Raised beds and communally managed rotation help to maintain soil fertility and provide a diversity of crops.
However, on both the privately and communally managed range-lands, soil nutrient and water infiltration status, rock cover, soil alkalinity, salinity and total N content were significantly greater at low than high and/or medium altitudes.
This study assessed the level of soil salinization in a communally managed 233 ha Nkhate irrigation scheme in the Lower Shire Valley region of Malawi.
There are two communally managed lands - P&D and N/Approach - that offer 'safe zones' near frequently used squatter patches (such as Endana, near N/Approach and P&D near Kirimun; see Figure 12).
The key, from an economic and development policy perspective, is to craft policy and legal measures that enable pastoralist rangelands to continue to maintain wildlife and livestock in communally managed rangelands.
Our two group ranches (Ilmotiok and Tiamamut) are located in the upper right-hand corner of the map in the patch of green land parcels designated by the government in the 1970s as communally managed lands.
These changes alter in turn how families manage mobility in this mixed-use system, which is already constrained by private and public land patches abutting communally managed lands (Gadd 2005; Huho et al. 2011; Wambuguh 2007; see also Figure 11 in this paper).
Programs of community-based forest management (CFM) were launched in 2006 and piloted in Nam Đông (Tran et al. 2010b), but strong socio-economic dynamics linked to market forces and emerging cash crops outweigh many efforts directed at the conservation and sustainable use of remaining communally managed natural forests.
This study was therefore conducted to assess the level of irrigation-induced soil salinization at a communally managed irrigation scheme in the Lower Shire Valley region of Malawi to recommend if there was a need to change or maintain the cropping system at the scheme.
The then government's socialist idea that state-owned lands, i.e. natural resources, should be accessible to everybody led to the abolishment of communally managed grazing areas, hence eliminating specific tribal rights over the resources of their homelands (Akhtar 1993).
