![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
Abstract
Drawing on postcolonial literature and theories of farmer resistance, this article provides an empirically based alternative explanation of African farmer behaviours to narratives that blame them for their lack of technology adoption. Based on six months of ethnographic immersion in one district in the Northern Region of Ghanaa, we identify the ways that farmers defy commercial agriculture investment, government services and non-governmental organisation (NGO) project interventions aimed at intensification, and describe their reasons for doing so. This study interprets farmers’ acts of defiance, such as side-selling or falsely weighting their products, as insights into everyday acts of resistance. We find that throughout Ghana’s postcolonial period, agriculture intensification policy and practice have produced an environment where various development actors and farmers have both a sense of entitlement and mistrust of each other. Farmers’ acts of sabotage may be spaces where they make rational choices based on experiences of historical antecedence, including decades of failed development projects, elite corruption and mismanagement, degrading ecologies and donor hegemony.
Funding
This work was supported by the Africa Institute and the Faculty of Social Science at Western University; the International Development Research Centre; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and the Vanier-Banting Secretariat of Canada.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Isaac Luginaah for his thoughtful comments on drafts of this manuscript. Most of all, we would like to show appreciation to those at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Ghana and all of the farmers and others who assisted with this research.
Notes
1. Moseley, Schnurr, and Bezner Kerr, “Interrogating the Technocratic (Neoliberal) Agenda”; Vercillo et al., “New Alliance for Food Security.”
2. Moseley, Schnurr, and Bezner Kerr, “Interrogating the Technocratic (Neoliberal) Agenda.”
3. Vercillo et al., “New Alliance for Food Security.”
4. Luginaah et al., “Environment, Migration and Food Security.”
5. Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development; McEwan, Postcolonialism and Development; Radcliffe, “Development and Geography.”
6. Gupta, Postcolonial Developments, 6.
7 Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Akram-Lodhi and Kay, Peasants and Globalization; Colburn, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance; Patel, “Food Sovereignty.”
8 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
9 Akram-Lodhi and Kay, Peasants and Globalization.
10 Vercillo et al., “New Alliance for Food Security.”
11 Hatanaka, Bain, and Busch, “Differentiated Standardization, Standardized Differentiations.”
12 Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations.
13 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
14. Borras, “Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies,” 10.
15. Bello, Food Wars.
16 Goody, “Rice Burning and the Green Revolution”; Awanyo, “Labor, Ecology, and a Failed Agenda”; Yaro, “The Poor Peasant.”
17 Peters, “Inequality and Social Conflict over Land.”
18. Akram-Lodhi and Kay, Peasants and Globalization; and Bernstein, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change.
19. Peters, “Inequality and Social Conflict over Land,” 285.
20. Bryceson, Women Wielding the Hoe.
21. Whitehead, “I’m Hungry, Mum”; Apusigah, “Gendered Politics of Farm Household Production.”
22. Akoto, “Agricultural Development Policy in Ghana.”
23. Amanor, “From Farmer Participation to Pro-Poor Seed Markets.”
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner Kerr, “Political Ecology of High-Input Agriculture.”
27. Goody, “Rice Burning and the Green Revolution.”
28. Ibid.
29. Akoto, “Agricultural Development Policy in Ghana.”
30. Gibbon, “African Agriculture under Structural Adjustment.”
31. Ibid.
32. Ragasa, Lambrecht, and Kufoalor, “Limitations of Contract Farming as a Pro-Poor Strategy.”
33. Akoto, “Planting for Food and Jobs.”
34. Aning and Abdallah, “Islamic Radicalisation and Violence”; Mine et al., Preventing Violent Conflict in Africa.
35. Yaro, “Perception of and Adaption to Climate Variability.”
36. Ghana Statistical Service, 2010 Population and Housing Census.
37. Codjoe, Atidoh, and Burkett, “Gender and Occupational Perspectives on Adaptation”; and Laube, Schraven, and Awo, “Smallholder Adaptation to Climate Change.”
38. Awanyo, “Labor, Ecology, and a Failed Agenda”; and Ferguson, Anti-Politics Machine.
39. Watts, “Silent Violence.”
40. Baxter and Eyles, “Evaluating Qualitative Research.”
41. Vercillo et al., “New Alliance for Food Security.”
42. Citi FM Online, “Minority to Deputy Agric Minister.”
43. Bello, Food Wars.
44. Hardin, Trust; Hoffman, Building Trust:Overcoming Suspicion; Hosking, Trust: A History; and Kohn, Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good.
45. Fukuyama, “Social Capital, Civil Society and Development”; Giddens, “Consequences of Modernity”; and Sztompka, Trust: A Sociological Theory.
46. Lyon, “Trust, Networks and Norms,” 664.
47. Ibid.
48. Ferguson, Anti-Politics Machine.
49. Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development.
50. Gupta, Postcolonial Developments.
51. Ferguson, Anti-Politics Machine.
52. Cooke and Kothari, Participation: The New Tyranny?; Cornwall, “Historical Perspectives on Participation in Development”; and Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development;
53. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments.
*. The name of the specific district sampled will remain confidential to protect participants involved in this study.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Siera Vercillo
Siera Vercillo The corresponding author is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She holds a PhD in Geography from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests include gender, feminism, dietary transitions, food security, farming, development and political ecology in sub-Saharan Africa. She also has degrees from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and the University of Toronto. [email protected]
Miriam Hird-Younger
Miriam Hird-Younger is a PhD student and Vanier Scholar in Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Miriam’s research critically examines trust in the development sector in Ghana. She is a graduate associate of the Centre for Critical Development Studies and a junior fellow of Massey College. [email protected]