In light of the high rate of population growth and rapid urbanization, the arable land frontier in Sub-Saharan Africa countries has been exhausted and the land-labor ratio has been shrinking. Under this setting, access to land for smallholders and the landless and improvement of land productivity have critical implication for poverty reduction and food insecurity. This dissertation is composed of three essays that study the determinants and impacts of land access, land distribution, and an intensified farming system in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa using household survey data from rural Kenya. The first essay utilizes household and parcel-level data from rural Kenya to explore the linkage between land access and food security. We find that a 10% increase in operated land size would increase household total food consumption per capita, cereal consumption per capita, non-cereal consumption, and home produced food consumption by 2.6%, 2.1%, 2.7% and 5.4%, respectively. We also find that land rental is the dominant mechanism that poor rural farmers use to access additional land for cultivation. However, the levels of long-term land investment (measured by application of organic fertilizer) and land productivity are significantly lower for rented parcels than for own parcels even after household fixed effect and parcel-level observed characteristics are controlled for. Furthermore, the amount of land actually rented in or out is found to be significantly below the amount of land desired if the land rental market is functioning perfectly. These findings point to the existence of problems with land rental markets that impede their ability to fully contribute to national food security and poverty reduction goals. The second essay aims to explore the determinants of the new maize farming system, which is characterized by adoption of high-yielding maize varieties, application of chemical fertilizer and manure produced by stall-fed improved dairy cows, and intercropping, especially the combination of maize and legumes, and its impact on land productivity and household income. We examine not only the impacts of new technologies and production practices but also the impacts of the entire new maize farming system by generating an agricultural intensification index based on a principal component analysis. Our estimation results show that an increase in sub-location level population density and a decrease in the land-labor ratio of an individual household accelerate farming intensification, and that adoption of each new technology and production practice has positive and significant impacts on land productivity. These findings are further supported by the significantly positive impacts of the agriculture intensification index on land productivity. The third essay attempts to assess the determinants of agricultural land distribution and the effects of land distribution on agricultural productivity, income and poverty based on micro-level long panel data in Kenya. The estimation results show that the village level population density is negatively correlated with the village level Gini coefficient of own farmland. The Gini coefficient of agricultural land is found to have significant and negative impacts on agricultural productivity, income and poverty. Specifically, an increase in the Gini coefficient by 0.1 would reduce the value of crop production per acre, net crop income per acre, net crop income per capita, the net livestock income per capita, the net non-farm income per capita, the net total income per capita, and chance of being out of poverty by 4.3%, 5.1%, 4.1%, 6.6%, 5.0%, 3.8% and 2.8%, respectively.
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