Ghana's farm policy leaving smallholders behind — UN Working Group

A United Nations human rights working group has called on the government to strengthen agricultural laws to promote agricultural transformation and improve the incomes of smallholder farmers, artisanal fishers and pastoralists.

Africa's representative to the UN Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, Professor Uche Ofodile, and group member, Genevieve Savigny, made the call in a statement in Accra at the conclusion of a 10-day country visit.

They said there were gaps between the country’s laws on agriculture and their implementation.

"The central challenge documented during this visit is not the absence of a legal framework.

It is the persistent gap between the law and policy and their meaningful implementation on the ground," the experts said.

Consultant

They urged the government to establish formalised rural consultation platforms at district and national levels with genuine decision-making authority and called for sustained investment in smallholder credit access, rural infrastructure and climate-adaptive support.

"The open question before us is not whether Ghana possesses the tools. It is whether it commands the political will to apply them," the statement concluded.

The working group met with government ministries, UN agencies, farming and fishing communities, civil society organisations and traditional authorities during the visit.

Strides

While commending the government's steps toward food security and agricultural modernisation, the experts cautioned that its drive toward mechanised, export-oriented agriculture, centred on cocoa, soybean and maize raised a fundamental question about the intended role of the millions of smallholders, women farmers, artisanal fishers and nomadic pastoralists who currently sustain Ghana's food supply.

They described galamsey as "the most acute, rapidly expanding and politically charged environmental emergency facing the country."

They characterised it as both a cause of environmental destruction and a symptom of the failure to offer rural youth a dignified economic future.

"Enforcement responses alone cannot resolve what is fundamentally a development failure intertwined with elite capture," the statement said.

They commended the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, for his sustained public condemnations of galamsey, which they described as demonstrating the transformative potential of engaged traditional leadership.

On land, the experts identified Ghana's coexisting statutory and customary tenure systems as exposing smallholder farmers to dispossession, particularly in rapidly urbanising areas where land demarcation remains weak.

"Women faced the sharpest disadvantage — excluded from land ownership and decision-making by both statutory gaps and entrenched social norms.

"Older women farmers are additionally exposed to witchcraft accusations, which the experts described as serving to displace and dispossess them of land and livelihood," the statement said.

On seed law reforms, the statement also warned that recent changes risked criminalising informal seed exchange among smallholders while privileging certified, commercially controlled varieties — a shift they said had serious implications for food sovereignty.