Ghana’s Agricultural Transformation

This chapter provides a broad overview of the agricultural sector and helps situate the narrower focus in each of the subsequent chapters of Part II of the book. Ghana’s agriculture has performed reasonably well since the 1980s in terms of its growth, labor productivity, farm incomes, and the decline in rural poverty. It then provides a description of the main features of the agricultural transformation that has occurred, and explains three drivers underlying these patterns: the policy environment; growing population pressure on the land base; and rapid urbanization. The chapter also identifies how agricultural transformation is progressing differently in the northern and southern regions of the country. In the former, substantial increases in farm production and incomes has come more from increases in the cropped area and crop mix than from increased yields. Land productivity has increased only modestly, but labor productivity has increased substantially in line with wages. In the latter, farm households have taken advantage of urban–rural linkages to diversify into nonagricultural sources of income, and farms have become smaller and more part-time. Despite having greater access to urban markets, services, infrastructure and an increasing population pressure on the land base, there is little evidence of agricultural intensification leading to higher land productivity in these areas.