Every morning, a farmer wakes up to a question more frightening than drought: Is this still my land?
Land grabbing is legally defined as the unauthorised, dishonest, or violent acquisition of property. Yet today’s dispossession rarely arrives with armies or eviction notices. More often, it comes through registration forms, lease agreements, and corporate contracts, all perfectly legal.
African smallholder farming is frequently romanticised as a timeless landscape of communal harmony and ancestral stewardship. But this peaceful image obscures a harsher reality. Modern smallholders find themselves trapped within a highly legalistic terrain, one shaped by state bureaucracies, global agribusiness, and statutes that rewrite ownership with the stroke of a pen.
This phenomenon manifests differently across the globe. In London’s Wandsworth Common, a developer was ordered to pay £530,000 after a newly built cellar encroached just 18 inches across a neighbour’s boundary, an expensive civil error, but not a political crime. In stark contrast, the Daniel Arap Moi case in Kenya exposed the predatory face of state power: the former president illegally overwrote land registry records to strip a 53‑acre property from its rightful owners and claim it as his own.
This abuse of power cuts deepest across the African continent, where land is not mere real estate: it is wealth, memory, and family heritage. Smallholder farmers feel this connection most acutely. According to the IFAD Field Report, they manage an estimated 33 million farms and produce up to 70 per cent of the region’s food supply. Yet despite their vital contributions and an abundance of uncultivated arable land, local agriculture is rarely prioritised. African nations collectively spend US $35 billion annually on food imports, a tragic paradox that exposes state systems failing to cultivate the very conditions needed for communities to grow, thrive, and protect their ancestral lands (IFAD, 2023).
The Ghanaian Paradox: Protecting Land by Opening Doors
A farmer’s independence depends on two things: seed and soil. Without soil, planting is impossible; without land, even the best seeds are worthless. Yet this simple reality is routinely ignored in how resources are distributed, effectively denying farmers control over their land before they even begin to farm.
This brings us to the issue of “legal land grabs.” In Ghana, the Land Act of 2020 was introduced to formalise and protect customary lands, which cover about 80 per cent of the country (McWilson, 2026). The law reshaped communal land ownership, management, and development. Its stated goal was to protect ordinary community members by curbing the unchecked authority of chiefs and elders.
However, by demanding strict registration of communal spaces, the state has unintentionally opened the door for foreign agribusinesses to acquire land with relative ease. At its core, the problem is simple: on Ghana’s expanding urban fringes, those who own the land (chiefs and families) have little say over its use, while those who control its use (the state) do not own it.
Malawi’s Unravelling Reform
Malawi’s Customary Land Act of 2016 was introduced with a noble aim: to empower smallholders by transforming communal land into registered private property, known as Customary Estates. The reform established three key structures: Traditional Land Management Areas under traditional authorities, Customary Estates as private titled holdings, and Customary Land Committees at the village level to oversee registration and leasing (Nkhoma, 2021).
Yet in reality, this statutory overhaul has done something far more troubling. It has stripped traditional chiefs of their centuries-old authority over land allocation, replacing indigenous stewardship with state bureaucrats and market-driven mechanisms. When land is reduced to a commodity, the safety nets of communal tenure disappear. Scholars writing in the MDPI Land Journal caution that converting ancestral land into tradeable “estates” makes it easy for wealthy elites and corporations to buy up holdings (Mwenda & Chirwa, 2021). The sobering conclusion is that displacement no longer requires military force; today’s enclosures are carried out through registration that legally erases generations of communal heritage.
The Final Assault: Seed Grabbing
Land grabbing is reinforced by a parallel assault: “seed grabbing.” Once agribusinesses take over, they outlaw traditional farming practices and force farmers to rely on patented corporate seeds. By controlling what grows, corporations ensure that the land cannot function without their products, locking in the grab not just legally, but ecologically.
This dual enclosure of land and seed represents a complete takeover of the agricultural system. Farmers lose not only their territory but also their autonomy over what they plant, how they plant it, and whether they can sustain themselves without corporate inputs. The soil itself becomes captive.
Conclusion
The land formalisation efforts in Ghana and Malawi illustrate a recurring paradox: reforms intended to secure tenure for smallholders have, in practice, facilitated elite capture, land alienation, and corporate enclosure. When complemented by “seed grabbing,” this dual assault undermines not only land access but also agricultural sovereignty.
Ultimately, the pen has become mightier than the sword and the farmer is paying the price.
What would it take to make land reform truly protect the farmer? Share your thoughts below.
References
HLRN. (n.d.). Land grabbing case: Kenya. Retrieved from https://www.hlrn.org/french/activitydetails.php?id=pmtsaA==
IFAD. (2023). The field report: Smallholder farmers in Africa. Retrieved from https://www.ifad.org/thefieldreport/
Mwenda, A., & Chirwa, E. (2021). Analyzing the changes of the meaning of customary land in the context of land grabbing in Malawi. Land, 10(8), 836. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10080836
Nkhoma, A. (2021). The state, traditional leadership and the politics of land reforms in Malawi. The African Review, 48(2), 451-471.
McWilson, W. K. (2026). Property rights misalignment in peri-urban Ghana: A land use rights transfer framework with lessons from China and Hong Kong. Habitat International, 176, 103946. 10.1016/j.habitatint.2026.103946
Today’s Conveyancer. (n.d.). Court rules developers owe £530k over cellar ‘land grab’. Retrieved from https://todaysconveyancer.co.uk/court-rules-developers-owe-530k-cellar-land-grab/
By Princela Kodom
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