The Need for Agricultural Land in the City, Ghana

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Setting the Scene

Kumasi, Ghana's second city, is one of Africa's fastest growing urban areas. Between 1990 and 2000 its population almost tripled to more than a million. Urban sprawl now extends as much as 30 kilometres from the old centre of the Ashanti capital.

Traditional farming villages are being invaded by industry and urban housing. Churches are also buying up land. Typical villages have seen their built-up area increase tenfold. But many rural activities persist in the area of fast development, known as the "peri-urban zone". Farming continues, of both cash crops and subsistence food for the table.

But disputes about land are growing. With three parties involved: the village chiefs, the farming occupiers and urban "developers", it is often the poorer farmers who lose out. As one vegetable farmer from Duase village near the city airport put it: "we are losing our land." He plans to become a trader in second-hand clothes. The children of other farmers are turning to shoemaking, hairdressing or another urban trade.

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Defining the problem

Traditions of land ownership in the Ashanti region were never designed to cope with real-estate traders and housing developers. Land is vested in the village chief. He apportions the land among his subjects, often with the help of a female relative, known in English as the queen mother.

But today, as developers move in, the land can suddenly be extremely valuable. And chiefs are allocating land to outsiders, often without consultation or agreement with their long-standing occupants. The transaction is often accomplished in return for what is known locally as 'drink money', implying a token sum, though in practice it can be substantial.

Kingsley Boateng, who purchased land in the village of Emena to build a house for his family, says the village's queen mother showed him various plots. When he had chosen, he paid the 'drink money' to her. "I think it is the cost of the land," he said.

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Taking action

The NRI has since 1997 been participating in the Kumasi Natural Resources Management Research Project, investigating the changes taking place in Kumasi's peri-urban zone, including access to water and land.

"City dwellers can move in and clear your crops overnight," says Ernestina Freduah Antoh, a social scientist from University of Science and Technology in Kumasi and part of the project team. The farmers have no land security, she says, and often do not even get to see the plans drawn up by their chiefs or by city officials. Her studies have confirmed that the chief usually retains most of the 'drink money'.

Women farmers often suffer the worst. They traditionally grow subsistence crops such as cassava, plantain and yam, on land closest to the heart of the villages. But this land is the most valuable land to developers. It is sold first. More distant fields, on which the village men usually grow cash crops such as oil palm, are least valuable to developers and survive the longest. Farming has grown more intensive, with loss of soil fertility.

NRI geographer Judith Pender says "planning is the wall we always seem to hit." So Ernestina wants to help village farmers to get more involved in planning what happens to their village land and the income from its sale. In future, she hopes, people will be able to stand up for their rights and insist that some of the land is retained for agriculture.

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The cast

"City dwellers can move in and clear your crops overnight" - Ernestina Freduah Antoh, social scientist, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi

* Judith Pender, geographer, NRI

* Kingsley Boateng, incoming house owner in Emena village

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Global Relevance

The populations of urban areas in many developing countries are growing faster than anywhere else on the planet. But these cities are often very unlike their developed-world counterparts, the suburbs. Many features of rural economies persist among the factories and housing developments, highways and shopping malls. In particular, farming persists. Often it supplies much of the food for city-dwellers. But the needs of farmers for access to basic resources such as farmland, water and the products of common lands often get lost. The analysis of the peri-urban zone around Kumasi and how it is being tackled could provide lessons for similar zones elsewhere in Africa and beyond.

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Thinking points

• Peri-urban areas in developing countries, with their continuing agricultural roles, are very different from their rich-world equivalents -- the suburbs.
• Traditional methods of land stewardship in such areas are often ill-adapted to handling the demands of commercial land development.
• Poor farmers are often the big losers in urbanisation. Their land may be worth a lot, but they rarely receive proper compensation for their loss.

Research on the peri-urban area around Kumasi was funded by the UK Department for International Development Natural Resources System Programme