ghana climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessment

AGRICULTUREAgriculture dominates the Ghanaian economy in terms of income, employment, food security, and exportearnings. Performance of the sector, however, has lagged other segments of the economy at rates lower thangrowth in GDP. Positive growth rates within the agriculture sector come primarily from cocoa productionand marketing. The livestock, fisheries and food crops sub-sectors, on the other hand, have not shown anyappreciable improvements. Nevertheless, modernization of the agriculture sector is expected to be animportant driver of growth in the medium-term on the basis of improved productivity; the growth goalscannot be met by simply expanding land under cultivation (Breisinger, Diao et al. 2008). The Government ofGhana considers agricultural modernization as a pre-condition for the structural transformation of theeconomy and the sustainable reduction in the incidence of poverty. Central to this strategy are improvementsin food crop production and expansion of cash crops with a heavy reliance on transforming smallholderfarmers by increasing their market orientation (Chamberlin 2007).The dominance of rain-fed agriculture in Africa makes its population vulnerable to climate change,particularly warmer temperatures and lowered rainfall, and some countries are more vulnerable than others(Kurukulasuriya, Mendelsohn et al. 2006; Dasgupta and Baschieri 2010). Additional constraints (diseaseburden, debt burden, political instability, and conflict) reduce the adaptive capacity and increase thevulnerability of rural populations (Challinor, Wheeler et al. 2007; Brown and Crawford 2008). Generally,however, African countries lag the rest of the world in adopting agricultural innovations, such as high-yieldingcrop varieties and capital intensive technologies such as irrigation (Evenson and Gollin 2003; Kurukulasuriya,Mendelsohn et al. 2006). Even as climate-neutral innovations could improve the lot of farmers currently andpossibly increase their resilience in the face of future climate conditions, agricultural intensification could leadto other vulnerabilities. Intensification that led to higher incomes would likely attract migrants using lessadapted methods that resulted in degradation, especially at climate zone margins (Geist, Lambin et al. 2006).SMALLHOLDERSThe commonly held view of agriculture in Ghana is that smallholders predominate, with about 90 percent offarm holdings 2 ha).58 GHANA CLIMATE CHANGE VULNERABILITY AND ADAPTATION ASSESSMENT