Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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family land tend to grow intercrops of a variety of food crops of which groundnuts is perhaps the
most important crop and the others are largely grown for self-provisioning. Groundnuts are
important since they can be grown on small areas of land with short fallowing systems. Here, the
most significant category of family land-users are women, who lack the capital to make heavy
investments in agriculture.
The increasing commodification of agriculture adversely affects women with less available
capital to invest in agriculture, who find themselves farming on more marginal land. The
increasing commodification of agriculture also results in more individual farming in which hired
labour becomes important to supplement the labour of the farmer. This can result in women
becoming more dependent upon expending capital on hired labour and gaining less help from
their husbands and male relatives. However, this also enables richer women with capital to farm
in their own right, to gain access to their own independent land and to hire labour to expand the
area they can cultivate and intensify production.
The increasing vagaries of climate, in recent years, has also increased the risk of farming. As a
result of this poorer farmers without surplus capital may tend to minimise risk by engaging less in
commercial “niche” crop production, growing hardier crops, such as groundnuts, cassava,
sorghum, bambara bean, and by engaging in multiple cropping systems. The farms of small
cultivators may contract, as they invest less of their income in the risk of agricultural production
and develop alternative livelihood options to supplement agricultural production. This is
particularly prevalent among youth who do not have capital to farm on a large scale. As a result
of this many male youth go into charcoal production to gain “quick” money. Many women also
combine small scale farming with petty trading.
Among the poorer sections of agrarian settlements in Brong Ahafo are migrants from the Upper
West and Upper East regions of Ghana. Many youth migrate seasonally, working as casual farm
labourers, gaining some capital with which to return to their home towns to develop their own
farming. Isolated settlements of migrant farmers can often be found situated far away from
feeder roads only accessible through remote paths. Farmers in these settlements may often have
fragile rights in the land they are farming. While rents may not be expensive, they may have to
perform some services for the chief from whom they got the land. However, migrants are socially
differentiated and there are many rich migrants farming in Brong Ahafo, who may have made
large investments in agriculture and may have access to large networks of migrant labourers. In
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