Agrarian livelihoods under siege: Carbon forestry, tenure constraints and the rise of capitalist forest enclosures in Ghana

Drawing on theoretical insights from agrarian political economy, and based on empirical research in the High Forest Zone of Ghana using in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper examined the context-specific but often less highlighted impacts of REDD+-based carbon forest development activities on local agrarian livelihoods. We find that although REDD+ intends to align local communities to benefit financially for contributions to carbon forestry, its uptake in the Ghanaian context has created entry points for the displacement of smallholder farmers through unregulated profit-driven and restrictive plantation-style carbon forest activities. This yields landless smallholder farmers whose labour is craftily integrated into a capitalist carbon forestry regime as tree planters, with many others striving to reproduce themselves through exploitative sharecropping arrangements and corrupt ‘backdoor’ land deals. We emphasize that, ‘more than carbon’ accumulation engendered by REDD+ is fast moving beyond land grabs to a more complex dimension in which the labour and financial resources of marginalized groups are further appropriated by forest investors, and their relatively powerful counterparts in what we term intimate exploitation. Given the ongoing plight of smallholder farmers, particularly the multitude of ‘hungry’ migrant farmers who seek ‘salvation’ in the High Forest Zone, it is obvious that REDD+ is pushed at the expense of ensuring food security. To sustainably address current land-related agricultural production bottlenecks and empower local communities to directly benefit from REDD+, we recommend that rather than centralizing both carbon rights and land rights in the hands of the state and a few private investors, community forestlands should be returned to local people under community-led forest management approaches. Local control of both land and carbon stocks will promote sustainable coexistence of smallholder agriculture and carbon forestry.