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HIV/AIDS AND ITS IMPACT ON LAND ISSUES
IN MALAWI
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1.1.Poverty Reduction – A Rural Development Imperative
The reduction of poverty is a key imperative development of in most countries in Southern Africa, poverty is largely situated in rural areas where the poorest people live. For this reason, efforts to alleviate poverty have largely targeted rural areas. In most countries in the region including Malawi, the majority of the population is located in these poor rural areas, relying on agriculture for its livelihood. This gives agrarian economies and rural development special importance in the region and on the African continent.
One of the most significant factors in rural development at present, is land. In rural areas of most countries in sub-Saharan Africa land is not only the primary means for generating a livelihood but often also a main vehicle to invest, accumulate wealth, and transfer it between generations. Due to the key role of land in rural life, the way in which access to this resource is regulated, (how rights to it are defined, and conflicts around land ownership resolved) has important implications whose impact reverberates beyond the sphere of agricultural production to that of development in general. In this way there is an important link between rural development and land.
The lack of access to land as one of the key contributors to poverty with many of the world’s poor being landless. This relationship elevates land to a position of being one of the most important resources in our region. In addition, land affects a household’s livelihood in terms of food source; its economic performance in terms of generating marketable surplus from its agricultural produce as well as the household’s social and economic status. An important relationship thus exists between rural development, human livelihood and land (amount and quality).
Another factor that has an important impact on economic and rural development is HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS affects the very same people that development is intended for. It is therefore important to integrate HIV/AIDS in rural development programmes in rural communities. The causes and challenges of HIV/AIDS are closely associated with wider challenges to development such as poverty, food and livelihood security and gender inequality. In addition, the impacts of HIV/AIDS are not isolated. There is interplay between HIV/AIDS and other development challenges such as poverty and access to basic resources. In effect HIV/AIDS tends to exacerbate existing development problems through catalytic effects and systematic impact. For this reason, in addressing the impacts of HIV/AIDS it becomes important to address the root causes and consequences of the wider challenges of rural development rather than developing programmes that deal only with HIV/AIDS.
1.2 Poverty and HIV/AIDS
Poverty is a key factor in leading to behaviours that expose people to risk of HIV infections e.g. onset of sexual activity at a lower the age due to economic considerations. Poverty also exacerbates the impact of HIV/AIDS. The experience of HIV/AIDS by individuals, households and even communities that are poor can result in the intensification of the level of poverty experienced by that group. HIV/AIDS can even push some non-poor groups into poverty. In this way, HIV/AIDS can impoverish or further impoverish people in such a way as to intensify the epidemic itself.
Poverty and gender are inextricably intertwined. Women and girls are disproportionately represented among the poor. Seventy percent of the world's poor are women. At the same time it is poor women who are most susceptible to HIV infections. Urban poverty creates particularly difficult circumstances for many women. Weak economies and high rates of unemployment have led many women to sell sexual services which are often seen as the only means of survival available to them. Female students without family support often engage in prostitution to support themselves during their studies. In this way women are caught up in the poverty-HIV/AIDS cycle described above.
1.3 The Relationship between HIV/AIDS, Land and Livelihoods
Recent work has observed that despite the intensifying efforts focused on prevention and care, the HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to spread unabated. This has been attributed, in part, to the fact that efforts to date have tended to ignore the bigger picture of the implications for development and poverty reduction, focusing only on the (nonetheless important) elements of reducing the number of new infections and improving accessibility of care and treatment to the infected.1 There is now the need to understand the links between HIV/AIDS and development and to develop and implement policies and initiatives that mitigate the impact of the pandemic on development.
HIV/AIDS can be observed to have both direct and indirect financial impacts. Direct impacts tend to be in the form of medical and funeral expenses. Indirect costs tend to be labour related; loss of income due to absenteeism resulting from illness or from care of the ill.2 In a rural setting, this means that cash income and labour are diverted towards coping with the illness, reducing the household’s efforts towards agricultural activity, be it for subsistence or for market purposes. This has the implication that HIV/AIDS impacts people’s options for using their landholdings productively. Since in many cases customary tenure (which is most prevalent in rural settings) is based on access for actual use of land – there is the underlying threat of loss of landholding as such holdings progressively fall out of use (either due to reduced cropping activity or due to reduced numbers of livestock and thus reduced need for grazing land). Hence, HIV/AIDS potentially affects people’s ability to retain their landholdings. Following the same principle of “use it or lose it” access to land is often linked to the applicant’s ability to make use of the land. In view of the debilitating impact of if the pandemic, both on the infected and the affected household members, HIV/AIDS can also be said to influence people’s ability to gain access to land. All these considerations have implications on security of tenure and ultimately, systems of tenure themselves.
There is a gender element to the impact of HIV/AIDS on a household’s land economy. Since most communities in Southern Africa are patrilineal and patriarchal, a household’s access to land is frequently dependent on the presence of an able male adult. Hence, in cases where the headship of a household passes from a male to a female person due to HIV/AIDS, the ability of that household to access and retain land becomes uncertain.
An additional development consequence if HIV/AIDS is the liquidation of assets as a coping strategy to generate income. A study on HIV/AIDS and micro-finance3 observed a pattern in the sequence of asset liquidation as follows:
- savings
- business income
- household assets
- productive assets
- land
So although people do not release their landholdings readily, it has been shown that households can be compelled by HIV/AIDS related crisis to relinquish their landholdings. How then does this influence poverty and livelihoods? It has been noted that poverty incidence usually rises as the amount of land owned or operated by poor rural households declines.4
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- NLoewenson and Whiteside, 2001
- FAO, 1994
- HIV/AIDS – responding to a Silent Economic Crisis Among the Micro-finance Clients
- IFAD, 2001
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