ABSTRACT

Using a comparative mixed methods approach involving two districts each in Southern and Northern Ghana, this article addresses the question: under what conditions, and at what scale does smallholder agricultural commercialisation promote or hinder food security? Specifically, it presents an analysis of how gender and spatial inequalities in resource control determine differential capacities to commercialise and the implications of agricultural commercialisation for food security in an export commodity dominated Southern Ghana versus a food crop dominated Northern Ghana. We found gender gaps in commercialisation capacity that did not seem to disappear even in the presence of land abundance because the gaps are structural. We also found that, in some contexts, high rates of commercialisation do not mean accumulation. Among females in parts of Northern Ghana, apparent high commercialisation rates are driven by necessity, and thus constitutes ‘distress push commercialisation’, which has negative food security implications. While we found no evidence of an overall positive association between commercialisation and food security, we show that in the export crop dominated high commercialisation zone of Southern Ghana, commercialisation enhances food security only up to a threshold above which further resource allocation towards non-food cash crops hurts food security because of inefficient food markets.

摘要

本文采用比较混合方法，涉及加纳南部和北部的两个地区，解决了以下问题：在什么条件下，小农农业商业化在多大程度上促进或阻碍了粮食安全？具体而言，它分析了资源控制中的性别和空间不平等如何决定商业化能力的差异以及农业商业化对加纳南部主导的出口商品与加纳北部主导的粮食作物的粮食安全的影响。我们发现商业化能力方面的性别差距即使在土地丰富的情况下似乎也没有消失，因为这些差距是结构性的。我们还发现，在某些情况下，高商业化率并不意味着积累。在加纳北部部分地区的女性中，明显的高商业化率是由需要驱动的，因此构成“困境推动商业化”，对粮食安全产生负面影响。虽然我们没有发现商业化与粮食安全之间存在整体正相关关系的证据，但我们表明，在加纳南部以出口作物为主的高商业化区，商业化只能将粮食安全提高到一个阈值，高于该阈值，进一步将资源分配给非粮食现金由于粮食市场效率低下，农作物损害了粮食安全。