WINDHOEK – The absence of rights to land makes it difficult to implement strategies that address land degradation according to Wolfgang Werner of the Polytechnic of Namibia.
A programme to register customary land rights is underway, but still large tracts of grazing land remain unregistered with no legal protection,” according to Werner. He was speaking at a side event during the 11th session of the Conference of Parties (COP11) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), organized by the Desert Research Foundation Namibia (DRFN), under the theme: Size Matters, Sustainable Land Management (SLM) and Livelihoods. He said the flexibility in both freehold and non-freehold land holding in the country is very often constrained by some structural policy issues relating to what can be done and what not. According to him resettlement farmers too face constraints since their allocated farming units appear to be too small to generate a sufficient income. “They keep some of the land as reserve land and thereby are forced to use the land that is available with little room to maneuver,” he said.
Werner said in non-freehold areas or communal land there appears to be a vacuum. Communal farmers still do not have legally protected rights to common grazing areas. “It becomes difficult because there are no legal and defined rights to the land. Communal areas face serious constraints in managing land resources in a more sustainable manner. Another aspect is that communal areas support too many livestock, which is not sustainable in the long run, while at the same time a large majority of the people have too few or too many animals,” he said. He said statistics from the 1990’s suggest that the central regions are the most populous with 50 percent of households owning satisfactory numbers of livestock, while 25 percent have herds that are too small to really engage in commercial marketing on a regular basis, and approximately one quarter have enough livestock to enable them to sell at markets regularly.
He recommended that a policy framework be introduced with incentives for both communal and commercial farmers to get involved in the pressing land degradation issues. “In communal areas an important aspect of moving forward would be to address the issue of legal rights for commonages, so that commonages can be regulated. What would be required also is to create institutions that [will] revamp traditional authorities so that the whole issue of land the sizes of areas that are allocated to resettlement beneficiaries can be revisited as these ecological steps will be in the interest of improving the management of land resources,” he said.
By Fifi Rhodes