investors interpret the law in ways that deny customary land recognition facilitated the transfer of these lands to outsiders without compensation, with affected communities being notified only ex post.2 Land assigned to companies was thus often occupied, causing violent clashes and conflicts. Similar issues continue to affect customary landholders in other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, including Cambodia, Indonesia, and Madagascar. Past decades have witnessed significant advances in the legal recognition of indigenous land rights and customary land tenure systems. Legal reforms in Benin, Indonesia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda, among others, led to recognition—or provision of ways to recognize—customary land rights that are of relevance to the majority of the population. Most of the relevant laws recognize that a community’s relationship with land is more than just an aggregation of individual plots but extends to land-based resources used in common, such as pastures, forests, and water. Legal protection in principle thus extends beyond cultivated or inhabited parcels. But to make this effective, land rights will need to be documented. Public Recording of Relevant Rights In many countries with areas of low population density, rural land rights are recognized as existing independent of whether they are formally registered. This is important for ensuring that recognition of such rights will not depend on action by an often slow and inaccessible bureaucracy. But absence of written documentation can make it more difficult to defend such rights against challenges by outsiders or the state. In Cambodia, for example, rights over land exist by virtue of meeting occupancy criteria established in the law (essentially possession for a certain period of time). In practice, those with formal documents evidencing their rights have been better positioned to defend or transact those rights than those relying only on general statutory recognition. In Indonesia, where customary land ownership (adat) is recognized in principle, it is often not eligible for title in practice. Households in the state forest estate thus often lose rights to investment projects with few options for recourse. Experts have long debated the pros and cons of registering land rights if customary systems still function relatively well. Titling and registration programs have tended to focus on defining and registering individual parcels and, not least because of their high cost, were often ill-equipped to capture the full range of rights land users may have by custom, including secondary rights and group rights to use common pool resources (Deininger 2003). If done poorly, formalization of land rights can indeed provide an opportunity for sophisticated and well-connected elites to grab land from those less well-equipped to navigate this process by asserting private control over forests and pastures that by custom were held in common. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of low-cost and participatory tools that allow the tailoring of registration to more faithfully reflect local
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RISING GLOBAL INTEREST IN FARMLAND