Land, Labour and the Family in Southern Ghana: A Critique of Land Policy Under Neo-Liberalisation (review)

The author's aim, as stated in the introduction, is to assess the impact of recent global economic changes and national policy shifts in Ghana starting in the early 1980s with Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) on landownership and use, and the availability of labor in rural areas. He uses two case studies to compare the origins and types of landownership and labor employed in two cocoa-growing areas in the Akyim area of the Eastern Region of Ghana. The rural settlements are Kofi Pare, where large cocoa farms were owned by a few individuals; and closely related, the Atewa Range settlements of Apinaman and Dwinease, which, in contrast, had many small cocoa farms and owners. Although both settlements had different patterns of landownership and labor practices, they experienced land shortages that led to the migration of local youths to urban areas in search of new and better economic opportunities. The shortage of land, and the new economic policies advocated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have accentuated the adverse consequences of the socioeconomic forces newly unleashed on most rural communities by globalization since the so-called triumph of Western or neoliberal capitalism, which seeks to displace the role of the state in Ghana and the rest of Africa.

The research report begins with a highly relevant historical account of how the Akyim settlements and the Akyim Abuakwa kingdom of the Eastern Region evolved. It demonstrates its relations with other nation-states and how it was incorporated into the British colonial territory called Gold Coast, now Ghana. To complete the setting and background for analysis, Amanor furnishes a precise and highly insightful description of the evolution of cocoa growing.

Background information is followed by a presentation of the two leading schools of thought on landownership. First, evolutionary theories are Euro-centered and emphasize individual and private property rights. As expected, this school of thought is closely associated with neoliberal capitalism and its twin, free-market capitalism. This is the so-called modern-industrialized type of landownership, with its implied legal rational dimensions, which is the type of ownership that is expected to precede Africa's real economic growth. The second collection of theories falls within the communitarian types of land tenure. With emphasis on communal and traditional forms of landownership, this set of theories is derived from anthropological studies emphasizing customary law and social relations. This school of thought emphasizes the locality and its uniqueness in determining land tenure and use. Its advocates treat colonial rule as the culprit for Africa's land problems because it undercut traditional land practices and failed to create a viable alternative to the one destroyed. In contrast, antagonists such as the evolutionaries treat communitarianism as the root cause of Africa's tardiness and ineffective response to the exigencies of modern industrial life and society. Amanor shows the limitations of both schools of thought by demonstrating how, in the ownership and use of land, changes are actually occurring in the selected rural settlements in Ghana.

Besides the fascinating historical and background information provided, this research is useful for several other reasons. Even though Amanor uses case studies, he successfully links local developments to policy shifts in Ghana's fairly centralized form of government. He demonstrates how post-Cold War global shifts toward privatization and the search for cheaper raw commodities are directly altering land availability and gender and intergenerational relations in rural Ghana. One example is expatriate firms' renewed emphasis on gold mining and timber logging. This causes what the author calls the criminalization of rural youths' logging and mining activities. Youths are forced to take these jobs as a means for survival, while farmland shrinks rapidly and the costs of farming rise steeply, in a situation where state subsidies are withdrawn...