Lineage and land reforms in Malawi: do matrilinear and patrilinear landholding systems represent a problem for land reforms in Malawi?

This paper is about land tenure relations among the matrilineal and patrilineal cultures in Malawi. Data from the National Agricultural and Livestock Census are used to characterize marriage systems and settlement and landholding patterns for local communities. Marriage systems correspond to customary land tenure patterns of matrilineal or patrilineal land holding. The differences between the two major ways of land holding represent a particular challenge for land reforms intending to unify rules for land tenure and land devolution. The paper discusses the problems of formalisation and the idea of maintaining the diversity. If diversity is not respected there is a chance that some sections of society, especially communities with matrilineal land holding, might be victims of formalization. Based on analogy of the resilience of the patrilineal land holding system in Norway it is argued that a democratic system will have difficulty removing the preferential rights of linage members and it is recommended that the existing land rights are formally recognized and circumscribed by fair procedures. In a situation of diversity one goal of a well-designed land holding system should be to ease the transitions of the diverse customary tenure systems towards systems adapted to the requirements of a modern large scale society rather than to a unified national system

Land Tenure and Social Relations in Matrilineal and Uxorilocal Societies in Malawi

The present paper is a revision of a paper that was submitted to Land Use Policy in 2009. The review from LUP from 2010 asked for a rewrite. Due to personal reasons this was not possible before other tasks took all available time. In connection with the lead authors work on an assessment of the fit of the Customary Land Act 2016 and its Amendments 2022 with rural lives and customary land management in Malawi, the discussion in the present paper was necessary as background. Hence we have updated the paper and present it as a report from the Centre for Land Tenure Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Erling Berge, Ås, March 2023This paper is about social relations in customary lands for the matrilineal uxorilocal culture of the Lomwe, Nyanja and Yao tribes in Southern Malawi. The study was carried out in the districts of Chiradzulu and Phalombe. Qualitative methods were used to examine local histories and practices to identify the social and power relations between males and females in matrilineal groups and the roles of chiefs, extended families, and traditional practices in access to and control over customary land. By focusing on local histories the study documents that patterns of access to and control over customary lands are historical in nature and embedded in social ties and power relations. Male and female members of the household or family have equal use rights but unequal ownership rights. The land belongs to the extended family and not to the community or individuals. Instead of saying the land belongs to ‘me’ the people say the land belongs to ‘us’ even though the individuals may have user rights in perpetuity. The ‘us’ implies the extended family and not the community. The power and control over the land is located in the group of sisters and not in the head of family (mwini-mbumba) or the Chief. The patterns of control have to be understood for proper decisions to be made on how to organize access to and control over land, especially in a country where livelihoods are dependent on agriculture or are land based in nature.Denne artikkelen handlar om dei sosiale relasjonane i tradisjonelle jordbruksområde innan den matrilineale og uxorilokale kulturen hos Lomwe, Nyanja og Yao stammene i det sørlege Malawi. Studien vart gjort i distrikta Chiradzulu og Phalombe. Det vart nytta kvalitative metodar for å studere lokalhistorie og praksisar for å identifisere sosial- og makt-relasjonar mellom menn og kvinner i matrilineale grupper og kva roller høvdingar, stor-familiar og tradisjonelle praksisar har for tilgang til og kontroll over tradisjonelle jordbruksområde. Ved å fokusere på lokalhistorie dokumenterer studien at mønsteret i tilgang til og kontroll over tradisjonelle jordbruksområde er historisk i utgangspunktet og innbakt i sosiale band og makt relasjonar. Mannlege og kvinnelege medlemmer i hushaldet eller stor-familien har dei same bruksrettane, men ulike eigarrettar. Jorda tilhøyrer stor-familien og ikkje lokalsamfunnet eller individa. I staden for å seie at jorda tilhøyrer «meg» seier folk at jorda tilhøyrer «oss» sjølv om individet kan ha bruksrettar for all æve. «Oss» tyder stor-familien og ikkje lokalsamfunnet. Makt og kontroll over jorda er lokalisert i gruppa av søstrer og ikkje i sjefen for stor-familien (mwini-mbumba) eller høvdingen. Dette mønsteret for kontroll må ein skjøne for å kunne ta skikkelege avgjerder om korleis ein kan organisere tilgang til og kontroll over jorda, særleg i eit land der levebrødet er avhengig av jordbruk eller er grunnleggande arealbasert. [uxorilokal (= matrilokal) tyder at personane er busett på kvinna sin heimstad; matrilineal tyder at ein reknar slektslinjer gjennom mødrer; høvdingar og mwini-mumba-er kan like gjerne vere menn som kvinner; familie tyder stor-familien av mødrer, tanter, søstrer, søskenbarn, osv; menn har sjølvsagt sin plass i storfamilien, men dei er ikkje jordeigarar

Plasma Cholesterol- and Body Fat-Lowering Effects of Chicken Protein Hydrolysate and Oil in High-Fat Fed Male Wistar Rats

Rest raw materials provide a new source of bioactive dietary ingredients, and this study aimed to determine the health effects of diets with chicken protein hydrolysate (CPH) and chicken oil (CO) generated from deboned chicken meat. Male Wistar rats (n = 56) were divided into seven groups in three predefined sub-experiments to study the effects of protein source (casein, chicken fillet, pork fillet, and CPH), the dose-effect of CPH (50% and 100% CPH), and the effects of combining CPH and CO. Rats were fed high-fat diets for 12 weeks, and casein and chicken fillet were used as controls in all sub-experiments. While casein, chicken-, or pork fillet diets resulted in similar weight gain and plasma lipid levels, the CPH diet reduced plasma total cholesterol. This effect was dose dependent and accompanied with the reduced hepatic activities of acetyl-CoA carboxylase and fatty acid synthase. Further, rats fed combined CPH and CO showed lower weight gain, and higher hepatic mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation, plasma L-carnitine, short-chain acylcarnitines, TMAO, and acetylcarnitine/palmitoylcarnitine. Thus, in male Wistar rats, CPH and CO lowered plasma cholesterol and increased hepatic fatty acid oxidation compared to whole protein diets, pointing to potential health-beneficial bioactive properties of these processed chicken rest raw materials.publishedVersio

On trust in Malawi: Behaviour in trust games in 18 Malawian villages in 2007

This paper originates from a series of “trust games” performed in Malawi during the summer of 2007. The results from the games are interpreted as pure stylized cases of a social dilemma. Some dilemmas, such as the prisoner’s dilemma, are more difficult to resolve than others. These are also called social traps. A group encountering a social trap can resolve it to the advantage of the group only by cooperation. The experiments were conducted in 18 villages, 6 from each of the 3 regions North, Centre, and South. Fifteen households from each village participated in the study. These were first interviewed, and later one person from each household was selected to play a trust game against another representative from the village. We lost a total of 3 players resulting in game results from 267 trust games. The interviews were analysed separately and provided the material for the construction of indexes by factor analysis (Berge et al. 2020a). The paper discusses the problems encountered in using this type of experiments. Economists specializing in experiments like this will often presume that results from a trust game are a good measure of general trust. The analysis of our data suggests that the game results measure actions. Actions that can be interpreted as demonstrating trust, but not trust as such. The trust games played are constructed as a social trap. The analysis of the data suggests that there is correlation between living in a village imbued by a culture of cooperation and the ability to avoid stepping into the trap in the game. All villages seem to be characterized by a culture of cooperation. Hence all players on average earn by participating in the game. But we also see that just as the theory predicts, the ego-centred players in a village with a high level of cooperation are the players who earn the most. By constructing indexes that characterize the context of each player we see that the ego-centred player earns most in villages located closer to an urban centre and where trust in relatives and family members are strongest. The winnings are somewhat less where trust in traditional authorities is stronger. The outcomes for these general relations are modified by the fact that the impact of the indexes is different in the different regions South, Centre, and North

An introduction to Graph Data Management

A graph database is a database where the data structures for the schema and/or instances are modeled as a (labeled)(directed) graph or generalizations of it, and where querying is expressed by graph-oriented operations and type constructors. In this article we present the basic notions of graph databases, give an historical overview of its main development, and study the main current systems that implement them

A Generic Bio-Economic Farm Model for Environmental and Economic Assessment of Agricultural Systems

Bio-economic farm models are tools to evaluate ex-post or to assess ex-ante the impact of policy and technology change on agriculture, economics and environment. Recently, various BEFMs have been developed, often for one purpose or location, but hardly any of these models are re-used later for other purposes or locations. The Farm System Simulator (FSSIM) provides a generic framework enabling the application of BEFMs under various situations and for different purposes (generating supply response functions and detailed regional or farm type assessments). FSSIM is set up as a component-based framework with components representing farmer objectives, risk, calibration, policies, current activities, alternative activities and different types of activities (e.g., annual and perennial cropping and livestock). The generic nature of FSSIM is evaluated using five criteria by examining its applications. FSSIM has been applied for different climate zones and soil types (criterion 1) and to a range of different farm types (criterion 2) with different specializations, intensities and sizes. In most applications FSSIM has been used to assess the effects of policy changes and in two applications to assess the impact of technological innovations (criterion 3). In the various applications, different data sources, level of detail (e.g., criterion 4) and model configurations have been used. FSSIM has been linked to an economic and several biophysical models (criterion 5). The model is available for applications to other conditions and research issues, and it is open to be further tested and to be extended with new components, indicators or linkages to other models

Learning cooperation from the commons

The paper discusses the link between commons as they might have been used in prehistoric Norway and the rules concerning the exploitation of the commons as found in the oldest known legislation for regions of Norway, Gulating Law and Frostating Law. One clear social dilemma has been identified: the setting of a common date for moving animals from the home fields up to the summer farms and home again in the fall. The problem was obvious and the solution not particularly difficult to institute. Many more problems were of course present, but they did not rise to the level of a social dilemma. All such problems were managed by the rules enacted by the bygdeting along with other problems of a community. In particular the process of inheritance, the problems of fencing, how to change borders between neighbours and between individually owned fields and the commons, were treated by extensive rules. The bygdeting managed such issues from prehistory until the 16th and 17th centuries when reforms initiated by the Danish-Norwegian kings started to take effect, making the rule-of-law more uniquely a task for the central authorities and of less concern for the local communities. Maybe the basic legacy of the long history of local rule was a strong belief in the court system, that it would secure the old saying: "By law the land shall be built, not with unlaw wasted"

Of urban commons

The paper is part of a joint presentation with Marius Grønning at the 5th International and Interdisciplinary Symposium of the European Academy of Land Use and Development (EALD) held in Oslo 3-5 September 2015.Last summer visitors to the Oslo opera house were met with the following announcement: “Here comes the “Opera Commons” explaining: “Operaallmenningen”, the Opera Commons, “will be a multi-functional meeting place for cultural events, recreational activities and people passing through.” The choice of “allmenning” (commons) to designate a place that is available to citizens of Oslo and their visitors as a “meeting place for cultural events” and “recreational activities” may be part of an international trend idolizing “the commons”. This trend one may observe both in academia and in some political circles. The trend deserves some reflection in its own right. Why is there currently a need for this term? The established theory of the commons does not have much to say about urban reality in its own right. However, the theory is well developed to understand some problems of collective action as these appear in urban development. The link between land tenure and structure of land use decisions is well known. We shall use the theory of the commons to comment on the link between tenure and form of commons that may appear and the problems of governing urban commons in various forms