Labor, Ecology, and a Failed Agenda of Market Incentives: The Political Ecology of Agrarian Reforms in Ghana

In spite of comprehensive market-based reforms and expanding economic incentives to engage in agricultural activities in Ghana, average agricultural growth between 1985 and 1995 remained stagnant at 2 percent per annum, far below the World Bank’s anticipated 4 percent annual growth. Based on an in-depth and primarily qualitative study of a sample of more than 200 farmers in the Berekum District of Ghana over the period 1985 – 1995, this article addresses the question of the slow growth in agriculture. The study investigates which farmers are able to expand production under the conditions of economic reform, and why. In addressing this problem, this article focuses at the point of production and employs a regional political-ecology perspective to indicate how the economic behavior of farmers–the focus of agricultural reforms–is inextricably bound to the culture, politics, and ecology of production within which farmers are embedded. More specifically, the discussion seeks to show that expansion in production extends beyond the influence of the reform’s production incentives and is contingent upon farmers’ varying ability to use custom and power to negotiate successfully for the critical resource of labor. Such access to labor, this article argues, is needed to meet the formidable challenge and to manage the menace presented particularly by the dominant C. odorata plant species and its ecology of notorious weeds and bushes. By stressing the labor processes of production, this article reflects on ways in which–to borrow Fairhead and Leach’s (1996, 8) phrase–‘ecological phenomena are ‘socialised’ and social phenomena ‘ecologised’’ to shape the outcome of agricultural production.