Family values, land sales and agricultural commodification in South-Eastern Ghana

Abstract

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.