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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Mauritania
Index
Irrigation dam at Foum Glaeta
Courtesy United Nations (John Isaac)
The system of land tenure was in transition in the 1980s.
Factors contributing to this transition included government
abolition of centuries-old slavery practices involving tribal and
ethnic relations between various herding and sedentary
communities; government development policies, particularly with
regard to land reform and large-scale irrigation schemes; and
tremendous shifts in land settlement and herding patterns because
of drought
(see Changing Social Patterns
, ch. 2).
Historically, landownership and range management were based
on tribal relations and ethnic settlement patterns. Rangeland for
herding was controlled through tribal ownership of wells; around
oases, slave groups worked cultivable plots, although traditional
noble clans held ownership of the land. In more southerly settled
agricultural areas, ownership varied from region to region and
village to village, depending on ethnic settlement patterns.
Landownership might be vested in the clan or village chief as
representative of the group and land distributed in perpetuity to
family units having usufruct. Elsewhere, traditional nobilities
might hold ownership of lands worked by formerly enslaved groups,
who held traditional usufruct. Although a village chief could not
sell land belonging to the clan (which would alienate family
groups from the land), traditional noble clans could more easily
sell property and effectively displace or disinherit slave
groups. By the late 1980s, it was not known to what extent the
formal abolition of slavery had affected traditional land
relationships among noble and former slave groups. Also unknown
was the impact of the government's stated policy of giving
priority to former slave groups when lands that might be claimed
under eminent domain were redistributed. Of potentially far
greater importance in land tenancy was the 1983 Land Reform Act
(see Political Power in the Mid-1980s
, ch. 4). The underlying
first cause of the act was the state's inherent and overriding
interest in land development. According to the act, the
government could grant title for parcels of undeveloped land--
which apparently included fallow land--to whoever pledged to
improve it and at the same time possessed requisite resources.
Although the economic necessity of the act was beyond question,
the social costs of appropriating valuable Senegal River Basin
land hypothetically controlled by blacks and redistributing it to
wealthy Maures from farther north could prove unacceptable. It
was evident, however, that the situation was in considerable
flux.
Large-scale government irrigation projects and plans for
integrated development based on regional water management created
another set of variables for traditional patterns of land use and
ownership. Groups located in areas behind dams or in areas to be
either permanently flooded or deprived of annual floods with
increased control over flow levels in the Senegal River were
undergoing a process of controlled resettlement. The formation of
cooperative production groups that were to be settled on the
land--often on a first-come, first-served basis--was essential to
project implementation.
Data as of June 1988
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