Land titles cancelled in Maputo Province

28 June 2007, AIM
URL: http://allafrica.com/stories/200706260929.html

Maputo:  The Maputo Provincial Directorate of Agriculture is making good on a longstanding threat to cancel the land tenure rights of investors who fail to use the land allocated to them.

According to a report in Tuesday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias", inspectors visited 287 land concessions in five districts - and found that 95 of them had been abandoned.

The Land Law states that investors applying for land must present a plan for what they intend to do with it. Mozambican investors have five years, and foreign investors two years, to put that plan into operation. During that period their land rights are only provisional.

If, after the end of this period, there is no sign that the land is being put to productive use, in line with the investor's original plan, then it should revert to the state.

The law allows investors to apply for an extension to their provisional land title, if unforeseen events have occurred, and they can make a plausible case as to why they were unable to implement their initial plans.

But in Maputo province no investor invoked this clause in the law.

In late 2006, the agriculture directorate suspended the issuing of land titles for six months, while it set about computerising the provincial land records. This provided the comprehensive data base for the inspectors to sweep through the entire province, looking at what investors had done with their land.

The picture was not encouraging. Some of the land concessions had been abandoned for seven or even ten years. The people with title to this land may have been holding onto it for purely speculative reasons.

Of the 95 areas regarded as abandoned, 70 have already reverted to the state, with the agriculture directorate cancelling the land titles. The legal procedures for cancelling the titles are currently under way for the other 25 areas.

In a further 71 concessions, the inspectors found that the title-holders were not making full use of the land. So these land titles will be altered to cover a smaller area.

In 121 cases, the title-holders have been given more time: they have been told to legalise their situation, or they will lose the land.

The Maputo director of agriculture, Setina Titosse, admitted that for years there had been no proper inspection. The data on land titles had been disorganised, and there had been cases where the same land had been allocated to more than one investor.

But the digital land registry made the current inspection possible, which had concentrated on concessions of land of 20 hectares or more.

Titosse said it could no longer be accepted that people granted large tracts of productive land were not using it.

"Cyclical droughts affect Maputo province, which means that hunger is constantly present in some areas", she said. "But we have dormant potential, because many people hold land that can produce, but they are not exploiting it".

"So we're carrying out the inspections, and we shall take land away from those who are not producing in order to allocate it to those who have production plans," she declared.

There were applicants who wanted to start agricultural production this year, she stressed.