Beyond the green revolution: reviving time-tested resilient practices for enhanced food security in Ghana’s upper west region through traditional Authorities

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of locally enacted bylaws governing Autonomous resilience Practices (ARP) on the food security of a sample of 700 smallholder farmers in Ghana’s Upper West Region. The research is grounded in the context of the Green Revolution’s inability to address food insecurity for large populations in Africa. The sequential mixed-methods design employed in the study first identified eight prevalent coping strategies for food insecurity among farmers. A pairwise matrix ranking method was used for this task. Subsequently, Poisson regression models were employed to assess how often farmers resorted to these coping strategies when bylaws aimed at protecting the local ecology were enforced. The results reveal highly significant and inverse relationships between increased frequency of implementing local bylaws on ARP and farmers’ frequency of resorting to the eight identified coping strategies for food security. The results underscore the significance of grassroots-level solutions to the shortcomings of the current food system, which produces surplus food but fails to adequately nourish a substantial proportion of the global population