TRENDS AND IMPACTS OF FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY AGRICULTURE

the lineage holdings to one family or individual
belonging to the lineage. As land ownership is
passed on within families, it is possible through
inheritance not only to gain access to land
but also to become its manager according to
customary rules (GERSDA, 2007). Management
was originally based not on ownership rights
understood in the sense of individual private
property rights, but on a set of rights (access,
usage, offtake, exclusion, disposal, etc.) held
collectively by the members of the lineage or
family and allocated in various ways to the
members of those groups.
Intralineage access patterns depend on the
size of lineage landholdings and tenure issues in
the area. In many families, there is an increasing
trend towards splitting up lineage holdings
following the enlargement and dismantling of
family farms. As a result of various different
factors, large families are breaking up and giving
rise in various places to the emergence of nuclear
families as customary holders of the land they
work.
Interlineage access is organised around
arrangements that transfer rights, permanently
or temporarily outside the landholding lineage.
These arrangements include gifts, loans, rental
and, more rarely, sharecropping and sale. The
latter three arrangements have developed recently
as a result of the growing monetization of land
relations. They tend to involve relationships
between indigenous people and recent migrants,
rather than between lineages within the same
community. The various arrangements can be
combined; the predominance of one or the other
depends on local land relations and the economic
stakes in the area concerned.
Despite the existence of principles common to
the different customary systems, rules governing
access to land vary according to local issues, social
and historical factors. They are also profoundly
influenced by dynamics concerning the design
and implementation of national law enacted by
the state.
Tenure systems under written law
Formal (written) law establishes various methods
of access to land. The provisions of general
legislation must be distinguished from the norms
Part 4: Business models for agricultural
investment: Impacts on local development
regulating particular areas such as irrigation
schemes.
The Land and Property Code (Code Domanial
et Foncier, CDF) is the piece of legislation that
provides the foundation of national law governing
tenure. As a general rule, Malian legislation
follows the principle of state ownership of land.
The state plays a leading role in land relations,
and directly holds land as part of its public or
private land estate. The latter category consists
of land that has been explicitly registered as
belonging to the state, but also land classified as
‘vacant and unclaimed’ and land held by virtue of
customary rights (article 28 of the CDF). The CDF
does protect these customary rights, requiring
that their compulsory acquisition requires public
purpose and payment of compensation (article
43). But ownership on these lands is vested with
the state. So it is the state that has the legal
authority to decide on and negotiate transactions
affecting these lands.
Article 35 of the CDF states that the private
land estate can be transferred in a number
of ways, namely such as rural concessions,
allocation, longterm lease, leasehold with
the promise of sale or title deeds. In the case
of rural concessions, for example, the public
authority grants the concessionholder the right
of temporary use of a piece of land to develop
it on the terms set out in the concession deed
and attached specifications. In a longterm lease,
the lessor grants the lessee a longterm use right
that can be mortgaged, against payment of an
annual fee. Title deeds are regulated by article
169 of the CDF, which states that titles are
permanent and cannot be challenged. A title
deed is seen by the Malian courts as the sole
starting point of all property rights at the time of
registration.
While customary rights are formally recognized
and protected by legislation, the procedures
to establish and register them have still not
been determined. This is because the necessary
implementing decrees have not yet been adopted.
This circumstance makes Mali’s land legislation
incomplete in important respects. Customary
land holders that wish to formalise their rights
can only do so through the procedure provided
for rural concessions. This procedure is costly
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