asked to invest in trees. It must be remembered that where tenure is based on use, tree planting can actually be used to secure tenure.