Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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4.1.8 Main circuits for land acquisition
These include:
! Family land - land on which families claim rights through constant cultivation, including the
right to pass land on by inheritance.
! Rights of spouses - usually due to women working on land made available by their husbands,
on marriage.
! Clearance rights over community land - individual rights claimed through ‘first clearance’;
these may be converted into family land over time.
! User rights - rights temporarily ceded to another farmer for use, and acknowledged through
some sort of token payment.
! Rights given by chiefs - usually to migrants, without existing rights; some prestation has to be
made to the chief, as wall an annual payment, probably in cash and kind.
! Hiring of land – leasing of land for monetary rents; this becomes more attractive as land
becomes scarcer - rights given by chiefs may well gradually be converted into leaseholds in
such situations; the land may be hired for one year or more, depending on the cropping cycle;
! Sharecropping – also emerges with increasing scarcity of land, and is more common than
leasing in the semi-deciduous forest areas; sharecropping arrangements in the Brong Ahafo
are mostly of the abunu and abusa type (respectively, the landlord retaining a half or third of
the production), possibly in the same farm or even (as applied to different crops) field.
! Squatting – is found on state farms and forest reserves.
The dominant forms of land access in the study areas are evident from Figure 4.3 and Table 4.3.
From these it will be seen that:
a) About 50% of farmers gain access to land through family ties.
b) In the northern transition zone, farmers can also gain access to uncultivated community/stool
land (20% have access to community land; see particularly Weila and Mansie).
c) Clearing uncultivated bush is also fairly common in Nsawkaw, less so in Subinso, though this
may reflect the high proportion of migrants in the latter settlement.
d) Women often gain access to land through spouses or affines.
e) 14% of women in the sample gained land through their spouses or affines, though there is
significant local variation in this, with the highest proportions in the land abundant northern
settlements.
f) Women’s dependence on their spouses is primarily a reflection of access to labour; women in
the northern areas, lack access to sufficient labour for land clearance, and are forced to make
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