Costs and Benefits of Land Fragmentation

This paper disentangles different
aspects of land fragmentation and its impact on the
efficiency of resource use. The paper uses information on
the incidence of crop shocks to assess whether fragmentation
provides benefits in reducing risk and parcel coordinates
and terrain-adjusted travel times between parcels to more
precisely account for the associated costs in 2010/11 data
from Rwanda. While fragmentation increases the time required
to move between a household’s parcels, this does not appear
to affect overall technical efficiency on the farm.
Fragmentation rather reduces the incidence of crop shocks
and increases yields and productive efficiency. In Rwanda’s
setting, interventions to reduce fragmentation may,
therefore, be ineffective or counterproductive.