Moreover, village land is controlled by a village council that is responsible for land management decisions including issuing the certificates of customary right of occupancy and administering the local registers of land rights. These two land laws have established the basic three land categories: Village, General, and Reserved Land. The current land laws of the Village Land Act ( VLA) of 1999 and Land Act of 1999 have more improved the situation of land governance in the legal framework. However, during 1986 there were changes that led to a reversal of this land policy and the customary land law was enacted to promote individual rights to own land which would promote investment and upsurges productivity (Collins et al., 2019). During the Ujamaa 1 period, the country adopted a land policy on communal land use whereby collective cultivation of land was highly encouraged to promote large scale collective farming. Most of the rural communities in Tanzania are lacking awareness of land use (United States Agency for International Development, 2017 Food and Agriculture Organization, 2018). The paper recommends that these characteristics of the smallholder maize producers should be critically considered when formulating any land and agricultural policies to enhance proper decision making by smallholder farmers on the choice of land ownership system that may led to sustainable agricultural production, productivity, and food security in developing countries particularly in Tanzania.Ībout 44.8 percent of Tanzania’s land is categorized as agricultural land at which agriculture accounts 24 percent of the Gross Domestic Product ( GDP), 30 percent of the total exports, 65 percent of raw materials for the industrial sector, and 67 percent to employment in Tanzania (United Republic of Tanzania, 2016a). Furthermore, the econometric analysis which is grounded from the multinomial logit regression model showed that accessibility, farm size, quantity harvested, accessibility of extension services, gender, household size, and age are all pertinent in influencing the smallholder maize farmer’s choice of land ownership. Moreover, the paper findings revealed that 90 percent, 7 percent, and 3 percent of the sampled maize smallholder farmers chose to farm under-owned, shared, and rented title land system respectively. Using a t-test for mean comparison, the paper found that there is a significant difference between male and female-headed households across socioeconomic and physical factors determining the choice of land ownership systems among maize smallholder farmers.
The paper uses the Tanzania National Panel Survey ( TZNPS) data basing on 2,073 observations comprising of a sample size of 691 households in three consecutive waves 2008/2009, 2010/2011, and 2012/2013. This paper determines the socioeconomic and physical characteristics that influence maize farmer’s choice of land ownership systems in Tanzania, i.e., owned, sharecropped, and rented title land.