Participatory Action Research Partnerships in Ghana for Global Food Sovereignty

If you are interested in learning more about the action research partnerships we are building in Ghana for food sovereignty, here is a recording of a recent talk I gave.

Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AHt6Cul1Ds&t=3115s&ab_channel=NorthropFryeCentre

The unprecedented state of global hunger is exposing the fragility of food systems, which are the political economic processes and infrastructures that feed people. This fragility is caused by systems that privilege the commodification of food and profit over ecological sustainability and equity. For decades, scholarship has demonstrated how the agricultural development approaches of the Green Revolution focused on intensifying yields across the Global South, generally degrade soil, decrease biodiversity and increase debt burdens, trapping smallholders in poverty. This trapping inhibits smallholders’ household food security and adaptive capacity to climate change. A donor evaluation recently demonstrated that food insecurity has intensified across the African countries currently targeted for the Green Revolution like Ghana, which is inciting resistance across the continent.

Major alternatives to the African Green Revolution generally advocate for food sovereignty, which is the right of people to define their own food systems instead of corporations, so that healthy, diverse, delicious and culturally appropriate food is more accessible. In this presentation, I will illustrate how we as scholars are supporting Ghanaian partner organizations’ efforts towards food sovereignty using grounded, participatory action and interdisciplinary research into agroecology and disappearing indigenous culinary ingredients as alternatives to the African Green Revolution. Learning from food sovereignty movements such as these partners’ efforts has the power to transform notions of who holds expertise and how change can happen.

Preserving and promoting local food production and culinary knowledge and practices for climate change adaptation and resistance to unjust political economic power dynamics can provide more sustainable incomes than those that privilege productivity.

A feminist political ecology of farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana

This article is published in Gender Place and Culture [link here] where I find that intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities in land access (based on ethnicity, place, age, and class) are due to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming, acutely erratic rainfall and aridity, as much as social norms.

For those who may not have access but are interested in reading the full article, the first 50 downloads are freely available [link here]. Or you can just contact me for further detail.

With the unprecedented feminization of agriculture globally, literature has emerged over the past decade suggesting that gender equality in agriculture could be advanced if gaps in access to farm resources between women and men are reduced. This paper examines gendered farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana. Based mainly on six months of immersive qualitative research, this case study draws from and contributes to feminist political ecology scholarship (FPE) on smallholder farming and agricultural development. The analysis describes some of the intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities (e.g., gender and ethnicity) of land access related to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming. Gender disparities in access to agricultural extension, chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, high yielding seed varieties, tractor services, credit packages and marketing contracts supported by the state, donors and NGOs are also found. FPE is useful for revealing how these gendered resource disparities are related to agricultural commercialization and increasingly erratic rainfall and aridity, making smallholders more vulnerable to land dispossession. Women’s dependence on men to farm while operating under these changing economic and environmental conditions, coupled with their weaker entitlement rights to resources, threatens to push many, particularly ethnic minority women, out of farming altogether. The ways that intersecting identities shape access to land also complicates understandings of the role of community outsiders who are both the dispossessors of land and those who are intensely vulnerable to dispossession. While rural development studies generally consider women’s farm resources compared to men’s, this does little to explain the intensifying intersectional vulnerabilities.