Recent literature on the agrarian crisis in Africa questions the adequacy of a technocratic approach to explaining and alleviating the crisis. Bringing about sustained growth in African agricultural output and rural incomes will require more than a technological breakthrough. Farmers' capacity to employ improved technology and to increase output and investment depends on their access to productive resources—broadly defined to include not only human, financial and material inputs, but also the knowledge and institutional means to use them effectively. To advance knowledge of the causes of the agrarian crisis and strengthen capacity to develop meaningful measures to alleviate it, it is necessary to understand the conditions under which African farmers gain access to productive resources and the ways in which conditions of access affect resource use and agricultural performance.

What has become known as ‘the African agrarian crisis’ is an extremely complex phenomenon. This much is clear from the fact that, despite the very considerable amount of literature which has been accumulated on the subject (Berry, 1984), there is still very little agreement as to its precise nature and dimensions and even less certainty on how to resolve it in the context of national level policies, plans and programmes. What this must mean, inter alia, is that explanations cannot be sought simply in pithy epigrams drawn from grand theories and hastily assembled micro-level data bases.

This article has been written as a contribution to the future orientation of a research programme on the agrarian crisis in Africa, which has been set up by the Joint Committee on African Studies (JCAS) of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. The aim of this article is to provide an agenda for research on the environment and access to resources in Africa and is one of four which both provide a review of some of the most important research issues and suggest ways in which they might be tackled.

For over a decade African economies have been plagued by recurrent food shortages, economic decline and growing disparities between the living standards of rich and poor. To a large extent food shortages and rural impoverishment may be attributed to external shocks—world recession, oil price shocks, deteriorating terms of trade and mounting debt service obligations—compounded in the 1970s and early 1980s by drought and war. In addition government policies have exacerbated the effects of adverse environmental and world market trends, aggravating rather than alleviating food shortages and depressing rural output and incomes.

The series of droughts in Africa and associated famine since the 1970s and the increasing reliance of most African countries on imported food are seen by many people to be key indicators of a crisis in African agriculture. At the same time there is a substantial difference between the story told by the macro-indicators of the crisis—foreign trade and grain production statistics from the formal sector, global famine statistics and environmental data—and by reports from individual village/community studies.

This article examines the relationship of formal and informal land-tenure systems to processes of agrarian change. Although it is often assumed that formal legal recognition of private rights in land can help to transform agriculture, causal links between particular tenure systems and agrarian processes are not easily demonstrated. It is difficult to separate the effects of land tenure from those of a host of other influences on agriculture. A number of studies have pointed to causal relationships among high population density, agricultural intensity, and individualisation of land rights (Podolefsky, 1987). Nevertheless, formal privatisation per se may have relatively little effect on processes of agrarian change, even in an economy where land is productive and scarce and where its distribution is relatively unequal.

The objective of this paper is to examine the nature of the interface between two systems of land tenure in an area of smallholdings, Murang'a District, Central Province, Kenya. The first, the ng'undu system, evolved in the fertile, dissected plateau area east of the Nyandarua Range since the Kikuyu migrated there in the early seventeenth century (Muriuki, 1974: 62–82; Government of Kenya, 1929: 6); the second, a freehold system of individual land tenure, was introduced by the colonial state in the mid-1950s as a political instrument to counter the force of Mau Mau (Lamb, 1974; Leys, 1975). The latter system, it was intended, would replace the former, thereby laying the basis for an intensification of African agriculture which was also, under the Swynnerton Plan, to include production for the urban and export markets (Heyer, 1981; House and Killick, 1983). Commitment to this same principle continues to inform present agricultural policy (Government of Kenya, 1984a, Kenya Development Plan 1984–1988, p. 187; 1986,: 88).