Institute of African Studies
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Item Contradictions between commercializing seeds, empowering smallholders farmers, and promoting biodiversity in Ghana: Seed policy within a historical framework(Elementa Science of Anthropocene, 2024) Amanor, K.S.This article critically examines the agricultural development agenda of promoting commercialization and sustainable intensification and contrasts this with farmers’ own priorities, with case studies drawn from the maize and cocoa sectors in Ghana. The study investigates the relationship between agricultural development paradigms, seed breeding strategies, and the commercialization of agriculture from the 1950s to present. It returns to the debates of farming systems research, the appropriation of the agricultural varieties of farmers within the South by Northern agribusiness, and Paul Richards’ framework of an Indigenous African agricultural revolution rooted in the experimental traditions of farmers to establish a critical framework for examining the commodification of seeds. It focuses on the contradictions between maintaining biodiversity, fashioning high-yielding proprietary seeds, and promoting farmer participation that became manifest in the framework of farming systems research. It argues that commercial pressures have prioritized yields and the protection of proprietary varieties over biodiversity in policy frameworks. This contrast with farmers’ own concerns with adapting varieties to the conditions on their farms through their own experimentation, and maintaining a diversity of changing genetic materials including those drawn from certified varieties. This enables farmers to hedge against risk, disease, and pest attacks, while selecting varietal materials that optimize yields in the particular agroecological conditions of their farms. Although social participation is still upheld as an important value in liberal market agrarian policies, there has been a significant transformation in its usage. It no longer denotes farmer participation in the design of and experimentation with technology, but participation in the consumption of the agricultural products of agribusiness or in the agricultural technology treadmill. This contribution examines the implication of smallholder agricultural commercialization for biodiversity and for the dynamism and vitality of local farming systems.Item Tractors, states, markets and agrarian change in Africa(Taylor & Francis Group, 2022) Cabral, L.; Amanor, K.S.Mechanisation has made a comeback to agricultural policy in Africa, encouraging scholars to revisit seminal literature on induced innovation. Recent studies emphasise the role for markets in addressing Africa’s mechanisation gaps and warn about past government failures to be avoided. The trust in the ability of markets to offer optimal solutions is debatable. Markets are shaped, as states are, by the interests of their most powerful players. A history-informed analysis of mechanisation and agrarian change in Africa sheds light onto how states and markets are co-constituted. The much-hyped rise in demand of tractors by medium-scale farmers can be linked back to earlier government intervention. And today’s public-private partnerships for mechanisation services illustrate how private interests shape public policy. Top-down tractor programmes continue to largely bypass smallholder farmers, though some are able to benefit. Though tractors are only one element of a complex story of agrarian change in Africa, they illustrate the enduring process of commodification of land, farming and agrarian relations that benefits the few and subjugates the many.Item Old tractors, new policies and induced technological transformation: agricultural mechanisation, class formation, and market liberalisation in Ghana(Taylor & Francis Group, 2022) Amanor, K.S.; Iddrisu, A.This article examines the recent uptake of tractor ploughing services in northern Ghana. It examines the historical continuities in mechanisation and the emergence of a class of medium-scale commercial farmers. In the light of this, it questions the thesis that the recent uptake of mechanisation and emergence of medium scale farmers reflects the successes of market liberalisation. It is critical of neoclassical theories of agricultural transformation rooted in theories of induced innovation and argues for a political economy approach that links agricultural transformation to processes of social differentiation and the historical role of the state in promoting agricultural commercialisation.Item Transnational corporations, financialization and community development in West African cocoa(Oxford University Press, 2021) Amanor, K.S.This article examines the role of financial capital in the cocoa industry of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. It argues that the processes of structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s brought two important elements into play. Firstly, transnational corporations taking advantage of the opening of global markets to gain control over the cocoa sector, and secondly, financial institutions promoting ‘country platforms’ that encouraged public–private partnerships to mobilize foreign investments and define development objectives. This has led to a distinct pattern of investment, which is intimately connected with governance reforms underpinned by a diverse set of public and private alliances at different levels. The article traces these alliances which have given rise to community development programmes. However, these programmes are underpinned by a drive towards greater intensification of production through the use of inputs supported by credit, which threatens to entangle farmers in debt and lock them into the poverty inherent in the cocoa industry