Portuguese land law and reform
Perhaps the most contentious economic issue debated in either country over the postindependence era is that of the ownership of land and the laws/regulations through which it is formalized (Bruce and Migot-Adholla, 1994).
Both Angola and Mozambique have multiple sets of overlapping claims to land which can be mostly categorized as follows:• Indigenous claims based on traditional occupancy, usually not formalized but widely recognized in the locality where they are located (Goody, 1969; Gluckman, 1969);
• Colonial-era ownership claims, mostly vacated for those settlers who left in 1975 but which survive in cases where settlers remained;
• Post-independence grants of land, which can be the result of claims or grants made at various levels of government up to and including the Presidency itself (Kloeck-Jenson, 1997, 1998; McGregor, 1995; Myers, 1993).
Of course, “Marxist” economic doctrine states that all land belongs to the “people” and is managed on their behalf by the state. This idea fits well with two important needs of any extractive regime, whether it be European or indigenous. The first is the need to be able to dispose of land as desired in order to reward supporters in a political sense. The second is the need to be able to monopolize extractive rents for mineral or other natural resource based wealth. This was particularly relevant early on in Angola where oil revenues formed the majority of the income of the government. Diamond mines were of secondary importance but are still large in absolute terms in Angola. In Mozambique such extractive goals were manifest in land grants to large farmers but also to foreign extractive companies interested in such things as logging or other extractive activities. It should be noted that many of these land grants simply ignored the fact that there were people already living on the lands involved.
Reform of the inherited Portuguese land law has proceeded in both Angola and Mozambique, and has been the subject of contentious debate both within the country and between the government and donors.
Mozambicans and Angolans have taken it as a matter of fixed policy that land belongs to the nation as a whole and cannot be owned by individuals in perpetuity as is the case in most Western industrial countries. Many donors, in contrast, have argued for a land law that would support an active market in land.While in theory the new land laws (allowing for varying periods of tenure for the purpose of using the land for farming, mining, habitation, etc) are quite specific in how tenancy is granted and held, in fact the resources to actually conduct a cadastral survey with the associated bureaucratic costs has been lacking in either country. Added to this is the problem that in some areas traditional farmers use shifting cultivation methods and so are not always farming the same plot. The result is a hodgepodge in which competing interests in any particular area vie for actual control over land. Peasants are routinely dispossessed in the interest of extractive interests promoted by the central or provincial governments, while large farmers also try to gain direct control over favored parcels.
None of this really resembles a “Marxist” system of land tenure either in economic theory or in terms of its application in existing Marxist countries anywhere in the world. Rather, we are witnessing an ongoing “land grab,” in which moneyed or connected players have an advantage over the less well-off.