Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

Annex 2: 25
Within charcoal producing areas within the northern transition zone these debates about environmental degradation have
become highly politicised, since there are complex struggles over the control of charcoal, and these struggles are articulated
in terms of the destruction of the environment and of forests that result from charcoal production. Patterns of environmental
change differ in the various ecologies of the transition zone. The dynamics of land cover change and its relationship to
farming systems need to be better understood rather than posing deforestation in a general framework.
Different farming systems have different impacts on the regeneration of trees on fallow and farmland. Yam farming depends
upon the regeneration of trees for yam staking, and a process of promoting cutting, pruning and fire control and regeneration.
In contrast with this, high input mechanised agriculture removes all the tree cover through stumping and attempts to maintain
permanent cultivated plots that are free from trees to allow tractor ploughing. The expansion of maize cultivation within the
semi-deciduous forest may also promote removal of tree cover. At Kokoago grasslands and stumped lands are considered
prime lands for cultivation and the remaining secondary forest patches are mainly farmed by women who cannot afford
investments in labour for maize production on grassland.
2.7 Farmer adaptation, innovation, and the agricultural research system
Farming systems within the Brong Ahafo region are complex, dynamic and diverse. Underlying this complexity is the ability
of farmers to adapt to changing conditions which result from changes in the biophysical, market, and policy environments.
While self provisioning is still important for most farmers, all the farming systems we have investigated have cash crop
sectors which focus on producing for a defined market niche in which the farmers have comparative advantage as compared
to farmers in other areas. These niches change with time. In the past, when agricultural policies concentrated on subsidising
and distributing inputs, farmers in the vicinity of state farms and other government agricultural projects took advantage of
their closeness to cheap input delivery services to engage in high input production, stumping and ploughing land and
replacing bush fallow recycling of land with permanent agriculture with inorganic fertilisers and new high yielding seeds.
The main impetus for this was the cheapness of subsidised inputs and government support services and not pressures of land
leading to the breakdown of bush fallowing.
Farmers away from the main centres of state induced agricultural modernisation were also initially interested in the use of
inputs, but found that delivery systems were not reliable and constant. Farmers at Mansie or Weila, for instance, would find
it difficult getting tractors to come to their villages to plough when necessary and they would not be able to get a guaranteed
supply of fertiliser from year to year. Under these conditions of insecure access to inputs, farmers paid more attention to
developing alternative modes of investing in agriculture other than through state controlled inputs. They invested in
significant amounts of hired labour, mainly migrant labour from the Upper West Region 1 , to expand areas under crop
production and to intensify weeding regimes. Thus, the expansion of yam production was made possible by the large number
1 This applies to the Western districts of Brong Ahafo served by the Wa-Wenchi road. In the Eastern parts of Brong Ahafo
and Northern Ashanti, significantly more migrants, using the Bolgatanga,-Tamale-Yeji-Ejura/Techiman or Tamale-
Kintampo-Techiman route would have come from the Upper East and Northern Region.