The short and long run effects of land use consolidation programme on farm input uptakes: Evidence from Rwanda

Food security remains a major concern, as efforts to commercialise and specialise in agricultural production have been constrained. This is partly due to land scarcity, compelling smallholder farmers to operate on fragmented lands. Land reforms that seek to consolidate lands and promote crop specialisation can be welfare-enhancing because they can stimulate investment in agricultural innovation. Rwanda’s 2008 land use consolidation (LUC) programme merges parcels of land and promotes crop specialisation. After more than a decade of its implementation, the beckoning question is whether LUC programme has improved technology adoption. Relying on previous three rounds of national survey data, capturing before and after the implementation of LUC programme, this paper contributes to the literature by (1) assessing the short- and long-run relationships between LUC and improved input uptake and (2) determining what conditions could influence the way LUC impact technology adoption. The result shows that the implementation of LUC leads to uptake of agricultural inputs both in the short- and long-run, but the impact is more in the long run. While in the short run, access to finance and asset ownership act as the underlying conditioning factors, in the long run, the dominant complementary factor is access to credit. These results suggest that there might be underlying structural factors that may inhibit the influence of LUC on technology adoption and hence the attainment of the goal of food security in Rwanda.