The gender and geography of agricultural commercialisation: what implications for the food security of Ghana’s smallholder farmers?

ABSTRACT

Using a comparative mixed methods approach involving two districts each in Southern and Northern Ghana, this article addresses the question: under what conditions, and at what scale does smallholder agricultural commercialisation promote or hinder food security? Specifically, it presents an analysis of how gender and spatial inequalities in resource control determine differential capacities to commercialise and the implications of agricultural commercialisation for food security in an export commodity dominated Southern Ghana versus a food crop dominated Northern Ghana. We found gender gaps in commercialisation capacity that did not seem to disappear even in the presence of land abundance because the gaps are structural. We also found that, in some contexts, high rates of commercialisation do not mean accumulation. Among females in parts of Northern Ghana, apparent high commercialisation rates are driven by necessity, and thus constitutes ‘distress push commercialisation’, which has negative food security implications. While we found no evidence of an overall positive association between commercialisation and food security, we show that in the export crop dominated high commercialisation zone of Southern Ghana, commercialisation enhances food security only up to a threshold above which further resource allocation towards non-food cash crops hurts food security because of inefficient food markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Commercialisation
• food security
• gender
• smallholders
• Ghana

Acknowledgements

This article was made possible by the farmers and community leaders who shared their time with us. We received valuable research assistance during data collection and transcription from Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey, Promise Eweh, Faustina Obeng and other enumerators. Thanks go to the rest of the Demeter Ghana research team (Peter Atupare, Martha Awo and Irene Tagbor) for their intellectual and administrative assistance. We thank Elisabeth Prügl and Fenneke Reysoo for reading and providing useful comments on an initial draft of the manuscript. Finally, we a grateful to Jun Borras for advice, and to two anonymous reviewers who provided extremely helpful comments that have significantly improved the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See von Braun and Kennedy (1986), for example.

2 These studies were situated in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

3 We account for location differences in cost of living using the food component of the regional Consumer Price Index (CPI) provided by the Ghana Statistical Service.

4 Some varieties of wild yam and cocoyam may grow naturally under old cocoa trees, however.

5 We refer to oil palm as a non-food cash crop because the main purpose for production is sales although palm oil and other derivatives of oil palm are central to Ghanaian cuisine and farmers may consume a small share of their oil palm output.

Additional information

Funding

The research that led to this article was funded by the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development, co-funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation under the R4D program.

Notes on contributors

Fred Mawunyo Dzanku

Fred Mawunyo Dzanku is an agricultural development economist whose research focuses principally on the economics of agricultural household behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa. He holds a PhD in Agriculural and Food Economics from the University of Reading, England. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of Ghana, an institution he joined as Research Fellow in 2013. Fred’s current research areas include rural agricultural development, the impact evaluation of projects, ex ante evaluation of biotechnology, household welfare analysis, and natural resource governance.

Dzodzi Tsikata

Dzodzi Tsikata is Research Professor (development sociology) and has been the Director of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Ghana since August 2016. Before this, she was based at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) during which time she was Deputy Director and Director of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (CEGENSA) at the University of Ghana. She holds a Ph.D. (cum laude) in Social Science from Leiden University in the Netherlands (2003). Before then, she was awarded an LL.B. (1984) and M.Phil Sociology (1996) by the University of Ghana and an M.A. Development Studies (1989) by the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, Netherlands.

Daniel Adu Ankrah

Daniel Adu Ankrah is currently lecturer at the department of agricultural extension, University of Ghana. Daniel holds a PhD in Livelihoods (International Development and applied economics) from the University of Reading, UK. He is a rural agricultural development expert and agribusiness specialist with over 10 years of experience in rural development, agribusiness management, micro-enterprise establishment and management. His areas of interest and research include food security and agricultural value chain analysis.