ghana climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessment

crop fallow would have to be accompanied by increasing mechanization to replace the labor needed to farmthe larger acreages.The agricultural sector has been a major driver of poverty reduction, almost exclusively dominating thelivelihoods of rural households. Smallholder farmers, who cultivate 1-2 ha plots of land, produce 80 percentof the country’s agricultural output. The two most important cash crops for smallholders are maize andcocoa. Additional, albeit less lucrative, foods grown by smallholders include cassava, yam, plantain, cocoyam,and various fruits and vegetables. The remaining 20 percent of agricultural production comes from largerscale industrial plantations that produce palm oil, cotton, rubber, sugar cane, and tobacco. Raising livestock isanother important activity engaged in by >60 percent of households. Chicken is the most commonly rearedanimal (30 percent of households), along with goats (18 percent), sheep (11 percent), cattle (4 percent), andother poultry, including ducks, turkeys, and guinea fowl. A few households raise pigs, grasscutter (cane rats),and rabbits.Fish provide 40-60 percent of the protein in the Ghanaian diet, and fisheries contribute about 4.5 percent tothe national GDP. The fishing industry in Ghana is based primarily on a large marine fishery, and to a lesserbut important extent, on inland or freshwater fisheries and aquaculture. The Volta Lake impoundment, otherreservoirs, aquaculture, and coastal lagoons are the sources of inland or freshwater fish. Even withoutconsideration of climate change, clear evidence is available of over-exploitation of the marine fishery and atleast anecdotal evidence is available of declining fisheries in Lake Volta and Lake Botsumtwi. On the coast,overfishing of marine stocks is obvious and acknowledged by local fishers; however, the root causes are notclear. Foreign and reportedly domestic trawlers using illegal pair trawling and both inshore purse seiners andtraditional canoe fishers using lights at night to attract fish deplete all sizes of fishes, and trawling is reportedlydegrading the bottom habitat for fishes. Likewise, traditional fishers are unsustainably harvesting near shorestocks using unselective methods and evidence suggests they are fishing down existing stocks (e.g., depletingall but the smallest sizes and species). Traditional fishers report they are catching smaller, fewer fishes despiteincreased fishing effort and going farther out to sea to fish.Continued expansion of the canoe fleet is also associated with fishery declines. The traditional fishers attemptto manage the fishery by limiting by traditional means the number of craft operating on a given day. Thepossible role of the loss or degradation of mangroves as breeding and rearing habitat should be investigated.Fisheries are under tremendous pressure, facing collapse, unless the government is ready to seriously monitorand regulate the resource. Any solution will involve a drastic cut in catch size and a reduction of the fishingseason. This means individuals that depend on the fisheries will need to find employment elsewhere. Reduceddomestic fish production seems to be likely, whether it is caused by collapse of the fisheries from overfishing,increased regulation in an attempt to avoid a collapse, climate change effects, or a combination of thesefactors. The unexplored question is how this critical protein source will be replaced in the Ghanaian diet andhow will it impact nutrition and food security?Although growth rates in agricultural production have slowed since the 1980s, they have been positive, butfor most crops growth came from increases in the area harvested not from productivity gains. Rice and milletwere exceptions. For maize, substantial differences exist in regions of the country, both in terms of averagegrowth rates and the share of growth resulting from increasing the area under cultivation (extensification)versus improving yields per ha (intensification). Extensification has caused significant environmental damage(deforestation, desertification, and soil erosion) and is clearly unsustainable. Meeting the ambitious goals ofthe GoG for increased agricultural productivity will be challenging; intervention is needed to set agricultureon a different development trajectory.Commercialization of maize and rice production requires increased land security in order to motivate farmersto invest in technology and inputs. Commercialization of maize production already has led to changes in theland tenure patterns and a tendency to preferentially allocate land to large-scale commercial farmers. Pressureon the available land resource has already intensified conflict in the northern savanna zone. For example,conflicts have arisen between farmers and herdsmen on the alluvial plains; in other areas, land fallowed byone family has been reallocated to another family. Transforming rice cropping in the northern savanna zone6 GHANA CLIMATE CHANGE VULNERABILITY AND ADAPTATION ASSESSMENT