Evidence assembled in this special issue of Food Policy shows that rising rural population densities in parts of Africa are profoundly affecting farming systems and the region’s economies in ways that are underappreciated in current discourse on African development issues. This study synthesizes how people, markets and governments are responding to rising land pressures in Africa, drawing on key findings from the various contributions in this special issue. The papers herein revisit the issue of Boserupian agricultural intensification as an important response to land constraints, but they also go further than Boserup and her followers to explore broader responses to land constraints, including non-farm diversification, migration, and reduced fertility rates. Agricultural and rural development strategies in the region will need to more fully anticipate the implications of Africa’s rapidly changing land and demographic situation, and the immense challenges that mounting land pressures pose in the context of current evidence of unsustainable agricultural intensification, a rapidly rising labor force associated with the region’s current demographic conditions, and limited nonfarm job creation. These challenges are manageable but will require explicit policy actions to address the unique development challenges in densely populated rural areas

Sub-Saharan Africa is typically regarded as land abundant, and previous efforts to estimate the true extent of potentially available cropland (PAC) have largely affirmed this perception. Such efforts, however, have largely focused on production potential and have underemphasized economic profitability and other constraints to expansion. This paper re-estimates PAC for Africa in a more explicit economic framework that emphasizes the returns to agricultural production under a variety of assumptions, using recent geospatial data. Existing PAC estimates for Africa are shown to be highly sensitive to assumptions about land productivity and market access, and are moderately influenced by the use of alternative data sources. The region’s underutilized land resources are concentrated in relatively few countries, many of which are fragile states. Between one-half and two-thirds of the region’s surplus land is currently under forest cover; conversion of forests to cropland would entail major environmental costs. Most of the continent’s unexploited land resources are located far from input and output markets, limiting their economic attractiveness. In the long run, improvements in infrastructure and agricultural productivity and the growth of hinterland towns will enhance the economic returns to cropland expansion. In the short to medium term, however, the potential for profitable smallholder-based cropland expansion in most African countries is likely to be much more limited than it is typically perceived to be

We use nationally representative household‐level panel survey data in two neighboring countries in Southern Africa—Zambia and Malawi—to characterize the current status of rural land rental market participation by smallholder farmers, and their subsequent welfare impacts. Rural rental market participation is much higher in densely‐populated Malawi than in lower‐density Zambia, reflecting the role of land scarcity in driving rental market development. Consistent with previous literature, we find evidence that rental markets contribute to efficiency gains within the smallholder sector by facilitating the transfer of land from less‐able to more‐able producers, on average, in both countries. Furthermore, we find that rental markets serve to re‐allocate land from relatively land‐rich to land‐poor households. We examine the impacts of participation on a number of welfare outcomes and find evidence for generally positive returns to renting in land in both countries, on average. However, our analysis also indicates that the returns to renting in land vary strongly with scale of production: tenants who produce more have larger returns to renting in, and many of the smaller producers who rent in do so at an economic loss. The impacts of renting out (i.e., participating in markets as landlords) are decidedly more mixed, with overall negative returns to landlords in Malawi and negligible returns to landlords in Zambia. The findings in this article highlight the need for researchers and policymakers in sub‐Saharan Africa to stay attuned to how land rental market participation and its impacts evolve in the near future.