“How come that others are selling our land?” – Customary Land Rights, Rural Livelihoods and Foreign Land Acquisition in the Case of a UK-based Forestry Company in Tanzania

By Martina Locher

Reports on transnational land acquisitions raise concerns about local people’s inadequate involvement in the decision-making process and violations of their land rights. In Tanzania, the new Village Land Act effective from 2001 is relatively progressive in terms of recognising customary land rights. According to this recently enacted legislation, transferring ‘Village Land’ to an investor depends on the villagers’ decision. It is therefore interesting to focus on the acknowledgement of customary land rights during land transaction procedures in Tanzania. This study analyses the case of a UK-based forestry company that has leased several plots of land in different villages in the Kilolo district. Interviews with various stakeholders in one of the cases reveal that even though the legal procedure has been followed in a formally correct way from the side of the investor, weaknesses at local government level have led to a conflictive situation, with a number of affected villagers having lost their land rights – and thus the base for their livelihoods – against their will. These include several households from a neighbour village, whose customary rights go back to the period before the resettlements during the 1970s (villagisation). Employing the concepts of property rights and legal pluralism (Benda-Beckmann et al. 2006), this article analyses the decision-making process that preceded this land transaction, related local power structures as well as the immediate implications for the different people’s livelihoods.