Article of the Month -
July 2018
|
Land Valuation in Support of Responsible
Land Consolidation on Ghana’s Rural Customary
Kwabena ASIAMA (Netherlands), Rohan
BENNETT (Australia), Jaap ZEVENBERGEN (Netherlands) and Seth
ASIAMA (Ghana)
FIG and Survey Review, through former FIG Vice President
Iain Greenway and Richard Grover, have
decided to award a paper presented at a
FIG Congress/Working Week. The Survey Review prize will be awarded
every two years to the author and presenter of a selected paper at a
FIG Congress/Working Week.
Survey Review is an international journal which has been published
since 1931, and in recent years under the auspices of the Commonwealth
Association of Surveying and Land Economy (CASLE). It has been published
continuously as a quarterly journal, bringing together a wide range of
papers on research, theory, practice and management in land and
engineering surveying.
The paper selected for the prize passes through an initial reviewing
and revision stage overseen by FIG, before being judged by members of
the Editorial Board of Survey Review.
This year’s winner, “Land Valuation in Support of Responsible Land
Consolidation on Ghana’s Rural Customary Lands” by Kwabena Asiama, Rohan
Bennett, Jaap Zevenbergen and Seth Asiama, deals with an important
subject and has implications for many other countries in which customary
land rights apply.
Kwabena Asiama receiving the Survey Review Award
from Richard Grover at the FIG Congress in
Istanbul.
SUMMARY
Land valuation is an important aspect of land consolidation where
farm parcels are appraised to set a basis for farmland parcel
exchange, reallocation, and expansion. There are two approaches to
land valuation in land consolidation – the agronomic value, with its
basis being the soil productivity and quality, and the market value.
The market value has been touted as the better approach with studies
pointing out the deficiencies in the agronomic value approach.
However, the market value approach cannot be used in Sub-Saharan
Africa’s customary lands due to the limited land market. Here, we
develop a framework for an approach for assigning values to
customary rural farm land parcels that reflects the local people’s
view of land value. We found in a case study of Nanton that key land
value factors that determine land values relate to the physical
attributes, legal conditions, agricultural productivity, locational
factors, and the planning scheme of the farmland parcels. These
factors were weighted by the local community according to their
perception of what affected their choice of farmland parcels. The
weights were integrated into the framework the produced the Land
Value Index (LVI) for each land parcel in the area of study. Our
results showed that in a scenario analysis, a change in weights
affected the land value indices at a scale that could change the
comparative basis of the land parcels. The sensitivity analysis
however showed that the LVIs were not significantly sensitive to the
changes in the weight of the factors. However, a prime weakness of
this framework is that it is more expensive to use than automatic
valuation models. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to
place relative quid pro quo values on rural agricultural farmlands
that have no land markets. We anticipate that the approach can be
the starting point for more approaches to valuing rural customary
lands for specific purposes. A further verification is however
needed in the study area to ascertain whether the results of the
derived LVIs are representative of the local farmers’ view of their
land values, and how the framework will fit into land consolidation
practices.
The full paper is available to read
here.
