Access or exclusion to land: An overview of evolving trends in cocoa landscapes in Ghana

This paper employs historical trends and perspectives of key cocoa sector actors to understand the evolving patterns of land access within Ghana’s cocoa landscapes. Primary data was collected through focus group discussions, questionnaires administered to cocoa farmers, and key informant interviews with farmers, cocoa extension agents and landowners on how access to land is evolving, and the responses of these actors to the dynamics around land access. We found that there is a shift from perceived long-term right-based access mechanisms such as customary law freehold (which includes gift and purchase) and usufructuary (use right for indigenes) to short-term structural and relational access mechanisms such as share contract arrangements (including sharecropping and land rental). Currently, both indigenes and migrants compete for these relational access mechanisms which were once predominantly associated with only migrant farmers. These shifting access dynamics have also led to modification of existing land access strategies, with landowners pursuing re-negotiation arrangements after a fixed term for farmers to retain access to their lands. The evolving access dynamics have triggered a range of responses, including existing migrant farmers’ resistance to renegotiated fixed terms to maintain land access, farmers refusal to rehabilitate old and moribund cocoa farms (as a means to secure their land under cocoa farming), and the emergence of unconventional practices such as sub-letting farms to other farmers and encroachment into forest reserves. Based on the findings of this study, we argue that current land access trends benefit landowners and new migrants over existing migrants, due to difficulties in complying with renegotiated terms, with a further risk of excluding vulnerable groups, such as relatively poor farmers, women and youth.