Land Tenure in the Cook Islands
Incorporation: a possible tenure innovation
Incorporation: a possible tenure innovation
In considering new forms of tenure, the present degree of utilization of the land must be born in mind. While almost all the land in the group is used to some degree, whether for planting, gathering of wild fruits or the collection of building materials, only an estimated eight per cent is actively used for housing, public utilities and crops other than the coconut.2 A further eleven per cent may be said to be planted with ‘economic’ stands of coconuts,3 though much of this land could be more fully utilized. The remaining eighty-one per cent of the land is markedly under-utilized: much of it because it is at present regarded as unusable.
2 In the pre-contact era these lands provided medicines, ropes, famine foods, building materials and other supplies, most of which are now obtained from trade stores. There is therefore no longer the necessity for each family to have its own bush lands.
3 I.e. not including areas on which only scattered coconut trees grow or which are not exploited systematically.
The fact that most of these lands have not been commercially exploited since the introduction of a cash economy suggests the desirability of examining the possibility of alternative systems of tenure and work organization. The existence of a potentially productive soil and the dissemination of information on how to make it so has generally been insufficient to stimulate the extensive use of these soils. Since 1950 the Administration has tried to encourage the rejuvenation of the banana industry on Rarotonga1 on an individual basis, but despite prizes, propaganda and guaranteed markets the output has not reached one per cent of the quantity exported under the system of organization on a minor lineage basis which operated during the period 1906–15.2
1 But not on other islands owing to shipping difficulties.
1 Most of the areas nevertheless appear to have a good productive potential given appropriate techniques of cultivation and soil conservation. At present Cook Islanders rarely crop land which lies at more than fourteen degrees of slope, but Dr J.E. Blaut informs me that he has himself measured land with a similar soil cover lying at sixty-three degrees and being actively cropped in Jamaica.
2 The average section in current use (excluding house-sites) in the four tapere of Turangi ma Nga Mataiapo was just under three acres in area, and the average unused section approximately twenty-eight acres in area. The used sections were generally the more fertile.
It is certain that the people would not be prepared to sell their rights in undeveloped lands, and while some individuals may be prepared to lease them to an outside person or group, the majority in all probability would not, thus precluding any major development from taking place. To be acceptable to the people, it is likely that any proposed enterprise would need to be so framed that the present owners retained some rights to the land and had a resonable assurance of an income from it. Perhaps the most appropriate tenure form under these circumstances is the ‘incorporation’.
Contiguous undeveloped lands in any particular locality could be incorporated into a single block, rights to individual sections being annulled and replaced by shares in the whole corporation in proportion to the separate rights previously held in the area. The land-owning corporation could work the land as a single unit for the benefit of its members, or could lease it to a local cooperative society or other enterprise in which the people had a degree of participation, either at a fixed rental or for a share of the profits.
1 On several of the Southern Group islands there are a number of contiguous tracts (containing numerous family sections) of over five hundred acres each, which are virtually unused.
1 Many persons employed in the citrus scheme and on Manuae plantation have insufficient land of their own on which to subsist.
2 According to the census of 1956, thirty-six per cent of persons then resident on Rarotonga had been born outside that island, but as the migration to Rarotonga has proceeded constantly for over a century, a large proportion of persons born in Rarotonga still have no land rights there as they were born of parents who came from other islands (in 1895 thirty-four per cent of Rarotonga's population had been born on other islands). In addition there are many Rarotongans whose land rights are so fragmented that they are unable to acquire the use of any portion of their lands. Avarua and Titikaveka are the districts containing the highest proportions of persons without land rights, and while no details of their numbers are available, I would estimate that sixty to seventy per cent of the population of those districts is without the effective use of planting land in which they hold rights.
It might, perhaps, be appropriate to conclude this historical analysis of land tenure in the Cook Islands with the maxim so often laid down by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: that unless tenure reform is associated with improvements in technical skills, the provision of credit, transport and markets it is unlikely to result in increases in output or in the satisfaction of the people concerned. Furthermore, in a democratic society, proposals for reform must be evolved with the full participation of the people concerned, and must be accepted by them if they are to result in effective improvements to their social and economic welfare.
page break