Rural Development and Land Use Planning (Lecture Notes)

Introduction

  • In the last two decades, African governments and international development agencies have supported the development of rural areas in Africa.
  • Why? Disparities in the share of development fruits between urban and rural areas in social amenities (health, electricity, potable water, housing) and in incomes.
  • Equity and social justice grounds: since the vast majority of Africa’s population lives in rural areas, neglecting them would be unjust.
  • Rural development can be seen as planning for a transformation of the national situation.
  • The rural sector accounts for a large part of GDP; economic health depends on increased productivity in rural/agricultural economies.
  • Consequently, numerous rural development programmes/projects have been initiated across Sub-Saharan Africa in the last two decades.

Concepts and Objectives of Rural Development

  • Definition: Rural development is the outcome of a series of qualitative and quantitative changes among a given rural population, whose converging effects raise standard of living and bring favorable changes in the people’s way of life.
  • Two essential elements in the definition:
    • Change: What kind of change and how to bring it about?
    • Comprehensive development: A holistic approach to develop the rural area, not just isolated schemes.
  • Change can be:
    • Planned vs unplanned (often implemented by change agents such as government or development agencies).
    • Revolutionary vs evolutionary in magnitude.
    • The distinction between planned and unplanned, and between revolutionary and evolutionary change must be borne in mind when discussing rural development strategies.
  • Comprehensive development (as per ECA): rural development should be viewed as an integrated milieu, calling for a set of policies and projects so designed and coordinated that will raise and sustain the standard of living of the rural population as a whole. It implies modernization that increases productive power and changes human attitudes, reducing dependence on the natural environment.
  • Rural development is not merely the sum of sector Ministries’ programs (e.g., mass education, agricultural extension, health and nutrition extension). It means the comprehensive development of the rural area.
  • Implication: rural development is a means to transform the national context; the focus is on holistic, integrated progress rather than isolated interventions.

Planned Activities to Promote Change in Rural Areas

  • Six major activities, designed to promote change in rural areas: 1) Land tenure reform
    • Changes in land ownership or tenancy rights to create easier access to land.
    • Issuing land titles, enforcing contracts, adjudicating disputes over boundaries, inheritance, and rights.
      2) Agrarian reform
    • Organization of an efficient system for delivering seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and other technical aids; provision of credit to rural masses.
    • Establishment of stable markets for agricultural produce.
      3) Infrastructural development
    • Provision of basic infrastructure: roads, wells and boreholes, irrigation and drainage works, storage facilities.
    • May include settlement relocation and resettlement.
      4) Provision of social amenities
    • Education and health facilities in rural areas.
      5) Institutional development
    • Creation of institutions to ensure long-term sustainability of changes: input supply for farmers, marketing of agricultural produce, and provision of credit.
      6) Political participation
    • Ensuring the rural population has a continuing and determining say in planning, decision-making, and implementation of programmes affecting their lives.
  • Input classification: two broad groups of inputs required for these activities:
    • Capital investment: agrarian reforms, infrastructural development, provision of social amenities, and to some extent institutional building.
    • Popular mobilization: land tenure reform, political participation, and (to a greater extent) institutional development with strong social objectives.
  • Strategy options for rural development in Africa: investment-type, popular mobilization-type, or a combination of the two in implementation.
  • In most African countries, the strategy pursued to date has been predominantly investment-type.

Development Projects as Vehicles of Intervention for Accelerating Rural Development

  • Rural development projects serve as vehicles for financing induced growth and change.
  • Resource considerations:
    • Financial resources are often the single most massive input, but external finance must be matched to absorptive capacity of rural people.
    • Development projects sometimes fail not due to lack of external finance but due to the society’s social inability to absorb it effectively and planners’ failure to define an efficient social development strategy.
  • Cernea’s observations on grass roots organization:
    • “Many rural programmes collapse precisely for want of grass roots organisations able to sustain group action. Yet the same programmes have seldom attempted to establish grass root organisations and institutional structures.”
    • “Highly yielding social organisations are not less important for development than high yielding crop varieties and intensified agriculture cannot occupy without intensified human organisation.”
  • Project cycle (core model for rural development planning, with local variations):
    1) Programme or project identification
    2) Preparation
    3) Appraisal
    4) Implementation
    5) Evaluation
  • Key critique: the cycle is typically controlled by politicians, planners, and administrators, with little involvement from potential beneficiaries in identification, preparation, or evaluation.
  • After project completion, the change agent often pulls out, sometimes leaving the area without sustaining mechanisms.
  • Augelli’s observation (on Italian-supported rural development projects in developing countries): upon leaving, the countryside tends to revert to the original state; thus, calls for flexible planning, trial-and-error processes, and bottom-up approaches to improve success rates over top-down strategies.

Land Use Planning and Rural Development

  • Relevance to tsetse fly (trypanosomiasis) and river blindness (onchocerciasis) control zones in West Africa: the discussion links to the physical resources that form the material base for development.
  • Land as the basic livelihood resource:
    • Definition of land (O'Keefe and Wisner): the combination, in any place and time, of subsoil, soil, biotic, hydrological, and climatic characteristics interacting with social labour to satisfy human needs. Land use is the application of limited available labour to land for productive purposes.
  • Main objective of land use planning: to achieve the productive potential of land, either by assessing the land’s productive potential or by restoring degraded land.
  • Productive potential of rural land includes:
    • Agriculture and livestock products, together with forestry.
    • Other land uses may include mining and wildlife reserves, depending on local relevance.
  • Planning phases for land use planning:
    • Description phase (natural resource survey): survey and classify the environment; leads to a resource map.
    • Evaluation phase (land classification): assess resources in terms of potential production.
    • Development phase: plan actions to translate resource potential into actual production; results in maps as outputs of each phase.
  • Limitations and needs in resource surveys:
    • Resource surveys often focus on descriptive and mapping tasks, neglecting information needed for land use planning.
    • Soil survey reports tend to provide only general appraisals of soil value for agriculture.
    • For soil surveys to support development planning, they should provide:
    • Estimates of crop yield under specific management practices.
    • Evidence of likely soil response to changes in land use.
    • Soil maps remain essential but should be complemented by additional information; broader field operations may be required.
  • Ecological survey of pasture lands:
    • Map plant communities; key requirement is carrying capacity: the number of cattle equivalents that can be supported without pasture degeneration, along with growth rates and fodder content.
    • Main technique: compare carrying capacity within the survey area to stock carrying capacity outside the area.
  • Trade-offs and demands in land-use surveys:
    • Surveys require more time and effort from field surveyors across soil, vegetation, and hydrology.
    • It can be argued that soil/vegetation surveyors should be involved in both appraisal and impact assessment of proposed land-use changes.
  • Government planning lessons (Bahrin):
    • Very few governments have adequate knowledge of best site and location for settlement projects due to insufficient inventory of country resources.
    • A long-term, extensive land colonisation strategy requires a detailed inventory of land resources; remote sensing technology offers a viable inventory method.
  • Relevance to densely and sparsely populated areas:
    • In dense areas, land-use planning aims at intensifying land use and optimizing water resources.
    • In disease-endemic regions (e.g., river blindness areas in West Africa), population pressure has driven settlement into less fertile zones, necessitating careful land-use decisions.
  • Historical example: land-use planning in northern Ghana in the 1950s included:
    • Watershed protective forest reserves, contouring of arable land to reduce runoff, dam construction to regulate water flow and control gullies near watersheds, and demarcation/fencing of grazing areas.
    • Productive measures: fuel-wood plantations, improved farming methods, and fish farming.
    • Infrastructure development: clay-cored dams for irrigation and stock water, wells for human consumption; modernization included bullock ploughing and use of farmyard manure.

Conclusion

  • Technology for freeing tsetse-infested areas exists and is available, though expensive and often imported.
  • The success of tsetse control will open large areas to animal production and human settlements.
  • It is important not to overemphasize technical and scientific aspects at the expense of human aspects; eradicating the tsetse fly is a means to an end—the improvement of living standards for rural dwellers who will occupy and utilize freed lands.
  • The paper discusses policy issues that can guide development in tsetse-free areas; people must come first since they are the basic factor in development, while capital infusion is necessary but not the sole decisive factor.
  • The role of land use planning is crucial for the rational development of both densely and sparsely populated areas.
  • Gunnar Myrdal’s perspective: true development should lift the entire social system upwards.