Introduction

1998).The proposition behind these studies is clear: African farmers are responsive to price, and providing farmers with adequate price incentives is a prerequisite for a production increase.Although this aspect of incentives is important, regarding price as the sole explanatory factor is far from satisfactory in understanding the complex realities of agricultural production in rural Africa.As the proponents of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) 1 have emphasized, "markets interact through many channels besides prices and incomes" (Hoff, Braverman, and Stiglitz 1993, p. 17; italics in original).Many non-price market interactions such as informal land markets governed by customary law and exchanges based on various social networks are also important in understanding the actual transactions we observe in rural societies.This is not to deny the importance of price incentives.But such incentives need to be placed in wider incentive structures embedded in the complex interactions among local institutions.The first purpose of this book is to clarify how various non-price factors, such as indigenous land tenure systems and gender relations, influence the production incentives of individual farmers.Based on the data derived from fieldwork in the 1990s, the study argues that the role of price incentive in agricultural production needs to be reconsidered by placing it in wider incentive structures embedded in local institutions.The second purpose of this book is to contribute to an understanding of historical changes in cocoa production by Ghanaian smallholders.Cocoa production, which is a century-old industry in Ghana, was the subject of numerous pioneering studies between the 1940s and the early 1970s (