ghana climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessment

of credit or attract potential investors, reducing agricultural productivity. Furthermore, tentative and changingterms of tenure lead to uncertain, and therefore shorter, planning horizons. Short-term planning is less likelyto entail large investments in productive assets or new technologies, as there is little opportunity for thetenant to capture any benefits from long-term investments. The same is true for investments in tree plantingand sustainable forestry. Tenants are much more likely to maximize profits in the short term to ensure thatthey do not lose their investment. Thus, insecure tenure often leads to land degradation and is economicallyunsustainable in the long term (Place and Hazell 1993; Lopez 1995; Hayes et al. 1997; Place & Migot-Adholla1998).Land scarcity and disputes over family land were less common survey responses, but are likely to becomelarger problems in the future and may be locally important. For each successive generation available farmlandis reduced, either through processes of commercialization and urbanization, or by the natural fragmentationand parcelization that occurs when land is split between family members. The resulting smaller and noncontinuousplots will not provide for productive livelihoods unless more land is made available. This isalready a problem in cocoa farming regions of the South. A study conducted in 1963 began suggesting that inmany cases fragmentation and parcelization had occurred to the extent that remaining linear strips forfarming were not economically viable (Hunter 1963). “With the depletion of virgin forest land in Ghana [as aresult of the rapid expansion of cocoa cultivation] it [became] difficult for farmers to acquire more land fortheir children.” (Benneh 1970: 206). This process is threatening to repeat itself in the Western Region ascocoa farming expands, and in the North.SOCIALLY VULNERABLE GROUPSEven in a well functioning customary system, access to land through inheritance or other means is based onpower and social connections, which can limit access for certain groups or individuals based on their positionin society. Acquiring a plot of land requires an abundance of social, political, and (most limiting) financialcapital, assets not readily available to all members of society. In Ghana, “productive lands for growingcommercial crops are denied to the less powerful in society such as widows, women, and migrants when theydo not possess the backing of powerful men.” (Yaro & Zackaria 1996, 6).Women in particular have a difficult time accessing land. Ghanaian culture is arranged to allow for theeconomic productivity of men, while women are expected to be domestically productive. “Women are notsupposed to be as economically productive as men are, and even if they are, men control their resources…This explains why Ghanaian society seems to invest more inheritance rights [to land] on men than women”(Gedzi, 2009: 2). Women are therefore considered to be a part of their husband’s economic unit – a wife’sclaim to her husband’s property is limited or nonexistent (Runger 2006). In the absence of a husband, awoman is left to rely on her father, her brother, or her son (if she is a widow).Farmers that are not attached to a land owning family (farmers who cannot trace their lineage back to a plotof land) also experience difficulty obtaining land. Typically, they are forced to work as sharecroppers, ormarry into a family with a lineage that provides access to land.Often, the primary asset of socially marginalized groups is their relatively cheap and readily available labor,which is somewhat useless without land on which to turn that labor into a living. “In Ghana, whereas sharecontracts were a means by which land-poor but labor-rich households could gain access to a plot, thoseseeking sharecrop land must now put forward a significant fee in order to gain access.” (Amanor 2001). Lowcostlabor is not enough on its own to build a bridge out of poverty; it demands access to land in order to betransformed into useful capital. If trends in land tenure persist, and access to land is denied to the sociallymarginalizedand poverty-stricken members of society, the poverty cycle in Ghana will persist (Akoto et al.2006).50 GHANA CLIMATE CHANGE VULNERABILITY AND ADAPTATION ASSESSMENT