Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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Systems perspectives have dominated agricultural research, with population growth seen as the
main motor for change. Such perspectives tend to regard bush fallowing as an outmoded system
which needs to be replaced by more environmentally friendly technologies, such as:
" More intensive cultivation using inputs to limit the area under agricultural cultivation, to
allow higher yields to be produced in smaller land areas, and enable larger areas to be
preserved as forests, woodlands, and recreational areas;
" Use of green manures to promote better soil recycling, improved fallowing, shorter fallowing
or permanent cultivation to enable more intensive and sustainable crop production in limited
areas and allow for preservation of forest and woodland areas;
" Promotion of agroforestry systems to promote soil conservation, improved recycling of land
and permanent cultivation in hedgerows systems such as alley cropping to enable more
intensive and sustainable cropping from limited areas, preservation of trees and allow for
preservation of more forests and woodlands.
The justification for the new technologies is often located in grand narratives of environmental
crisis, requiring new interventions and new technologies. These narratives tend to encourage
narrow commodity-focused programmes with only a limited acknowledgement of the wider
setting.
Since research does not focus on the internal dynamics of farming systems, it tends to present the
findings of commodity programmes as the solution to complex problems, with insufficient
acknowledgement of their social-economic and political dimensions.
Little funding is available to support independent critical research. Such research as does occur
tends to be conceived within the dominant paradigm. Thus, the major demonstration trials and
government service recommendations concern crops in which research services have developed a
comparative advantage. However, these do not necessarily coincide with crops grown by farmers
nor support their dominant strategies. Two illustrative cases – Mucuna trials and the root and
tuber programme – are reviewed in Annex 2.7.
4.1.19 Poverty and agricultural development
Since the early 1980s complex adaptations and responses to policy processes have occurred in
farming systems in Brong Ahafo. These are partly in response to neo-liberal economic policies.
Prior to the adoption of structural adjustment agricultural services were concerned with input
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