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 industryItem From farmer participation to pro-poor seed markets: The political economy of commercial cereal seed networks in Ghana(IDS Bulletin, 2011-07) Amanor, K.S.The current agricultural policy discourse in Ghana emphasises 'pro-poor market' approaches to seeds and input delivery systems by creating public-private partnerships and an enabling environment for agri-business. This has resulted in a particular configuration of actors and interests that define the country's emerging Green Revolution agenda, of which certified seed is a critical component. This article draws on the results of a political economic analysis of Ghana's cereal seed system to examine how influential alliances of public and private actors have constructed a particular vision of the future of agriculture in the country which serves a narrow set of political interests and constrains local innovation and opportunity in the seed sector. It highlights how this universalising 'consensus' is acting to close down efforts to establish more pluralistic, participatory approaches in favour of a single, dominant, commercially oriented model of agricultural development. © 2011 The Author. IDS Bulletin © 2011 Institute of Development Studies.Item Family values, land sales and agricultural commodification in South-Eastern Ghana(Africa, 2010-02) Amanor, K.S.It is argued that land shortage and the decline of new frontier areas results in increasing conflicts over rights to land and to labour. This constrains land sales and agricultural land becomes increasingly transferred though sharecropping and the commodification of user rights in land, rather than through the evolution of clearly defined land markets. Smallholder agriculture increasingly becomes an individual undertaking, in which labour is hired, and rights to land are acquired rather than allocated within the family. Agricultural relations of production become increasingly commodified and the moral economy of the family is undermined and increasingly socially differentiated. The article traces historically the emergence of these production relations in south-east Ghana.Item Global food chains, African smallholders and world bank governance(Journal of Agrarian Change, 2009-03) Amanor, K.S.This paper critically examines the World Bank's analysis of the development of agribusiness in Africa in the World Development Report 2008 in relationship to its governance policies, which seek to introduce institutional reforms to promote private and public sector linkages with the participation of civil society. The paper argues that this confuses food chain governance (control over quality and the logistics of production) with democratic governance and essentially promotes oligopolization of the food industry and the interests of the powerful in the name of smallholder farmers. © Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Item Space, time, rhetoric and agricultural change in the transition zone of Ghana(Human Ecology, 2007-02) Amanor, K.S.; Pabi, O.This paper examines change within farming systems in the Brong Ahafo Region in Ghana, and the impact of agricultural modernization and mechanization on the regional economy and local farming systems. It combines anthropological, historical, and remote sensing techniques to document changes in farming practice and land use and land cover. It argues that change is not the product of simple evolutionary sequences of responses to population pressures or adoption of modern technologies, but arises out of a complex set of factors interacting within wider regional economies, which are increasingly commodified and commercialized and subject to global market pressures. These include technical, institutional, market, movements of labor, and transport infrastructure development dimensions, which often create new opportunities for local farmers other than those envisaged in agricultural development policies. Tracing the opening up of the transition zone over the last 40-50 years through the development of state farms and mechanized synthetic agriculture, the paper examines the changing fortunes of farming systems within a radius of 30-40 km from agricultural technology hubs and the implications for models of agricultural development. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006.Item Agricultural markets in West Africa: Frontiers, agribusiness and social differentiation(IDS Bulletin, 2005-06) Amanor, K.S.Agricultural development policies and analyses have sought to reduce direct state intervention in order to promote free markets, yet rarely investigate the nature of African agribusiness and commodity markets. West African history shows a pattern of forest rents, frontier colonisation, boom and bust cycles and limited scope for diversifying production. Food markets present some opportunities, but are also characterised by unequal power in production and exchange State decline has left farmers to obtain technical inputs from private agribusinesses, but often on poor terms that heighten inequality and insecurity. © Institute of Development Studies.Item Global resource grabs, agribusiness concentration and the smallholder: Two West African case studies(Journal of Peasant Studies, 2012-05) Amanor, K.S.This paper places land grabbing within the context of developments within agribusiness within the last 30 years, tracing the various trajectories of increasing competition and concentration and pressures on commodity prices that have resulted in increasing dispossession of smallholders and a move in some agri-food chains towards large estate production. The paper explores the ways in which contemporary agricultural policies and neoliberal market reforms reflect these developments and examines recent framing of land policies in Africa in the context of the development of agrarian capital and agribusiness. Competitiveness results in dispossession of less successful smallholders from below by commercial smallholders, and from above by large estates vertically integrated into agribusiness marketing chains. This is illustrated with examples from the cocoa sector in Côte d'Ivoire and pineapples in Ghana. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.