This paper reviews the scholarly literature discussing the effect(s) of land registration on the relations between land tenure security and agricultural productivity. Using 85 studies, the paper focuses on the regular claim that land registration’s facilitation of formal documents-based land dealings leads to investment in a more productive agriculture. The paper shows that this claim is problematic for three reasons. First, most studies offer no empirical evidence to support the claim on the above-mentioned effect. Second, there are suggestions that land registration can actually threaten ‘de facto’ tenure security or even lead to insecurity of tenure. Third, the gendered realization of land registration and security may lead to uneven distribution of costs and benefits, but these effects are often ignored. Next to suggesting the importance of land information updating and the efficiency of local land management institutions, this paper also finds that more research with a combined locally-set approach is needed to better understand any relation(s) between land tenure security and agricultural productivity.

The year 2007 marked the beginning of a journey to secure food in Rwanda. The country introduced the Crop Intensification Program (CIP), which promotes the farmland use consolidation (LUC). This study assesses the effect of farmland use changes on the agriculture production. We collected data at four research sites and considered three agriculture years to assess the effect of the fragmented or consolidated farmland use on the harvest. The study confirms that the CIP/LUC program converted perennial crops, mainly banana plantations, into seasonal crops, which were prioritized by the program. Overall, we conclude that the shift in farmland use has created an increase in both the harvest and monetary yields of the prioritized crops. However, within that general trend, we observe differences: farmers with smaller and/or fewer farm plots did not realize as great a yield increase as those who joined the CIP/LUC program with larger and/or multiple farm plots. While contributing to an understanding of the ongoing agriculture transformation program in Rwanda, this study followed a statistical approach that could be used by new studies assessing the benefits and outcomes of development policies.