The effect of land fragmentation on the productivity and technical efficiency of smallholder maize farms in Southern Rwanda

1.2 Statement of the problem

The efficiency of smallholder farms in Rwanda is highly disputed. Several factors, mainly farm-specific and household-specific characteristics (such as education levels, dependency ratio, access to extension services, possession of land titles among others), can reduce the technical efficiency of farms. This study has a particular focus on the effects of land fragmentation on the productivity and efficiency of farms.

Cultivated land in Rwanda is still small compared to total agricultural land. This implies that land scarcity is not so extreme. There have been claims that land fragmentation results from extreme land scarcity and insufficiency of agricultural land (Mosley, 2004). Agricultural land during 2000-2007 was fixed at 2,294,380 hectares and there has always been a big gap between agricultural land and cultivated land, the latter being always smaller relative to the former. From 2000 to 2007, cultivated land has not reached 1,000,000 ha (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3: Cultivated land in Rwanda (`000 hectares)

Source: Republic of Rwanda (2008), Rwanda in Statistics and Figures

The problem therefore is not that less land is allocated to crop production but the land allocated to crop production is not efficiently used due to practices like land fragmentation.

Farms in Rwanda have over the past been shrinking in size. Land inheritance is common in Rwanda (Bizimana et al., 2004) and has led to continuous subdivision of farms, leading to a fall in average farm size (Mpyisi et al., 2003). In this study plot size, number of plots per household and distance from the households' residences to plots were used as measures of land fragmentation.

By 2002, only 27.1% of Rwandans had farms greater or equal to 1 hectare, but 72.9% had farms that were less than 1 ha (Table 1.4). Therefore, land fragmentation, measured in terms of farm size, was high.

Table 1.3: Farm size distribution in 1984 and 2002

Farm size (ha)		Households
	Percentage in 1984		Percentage in 2002
< 0.25	7.4		16.8
0.25-0.5	19		26.4
0.5-1.0	30.4		29.7
1.0-2.0	26.7		19.5
> 2	16.4		7.6
Total	99.90%		100%

Source: (Mpyisi et al., 2003).

In 2006, 93.6% of Rwandans had farms of 0.5 hectare or less and only 6.4% of Rwandans had farms of more than 0.5 hectare (Table 1.5). This again shows that land fragmentation, measured in terms of farm size, was high.

Table 1.4: Farm size distribution in 2006

Farm size (ha)	Percentage
0.25	61.3
0.26-0.5	32.3
0.51-0.75	1.6
0.76-1	3.2
1	1.6
Total	100

Source: Republic of Rwanda (2006), Rwanda Development Indicators

Average farm size decreased from 1.2 ha in 1984 to 0.84 ha in 2002. In 2006, average farm size in Rwanda dropped to 0.72 ha (Table 1.6). An economically productive farm must not be less than 0.9 ha (Kelly and Murekezi, 2000; Mosley, 2004), which is unattainable to many Rwandans.

Table 1.5: Change in average farm size (1984-2006)

	Average Farm size in Rwanda (ha)
Year		1984		2002	2006
Average farm size		1.2		0.84	0.72

Source: (Mpyisi et al., 2003) and Republic of Rwanda (2006), Rwanda Development Indicators

In terms of geographical dispersion, Rwandans can have up to 5 plots in different locations and a household can have ten plots on average (Musahara, 2006). The most common problems of land fragmentation include the fact that it makes supervision and protection of land difficult; it entails long distances, loss of working hours, the problem of transporting agricultural implements and products; and results in small and uneconomic size of operational holdings (Webster and Wilson, 1980).

However, land fragmentation may also be beneficial to farmers. Bentley (1987) argued that land fragmentation may enable risk management through the use of multiple agro-climatic zones and the practice of crop scheduling. Growing crops in different locations may reduce the risk of losing output due to perils such as floods, fires and destruction of crops by herds. Land fragmentation may also enable the growing of a variety of crops that mature and ripen at different times thereby allowing concentration of labor on different farms at different times (Shuhao, 2005). In Rwanda, some previous empirical studies reported that land fragmentation does not necessarily lead to inefficiency in crop production ( Blarel Benoit,  Peter Hazell,  Frank Place and  John Quiggin1992) and that farmers used fragmentation as a coping mechanism to deal with problems of land scarcity and to capture advantages of regional agro-climatic differences (Marara and Takeuchi, 2003).

Previous studies in Rwanda about land fragmentation had mixed results. The relationship between fragmentation and land productivity might not necessarily be negative (as noted, for Rwanda, by Blarel Benoit,  Peter Hazell,  Frank Place and  John Quiggin, 1992; Marara and Takeuchi, 2003). However, a study by Bizimana et al. (2004) in the former Rusatira and Muyira districts of the former Butare province revealed that the number of plots per household negatively affected economic efficiency while plot size positively affected economic efficiency. The authors recommended that land consolidation be adopted as it could help increase the economic efficiency of farms. These studies however did not capture the various dimensions of land fragmentation (plot size, distance to the plot and number of plots per household).

This study applied the stochastic production frontier approach (since it accounts for both measurement errors and stochastic noise) to model the effects of each form/indicator of land fragmentation on the technical efficiency of smallholder maize farms in Southern Rwanda using Gisagara district as a case study.