Cocoa, Community and the Politics of Belonging in the Aowin Suaman District in the Western Region of Ghana 1962-2008.

Abstract

Research interests in the agrarian sector in West Africa in the last two or three decades have paid attention to analysing the economic and socio-political impact on indigene-settler farmer relations as well as how these have raised issues of integration and the politics of belonging. Research interests and approaches on West Africa on the larger agrarian and political economy addressed themselves to issues of conflict resolution and failed states with a few focusing on the political economy of these conflicts. There were those that also concentrated on issues such as land reform, environmental management, food security, and indigenous technology, the long term dynamism in the agro-food system on a global stage, and also, on the dynamics in the socio-economic change at the local level, thus addressing problems such as semi-proletarianisation and re-peseantation, rural-urban linkages, and gender relations. However, issues of landlessness, land centered conflicts, and belonging and the politics of belonging largely hanged outside the focus of these studies. Landlessness has over the past two to three decades been one of the principal causes of violent conflicts in contemporary Ghana and neighbouring countries like Cote d’Ivoire. This has also resulted into the victimisation, forced or self-imposed exile of settler farmers from their host communities. Central to these crises is the issue of accumulation, property and power on the one hand, and socio-political and economic marginalisation on the other. This marginality finds new expression in the quest of the indigenes for political exclusion of economic migrants in partisan politics, especially during election periods, which are also used as covered ups to vent their resentment and apprehension against the settler farmer. This study therefore undertakes a socio-historical examination of the relationship between indigenous people and settler farmers in rural communities in Ghana during 1962-2008. The study examines the politics that is associated with cocoa farming in rural communities in Ghana. It focuses on competition and conflicts centered on land, social inequality and contestation over belonging, local citizenship and electoral politics. The study thus explores the dynamics of accumulation and impacts of investment in cocoa farming on the commodification of land and relations between migrants who acquire land and indigenes who allocate land and in the end suffer from landlessness. The study also examines the implications of this for social and political relations in rural communities in Ghana. The study demonstrates that scarcity in land as well as conflicts across ethnicities within rural communities do not arise as a result of outright sales of land only. The study thus argues that not all land related conflicts are autochthon conflicts, and that the historical peculiarities of a community coupled with lax traditional institutions are also alternative explanatory factors that lead to landlessness and conflicts in communities.