Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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! Where densities are higher, the additional labour has been applied to more intensive use of
land (though not necessarily as a response to land shortage per se).
In neither case has viable agriculture developed in line with predictions.
4.1.4 The Small Farmer in Policy Discourse
One of the consequences of this failure has been an inability to develop the capacity to challenge
the dominant environmental narratives. Thus, presumptions as to the cultural backwardness of the
small farmer community continue to dominate the arenas of national policy making, and block a
more creative engagement with a dynamic economy.
While the problems of ‘modern agriculture’ in Ghana should have promoted a more critical
approach, recent environmental rhetoric has acted in a contrary direction, and the policies of
cultural modernisation have only been reinforced. These environmental policies have, moreover,
imbued the dominant narrative with an added moral dimension which has had the effects of both
criminalizing established farming practices (such as bush burning), and elevating donor-friendly
alternatives (for example, teak and cashew production) onto a morally superior environmental
plane. Ironically, extensive tree plantations may well end up mirroring the land hoarding
strategies of the mechanisation era, to the detriment of the small farmer majority. Like stumping
and ploughing, tree plantations tend to be seen as a strategy to alienate land and secure it for the
long term.
4.1.5 Fallowing and Permanent Cultivation.
Much of the rhetoric on agricultural modernisation contends that population growth creates
pressures on fallowing systems because of its effects on land quality. Rising population pressure
leads to shortened fallows, and this in turn leads to short cycles which prevent soils recycling
sufficiently. This creates a downward spiral of impoverished soils with insufficient resting
periods before cultivation.
Data collected for this study presents a more complex picture. Medium fallows of between 3-6
years prevail in the Brong Ahafo transition area, with 31 percent of farmers using longer fallows
of over 7 years and 10 percent fallowing for over 10 years. While there is evidence of farmers
responding to land shortage in certain areas by using shorter fallows (as at Buoku where 37
percent of plots are being fallowed for periods of between 1-2 years), adoption of intensive
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