The last five decades have witnessed significant inflows of donor assistance from the international donor community to support rural livelihoods and development in Ghana. However, after 50 years of consistent aid to Ghana, donor assistance has not fared as expected to improve farmers’ livelihoods and agricultural productivity.
Using the modernisation theory as the basis of the study, this article examines how urbanisation, urban growth, and access to and security of rights to land affect the utility of development aid for farmers’ livelihoods.
The setting is among the pineapple farmers at Nsawam in the Eastern Region of Ghana.
Relying on the qualitative research approach, data gathered reveal that because of urbanisation pressures, farmers’ rights to their lands are threatened by economic and political powers with stakes in farmers’ lands, such that farmers at all times attempt to find alternative livelihoods, even with development aid.
Thus, the study concludes that when farmers’ major assets are threatened, they do not necessarily seek to sustain current livelihoods. Rather, they constantly seek alternative ones, a finding that should inform sustainable livelihood analysis to better understand farmers’ perspectives and meet their expectations about their own livelihoods. The study advocates ‘livelihood transience’ as an expanded and integral form of livelihood analysis. This expanded notion should not replace the current focus on ‘sustainable livelihood’, but rather complement it.
Foreign aid; farmers; livelihood; rural farmers; Ghana; pineapple farmers.
Support for farmers and the promotion of livelihood among the poor in society is very significant for the donor community in Ghana. Three decades of political turbulence, which characterised the country between 1966 and 1992, plunged the Ghanaian economy into stale economic growth and development. The worsening economic outlook of the country attracted significant donor resources into the country to bridge these development gaps (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]
Foreign development aid is the transfer of resources from donor nations to needy countries. These donor resources can also be considered as international transfer of capital, goods and services to needy nations (Ekiring
Ghana’s touted era of hope, however, witnessed average national economic performance and increased decentralised democracy, where local governments led the process of rural development and support for rural livelihoods. In this context, under the conviction of the international donor community that aid can work for Ghana, the country witnessed an unprecedented level of more than US$1306.93 million in aid inflows (OECD
The concept of livelihood pervades a number of disciplines, theoretical works and development practice targeting poverty reduction (Krantz
The focus on poor and rural people’s livelihoods dominates the programmes and projects of most aid providers. These agencies are not the focus in this article, but it is necessary to mention them here to create a quick mental image of the importance that development aid programmes between Ghana and donor communities attach to the livelihoods of rural people. Although methodological weaknesses of how to identify poverty and the poor remain (Krantz
Livelihood analysis and development practice highlight assets or capital resources as a major component of livelihoods for the poor. Assets for livelihood may take different forms of tangible capital stock or endowments such as land, equipment, technology, cash and other materials, or intangible resources (Ellis
In view of the power dynamics that affect assets of farmers, in this article farmers’ access to and security over their assets, and their livelihood strategies will be analysed under the presumption that to make a living or to develop a livelihood may not necessarily mean permanent contentment with a particular kind of livelihood. Farmers’ strategies may be aimed at changing their livelihoods over time. The dominant analysis of livelihood in the literature, however, is that sustainable livelihood approaches commonly construct target people as ‘poor’. Such a construction obscures attention on strategies that poor people adopt to find alternative livelihoods, or even progression away to find completely different forms of livelihood. The point of departure in this article, therefore, is that it is true that people strategise on their livelihoods, but most often they do not intend to only sustain them. Rather, poor people by their strategies also constantly attempt to move out of their current livelihoods to alternative ones, if circumstances provide opportunities for them to do so, and/or if their assets are threatened. Thus, the notion of livelihood in this article is that current livelihood strategies may actually be aimed at finding alternative livelihoods that people perceive to serve their needs better.
The results and analysis in the next section will show that in the Nsawam area where land values are rising as the area gradually urbanises and Accra extends its frontiers, farmers’ rights to land are being subverted by people with economic and political power. In view of this subversion, people constantly strategise to confront the maze of powers that come to bear on their major assets, land (Ellis
Modernisation is one of the first theories that emerged in the development discussion in Europe and gained the world’s attention when developing countries started gaining independence in the 1950s (Adom
The analysis and discussions in this article are guided by the access theory (Ribot & Peluso
Understanding farmers’ experiences of their livelihoods and the financial assistance from the MCA was the major goal in collecting primary data for this study. For this reason, a case-study design was adopted. This approach draws from Yin (
Agriculture, forestry and fishing closely follow the wholesale and retail sector as the major economic activity for the majority of people in the Municipality. Agriculture is dominant in rural areas, with 71.7% of households in agriculture as their major livelihood (GSS
Empirical primary data were collected between October and December 2015 from a total of 16 pineapple farmers who had accessed the MCA loan facility, and five family heads in three villages. The villages are Sekyikrom, Fotobi and Ankwa Dobro. Visits were also made to the twice-weekly Nsawam open market to meet and discuss the issues, especially with women farmers. Consultations were also held with three officials of the Nsawam-Adoagyiri Municipal Assembly. The primary data were transcribed, and analysis was facilitated by the use of the Atlas.ti qualitative analysis computer software, where codes and themes were drawn inductively from the interview transcripts. Subsequently, the analysis in the article draws on the access theory (Ribot & Peluso
All the ethical principles were strictly adhered to in this research.
Primary data were collected on the perceptions and strategies of farmers on their livelihoods and how the MCA loan supports such livelihoods. The data reveal several issues that connect from different angles and piece together to produce deep insights. Access theory and the concept of livelihood, as discussed above, come in handy to explain the primary data to show that circumstances affecting livelihood assets, which are land in the case of Nsawam pineapple farmers, mediate the actual effect of development aid on farmers’ livelihood. To this end, the primary data show that property rights alone do not secure land for farming as a sustainable form of livelihood. Farmers’ rights to their lands are affected by economic and political power of actors with stakes in farmers’ lands – this, in turn, affects how development aid works for farmers’ livelihoods. Because of the spatial spread of Accra and the gradual urbanisation of Nsawam, economic power of urban developers couples with political power of family heads to buy off farmers’ rights to their lands. Consequently, the data show that development aid, which is oblivious to these challenges, does not align with the expectations of farmers about their livelihoods. Thus, power, be it economic or political, and how it affects livelihood assets, is a crucial element that should be addressed in any support for farmers. Next, these issues from the primary data are analysed before they are pieced together in a discussion in the ‘Results and analysis’ section.
Access to land and retention of that land, or security of tenure, is precarious now for the smallholder pineapple farmers in the study area. Interactions with these farmers reveal that security of rights to land has been weakened severely over the last two decades. The lands in the area are owned and administered on the basis of customary law by families. Thus, rights to land are organised customarily in a hierarchy, from allodial rights as the supreme and most comprehensive rights to land and held by the family head in trust for the entire extended family, to the usufructuary rights as use rights held by individual members of the family, and to tenancy rights held on rental basis by any other person. The usufructuary and tenancy rights are therefore derivations of the allodial right. They are both use rights. However, the usufructuary right can be held only by a person who holds membership of a landowning family by blood, adoption or gift. Usufructuary rights holders possess wide discretion and autonomy to use land because as a member of the family, an individual should at all times have unrestricted access to customary land for their livelihood, and they should be able to pursue their livelihoods on the communal land without any undue hindrances (Narh
Yet, farmers claim that for the economic power of urban people seeking to buy land, family heads alone cannot sell off their lands without a major breach of customary norms. In this respect, farmers’ understanding of their rights to land reveals a misconception created in the literature that the usufructuary rights to land can be abrogated by a decision made on the basis of the allodial right. Actually, the farmers indicate that the usufructuary right, though considered use rights and subject to the allodial rights, in reality can not be taken away just anyhow at any time. Only a serious breach of the custom regarding land tenure can result in a farmer being dispossessed of their usufructuary rights. To this end, it is opined that whether the usufructuary right can be abrogated or not is dependent directly on how much economic and political power one holds to abrogate or defend such rights. In the case of Nsawam area farmers, most often it is the family heads and urban developers that hold the power.
The dominant reason given for the weakening or disappearing rights to land in the study area is the stashing away and incorporation of rural lands into urban schemes. The growth of Accra is spreading out towards Nsawam, currently having engulfed the villages of Dobro and Medie. Nsawam, the Municipal capital, is also growing and engulfing surrounding village lands. Thus, the economic value of land is increasing at a fast rate. In response, family heads (but also sometimes farmers themselves) even without the consent or knowledge of land users lease out increasing tracts of farmland to developers. Consequently, farmers adopt different strategies to confront the land sales or find alternative livelihoods other than farming.
Land sales to urban developers and consequent livelihood strategies.
… [
Yes, yes, I want to sell this land so that abusua panyin [family head] and his crook people do not come ask me to leave it for them to sell:
Well you know, everybody needs land to build. You can see that Nsawam is no more a small place now. So I will see if I can do something else other than pineapple. You know you cannot farm anymore when many people in this place have sold most of the land and building surrounds you:
Clement, a smallholder farmer, is a middle-aged farmer having cultivated pineapple for the last 20 years on a 3-acre farm. He has considered his land an inalienable inheritance passed on to him by his father. However, he has already concluded transactions to sell off (i.e. lease) 2 acres of this land because he fears the extended family (represented by the family head) will soon forcefully sell off all his land as pressure of urbanisation and urban growth builds up on the area for vacant land. Ironically, Clement considers the possible actions of his extended family to sell off his land legitimate, because the family head holds the allodial rights to the land. But the family head can do so only in circumstances where he (Clement) has committed a grave offence against the customs of the family. Yet, if his land should be sold at all, it should provide him as much benefit as others in the family. This, however, is often not the case as the family head maintains a non-transparent system that denies family members of benefits from land sales. For Clement, to sell his land first before the family does so is to be smart. But this means he will have to change his livelihood from pineapple farming. He hopes that he can secure an alternative livelihood that provides greater and more secure benefits than farming.
As indicated in
Added to the influence of power on their rights to land, farmers face another challenge in maintaining their pineapple farming. Significantly, the farmers indicate that they cultivate pineapple currently, but this is no more an attractive business because of a lack of off-season storage and processing, poor soils, worsening climatic conditions, besides weakening property rights. Many farmers use artificial fertilisers to replenish nutrients and bring plants to fruit quickly. Pineapple farming is thus a capital-intensive business. Farmers reveal that an acre of pineapple farm requires on average between 4000 and 7000 Ghana cedis (1067 and 2000 Euro as of December 2015) to cultivate. Some fruit processing plants like Blue Skies have had to operate at lower than usual capacity because of the inability of farmers to supply to fill factory stock. Many farmers are not able to meet the specifications of the fruit processing factories like Blue Skies. Therefore, these farmers often resort to the local market where the bumper season sees lower prices. In the lean season, however, price of pineapples rises quite high, but it is also the period when the weather condition is most unfavourable and more chemicals have to be applied on the land to produce to meet market demand. Thus, relative cost of production is still high in either bumper or lean season.
Capital-intensive nature of pineapple farming.
Aahh, this pineapple business, hmmm; you make the money and spend it again on chemicals on the farm. This year I have spent close to 7,000 Ghana cedis on chemicals and fertiliser to improve my farm. I hope that I am able to pay off so many loans I have already taken around:
Since our father left this land for us, the men have not been interested to use it. I think they prefer to acquire their own property. But it is our father’s so if we own it we actually do so much good for him. Our children will also come to use it. My brothers are in Accra now, but they come home from time to time. They give me some money when they come. Who knows, if pineapple farming remains this expensive, maybe I will also join them there in Accra soon to do something else. If there is no one to take care of this land if I should go to the city, I will have to sell it:
In all, Yoofi’s experiences indicate that she hardly makes enough profit from her farm to convince her that she should continue farming pineapple for a long while more. Thus, it can be expected that saving is rare, except when her brothers remit her or visit from Accra and bring some money along.
All her three brothers left the village for the city to live and work. In her early 30s, Yoofi believes she may have to abandon pineapple farming to do something else, probably in the city too, if pineapple farming remains capital intensive. Because her brothers are not really interested in the land that they inherited from their father, she is considering leaving it in the care of a neighbour if she should leave for the city. But then, as land values are rising from urbanisation and urban growth, she cannot be sure to maintain the land when she is not in the village. Perhaps the family head will sell it, but she can rather sell it first.
In the circumstances of precarious rights to land, high capital requirements and unstable pineapple markets, most farmers who obtain forms of aid support are unable to produce expected yield on their loans. Consequently, for many pineapple farmers loan repayment is a problem (Ankrah & Dorward
Challenges for loan repayment.
Oh, this year [2015], it has been good. We got good rains so the land produced more. But the problem is that you take all to the market and return home with so little money because everyone is selling:
You cannot depend only on one job. I have a small fitting shop that I want to expand. I will combine it with the pineapple farming. I will do this mechanic work as well to see how far I can succeed. That shop, I get about 30 Ghana cedis [8 Euro as at December 2015] a day at least. If the day is good then I get a bit more. But I have to keep using the land else people will say it is vacant and they will pay huge money to get it. I will not allow that to happen:
…[b]ut you see, I also need money for my fitting shop so I cannot put the entire farm loan into pineapple farming. It is not their problem; it is my problem to pay so anyhow I will pay it is not their problem. I will surely pay, whether for pineapple or for fitting shop:
Harvest has been good this season as many farmers invested their loans in farming. But the consequence is that prices drop and wipe off any high returns from the loans. Therefore, with about 30 Ghana cedis for a day’s income, Fofie is convinced his new fitting shop can earn him about the same level of livelihood as in pineapple farming.
He does not intend to abandon pineapple farming altogether, but he concentrates as much on his mechanic work. When he received the MCA loan, Fofie divided the loan into two halves, one for his pineapple farming and the other to build a shed and its accessories for his fitting shop. But his mechanic business is new and needs time to recoup profits to repay the loan.
In effect, Fofie deliberately divested some of his loan from pineapple farming and is unable to fully pay the loan currently. He hopes things turn around for the better. But already he thinks he cannot maintain his current livelihood as farming alone. He needs to add an alternative, if not a higher income, livelihood, hence his fitting shop. He will keep his farming livelihood though, to safeguard the land.
The farmers in the study have different livelihood experiences. However, the common point running through their experiences is that farming may cease to be their livelihood over time. The underlying common factor for this is the precarious nature of their rights to land as developers and family heads buy off more land to develop. Rising land values in the Nsawam area means the pressure on property rights of farmers is likely to increase, not abate. The ensuing strategies of farmers to possibly abandon farming and find different livelihoods leave development aid programmes with the task to understand farmers’ expectations and their livelihood aspirations if it is to make any meaningful impact for farmers. It is conclusive from the farmer experiences listed above that pineapple farming may not necessarily be a sufficient livelihood for farmers if they see alternative, more secure livelihoods that earn more income and yet do not entail the strains of land rights and pineapple market challenges.
In this section, development aid is placed in farmers’ experiences. The insight from the data analysis is that even though the MCA support had good intentions for pineapple farmers in the Nsawam area, in the context of the challenges to land rights it failed in two respects: firstly, it took for granted that farmers possess assets that remain theirs, that is, they have secure rights to land; and secondly, the fact that its conception of farmers’ livelihood did not see livelihood as a dynamic phenomenon. These two points are discussed next.
On the basis of farmers’ strategies to pursue other forms of investments and livelihoods to overcome the challenge of land rights insecurity, livelihood assets are not only affected by property rights, but also by a host of factors including power of people with stakes in these assets (Ribot & Peluso
It will therefore be our contention that farmers are practical agents who see development aid not just to boost their current farming activities. Rather, how much useful development aid is for farmers’ livelihoods will depend on how such aid supports or hinders their strategic ways to confront powerful intrusion into their rights to land. It will also depend on whether they are determined to find alternative livelihoods as a response to their weakening land rights. Farmers are not expected to just accept any form of aid without an assessment of its usefulness for their livelihood aspirations. They have agency and will always manoeuvre situations. Agency is generally understood to mean the capacity of individuals to act independently of institutions and other restraints, within various situational contexts, to make their own free choices for their interests (Brown & Westaway
Property and access are about relations among people concerning benefits or values – their appropriation, accumulation, transfer and distribution. Therefore, access is framed within dynamic political and economic relations that help identify the circumstances by which some people are able to benefit from particular resources, while others lose out. Any support for farmers should not overlook how these dynamic relationships affect livelihood assets of people. Development aid managers fail to recognise that the livelihood assets of farmers can be made productive or not, depending on the level of their vulnerability to power in the unequal relationships they face (Krantz
Collectively, the actions of farmers to manoeuvre the challenges facing their livelihoods reveal that livelihood is a dynamic process and transient. People constantly seek to make a better living, thus at all times explore opportunities to improve on or change from current livelihoods to alternatives ones, according to their own life circumstances. For the pineapple farmers in the study area, they will not want to be farmers always. For them, to confront current livelihood challenges means that they must find alternative livelihoods or modify existing ones for better outcomes. If opportunities become available, farmers do not aim to maintain the same livelihood for the rest of their lives. Nonetheless, it is important that analysis of the dynamism of livelihoods and livelihood strategies is placed within their situational context to determine if and why really people will want to seek alternative livelihoods.
We can posit then that the dynamism of livelihood, as the experiences of the pineapple farmers reveal, is where people possess active agency to manoeuvre situations and resources to improve on or change from their current livelihoods, even if livelihood interests are at variance with official policy and programme goals. Indeed, many policy and programme failures are because of a lack of recognition of the agency and power of target people to subvert aims of these policies and what governors believe is good for them (Mayntz
One key argument for drawing on agency in analysing the relationship between farmers’ livelihoods and development aid is that it helps to understand pineapple farmers as not powerless or passive victims of the challenges they face, but as active entrepreneurs who constantly draw out opportunities from these challenges to make better lives. Focusing on environmental vulnerability and the role of agency in the incidence of vulnerability and coping mechanisms of people, McLaughlin and Dietz (
It is therefore evident that livelihood analysis should entail an appreciation of the diverse range of major factors that affect particular forms of livelihood (Morse & McNamara
In effect, we suggest an expanded form of livelihood analysis, where equal focus should also be placed on ‘livelihood transience’. The concept of livelihood transience is the composite of strategies that utilise current opportunities and resources not for maintaining existing livelihoods, but rather for securing new livelihoods. The notion of livelihood transience, however, should not replace the current focus on ‘sustainable livelihoods’. It should build on and complement it. What is important in this regard is to recognise that the notion of sustainable livelihood that views people as settled with their current forms of livelihood and therefore will want to ‘sustain’ them is inadequate to explain the dynamism of livelihoods. In the notion of livelihood transience, people will be seen rather as constantly striving to find alternative better livelihoods. Thus, with this new notion, any livelihood analysis will consider the aspirations and strategies of people to move from one form of livelihood to another, and what resources they are using in this regard.
In this study, the relationship between development aid and livelihood of smallholder pineapple farmers in three villages in the Nsawam-Adoagyiri Municipality was investigated. The work solicited the experiences of these farmers to explore the utility of development aid for their livelihoods. It is informed by the quite low impact on poverty reduction and improved livelihoods that the massive inflows of donor assistance into the Ghanaian economy have achieved so far. While external assistance seeks to support farmers to maintain and improve their farming, empirical data reveal that particular local circumstances stimulate farmers’ strategies to find alternative forms of livelihoods as a way of confronting or overcoming challenges to their assets. Thus, donor assistance for rural livelihoods does not yield the desired results on livelihoods because donor managers are either oblivion of or fail to address the challenges that confront assets of farmers, such as how powerful actors weaken farmers’ rights to land. In other words, development aid often fails to achieve its goals because it does not align with the expectations that farmers have of their livelihoods. In the context of pineapple farming in the Nsawam area, to make aid relevant to beneficiary farmers, donors can direct some focus on supporting measures to secure the major assets of farmers, that is, land.
It is concluded that livelihood is dynamic and transient. Livelihood transience focuses on how people identify alternative livelihoods from current opportunities and resources. Support programmes on livelihoods should be mindful of the fact that target people possibly see such support not as a resource to maintain current forms of livelihood, but as a window to escape current entrapments to find alternatively better livelihoods. To this end, governors and donors should see beyond current livelihood situations and include in their programmes future livelihood prospects that people see. In effect, this study advocates ‘livelihood transience’ as an expanded and integral form of livelihood analysis. This expanded notion should not replace the current focus on ‘sustainable livelihood’, but rather complement it.
The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.
L.B. wrote part of the literature review, summary of the findings and the recommendations. A.Y.A. wrote the introduction, part of the literature review, methodology and the data analysis.
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the authors.
‘Query report’ in all boxes are quotations from interview transcripts generated by the Atlas.ti software. ‘Interpretation’ in all boxes are the authors’ own interpretation of quotations.