This study has explored the linkages between international remittances and access to land in West Africa, by analysing the extent to which remittances enable migrant households to improve their access to land and the effects that this has on land relations. In so doing, it has raised more issues and questions than provided answers. Chapter 2 provided a conceptual framework for exploring the linkages between international remittances and access to land, drawing on a literature review and on interviews with key informants. Chapters 3 and 4 presented findings from our fieldwork in Senegal and France and in Ghana and the UK, respectively. While in most cases findings from the literature review and from the fieldwork are mutually reinforcing, in some areas our findings somewhat differ from research available in the literature (e.g. on the relative importance of land purchases as a form of remittance use; see below).
Although the literature review and fieldwork have shed some light on those linkages, the complexity of the issues demands more careful examination by larger-scale follow-on research. This is in line with the original aim of this scoping study, to identify areas for further work rather than providing operational and policy recommendations. Some issues deserving particular attention in follow-on work are identified below (section 5.2).
Overall, remittances emerge as an important and steadily growing source of finance for developing countries, well above official development aid and rivalling foreign direct investment volumes. In areas of emigration, remittances support livelihoods by enabling households to meet their basic needs and to invest in a variety of capital assets. Although some distinguish between “productive” and “unproductive” remittance uses, the line between the two is often blurred, and both contribute to livelihoods and development. Moreover, migrants’ and hometown associations contribute to local development through schools, health centres, wells and other projects. More generally, migration deeply affects the local economy, cultural values and social fabric. This is particularly true in areas characterised by long-standing and substantial out-migration, as in the village of Moudéry, one of the field sites in Senegal. Here, the research team struggled to find households without members currently or previously abroad, and 29 out of the 32 elected local councillors were or had been migrants themselves.
In these areas, poverty reduction policies and programmes cannot simply ignore the phenomenon. Governments and development agencies should explore ways to support the livelihood strategies of migrant households while ensuring that non-migrant households are not left behind. Indeed, acknowledging the important contribution of remittances to development in the home countries should not lead to the conclusion that they can be a substitute for official development aid. The migrants’ associations we met seek additional funds from donors and development agencies to complement their “collective” remittances and fund their community development projects. Moreover, while the fact that remittances flow directly to individual households makes them a very effective form of North-South financial transfer, it also means that they do not directly address the livelihood and development needs of non-migrant households.
This study has documented how migrant households use remittances to improve their access to land. Although the existing literature focuses on land purchase as a means to increase access to land, fieldwork in both Ghana and Senegal has shown that improvements in land access can also be achieved in a variety of other ways, such as strengthening the security of existing access, administrative land allocation, leases, as well as land loans and inheritance. Thus, fieldwork in Ghana revealed that while purchases are common for residential plots, agricultural land is rarely sold, and migrant households usually gain access to it through leases. Similarly, in Senegal, the migrant households we interviewed have improved their access to land mainly through: the consolidation of their existing land rights, by putting the land into more productive use through hired labour and agricultural inputs (“mise en valeur”); land allocation by the rural council; and land rental. Only one of our Senegalese respondents had informally purchased land. For all these different institutional arrangements, intermediaries - family members or others - play a crucial role, and benefit from this brokerage function.
Improved access to land enables households to expand their agricultural activities, either for subsistence (e.g. most of our Senegalese respondents) or for commercial purposes (see e.g. the Ghanaian respondents growing pineapples and mangoes). In both cases, this contributes to their income.
However, improving access to agricultural land is only one of the many possible uses of remittances, and by no means the most common. Basic needs aside, housing seems to be the most common form of remittance use. This finding is supported both by the literature review and by the fieldwork in Ghana, where most of the respondents were acquiring land for residential purposes. Similarly, the migrants interviewed in France and Great Britain, who are living in a big metropolis like Paris and London, showed little interest in agriculture. It must be remembered that, in many rural areas, international migration takes place within the context of a broader process of de-agrarianization, with younger people seeking to move out of agriculture.
In this regard, fieldwork in Senegal and France, where we were able to work with members of the same families, shows possible differences in the perception of needs and priorities between migrants and families back home. Thus, while for migrants land is usually not a priority, the livelihoods of their families may substantially depend on it. In these cases, where remittances are sent to support the family rather than for an individual project of the migrant, land-based uses of remittances (including reclamation of land lent to others, use of agricultural hired labour, etc.) may be decided by the family with a substantial degree of autonomy from the migrant.
Further analysis is needed of the development outcomes from improved land access achieved through remittances. Where this happens through reclamation or the clearing of new lands (as in the case of Southern Morocco, where remittance-funded water points enable the cultivation of previously barren land; de Haas, 2003 - see above, chapter 2), the contribution in terms of increased agricultural production and rural development is evident.
However, where land is already under cultivation, improved land access for some exacerbates competition and undermines access for others, particularly non-migrant households. This may happen through administrative mechanisms (preference for migrant households in land allocation processes), market mechanisms (soaring land prices as a result of remittance-supported demand, making it harder for locals to access land) or other (reclaiming plots lent to others by migrant households now better able to cultivate them). These scenarios require a more careful examination of the development outcomes of the linkages between remittances and access to land, both in terms of economic development (are migrant households producing more and more efficiently than non-migrant ones, as a result of their access to resources, skills and ideas from abroad?) and in terms of equity (are benefits “trickling down” to non-migrant households, or are these increasingly marginalised and their livelihoods undermined?).
The past three or four years have witnessed a new interest in the linkages between migration, particularly remittances, and development, and a boom in the literature on this issue. In contrast to the literature of previous decades, which tended to emphasise the negative impact of migration on home countries (brain drain, labour loss, remittance dependency, etc), the new literature sees migration as a development opportunity, highlighting the transfer of resources, skills, knowledge and ideas that it can foster - often to the point of overlooking the risks and challenges it creates.
However, very little research exists to date on the linkages between migration and specific development issues, such as access to land. Understanding these linkages is key to moving from a general recognition of how remittances contribute to livelihoods and development towards more specific insights on how to maximise their social and economic outcomes while minimising their potential to lead to greater inequality. This scoping study has started to tackle the complex linkages between international remittances and access to land. The following paragraphs identify areas for further research in order to understand those linkages better.
First of all, the diversity of institutional mechanisms through which migrant households improve their access to land (purchase, rental, loan, administrative allocation, etc) deserves to be explored more in depth than was possible in this study. Taking the example of land purchase, possible research questions include: the extent to which remittances are supporting them, and the nature, location, size and quality of the land purchased; the process followed for land purchases, including their formal or informal nature and the role of intermediaries; whether migrants have a higher propensity than non-migrant households to seek land titles; the extent to which remittance-supported purchases contribute to increased land competition, chaotic land markets and land disputes; and whether these purchases result in greater land concentration and even in a reduction of land access for non-migrant households.
Questions along the same lines (nature/process and effects) should be addressed for all the other land access mechanisms identified by this scoping study. In tackling these issues, it is important to go beyond static “snapshots”, i.e. recording changes in land access in the recent past (as our fieldwork had to do due to limited time), and to study changes over longer periods of time. Given the different land dynamics in rural and peri-urban areas, research should cover both settings. In rural areas, it may be useful to focus on sites where land is particularly “valuable” (e.g. irrigated plots, etc).
In studying these different institutional arrangements for access to land, attention should be paid to the factors affecting remittance decisions, particularly factors affecting the amount and frequency of remittances (a very large research area in itself), the allocation of remittances among different uses including land, and the choice of the specific arrangements to improve access to land.
Most of the literature reviewed addressed only briefly the relationship between remittances and access to land. In order to appreciate the full nature and implications of that relationship, we need to explore the effects that changes in land access have on land use and agriculture, and ultimately on rural development. Examples of possible research questions include: are remittances allowing to compensate for the “labour loss” effect in the home areas, by enabling to hire labour to cultivate land? If so, what are the processes that this triggers? For instance, the arrival of labourers from neighbouring, poorer countries? Are migration and remittances favouring agricultural intensification and the adoption of new agricultural technologies? Do these processes support family farms, or do they contribute to the shift towards medium and larger scale commercial agriculture, which is ongoing in several West African countries? In peri-urban areas, do remittances contribute to the transformation of agricultural land into residential plots, what are the effects of this on agricultural production and food security, and who is winning and who is losing in this process?
Our time and resource constraints prevent us from studying what happens within households in any depth. Yet, as stated above (chapter 2), households should not be considered single entities in how remittances are used. First, gender factors affect decisions on the amount, frequency and use of remittances. Secondly, remittances may alter relations between siblings and between parents and children. Thirdly, improvements in land access may have different implications for different family members, along gender, generational or other lines. These and other intra-household aspects deserve further research.
Several countries have adopted a variety of measures to facilitate remittance inflows and encourage their best use. These include not only the removal of restrictions (e.g. foreign exchange controls), but also proactive measures to attract investment from their migrants overseas, such as investment schemes and advisory facilities (Sander, 2003; for an example, see box below).
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Box 12. Remittances and policies in Mexico With a substantial share of its population in the United States and one of the highest levels of remittances in the world, Mexico has taken several steps to attract remittances and promote their investment. For instance, the government established the National Council for Mexican Communities Abroad in order to maintain ties with the Mexican diaspora in the United States. Mexican consulates in the US provide migrants with ID cards, which facilitate their access to banking services. In 2002, building on pre-existing schemes implemented at the state level, the federal Mexican government adopted the “Three for One” programme, whereby each dollar sent by migrants or migrants’ associations in the United States are matched with three additional dollars (one from each of the federal, state and local governments) in order to fund infrastructure projects. Finally, the state of Guanajuato has set up the “Adopt a Community” programme, aimed at channelling remittances into nine local sewing projects, and the federal government has recently launched a similar programme at a national scale. Source: Sander, 2003. |
The nature of these measures as well as their success and the constraints they met need to be better understood and to be shared with policy makers in other countries. In addition, access to land is likely to require investigation of more specific policy areas, particularly the extent to which land legislation provides adequate tenure security and ensures the transparency of land allocation procedures, and the overall policy framework makes agriculture economically profitable (see above, chapter 2).
Besides national policy frameworks, decisions concerning remittance use are affected by policy and institutional factors at local level. For instance, where decentralization is in place and local governments have been transferred land management responsibilities (e.g. Senegal; chapter 3), remittance flows can provide an invaluable source of finance for local development, but also alter power relations within the community. The transparency of decision-making concerning land allocation, and the extent to which it successfully takes into account the interests of both migrant and non-migrant households, are key for local democracy and equitable development. More research is needed better to understand these processes and their outcomes, and ways to improve transparency and representation of different interests.
It is hard to think of further work on migration and development without involving migrants and their associations. In this study, interviewing migrants in their destination countries added a whole new perspective to the fieldwork, especially in the case of Senegal, where we managed to match migrants in France and households in Senegal. Besides research, a whole body of work could be carried out to strengthen the capacity of migrant associations, which are already involved in developmental activities, to tackle themselves some of the issues highlighted by this study. Indeed, the migrant associations we met were eager to receive support from development agencies, both financial and technical.
Policy measures in destination countries are also likely to substantially affect remittance flows, particularly those affecting migrants’ labour and other rights. While it is generally thought that remittance flows will continue to increase, the tightening of immigration policies in major destination countries may affect those flows. Indeed, as time and generations go by, remittances from existing migrants tend to decrease, and the arrival of new migrants may be necessary to reinvigorate remittance flows. Moreover, the effects on remittance flows of recent policy measures designed to counteract international terrorism and its financial basis are very little understood. A better understanding of these issues is crucial. Indeed, efforts to attract and promote best use of remittance flows in the home countries may be of limited impact if those flows are constrained at their source.
