‘Regularise size of land companies can acquire’
Ghana needs to regulate and limit the size of land companies can acquire for any purposes, including real estate and agriculture.
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This was the view of participants in a workshop to disseminate the findings of a research on large-scale land acquisition and its impact on women in Africa.
They contended that regulation was necessary to prevent the increasing takeover of farmlands which could compromise the country’s food security.
According to them, the unbridled acquisition of large tracts of land could leave the poor and vulnerable poorer, especially women and migrant farmers, who are denied access to lands that they have been farming on.
They, therefore, called for a clear definition of the limit on large-scale land acquisition a company or an individual could acquire in the country’s Land Bill being drafted.
The Land Bill currently being drafted defines land from 10 acres and beyond as large scale, the Lands Commission pegs it as 50 acres and the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) puts it at 500 acres.
Impact on food security
The National Coordinator, Civil Society Coalition of Land, a non-governmental organisation, Mr Ebenezer Agyei Bediako, said the issues about large-scale land acquisition affected several smallholder farmers.
“We want things to be streamlined and proper definition of what large-scale land in Ghana is, because of the effect it could have on food security.”
“If you allow people to buy just any size of land, and lands meant for agriculture is used for any other investment, then we need to know what large scale land acquisition is, so that we protect the interest of the poor and the vulnerable who would not be able to compete or litigate,” he said.
A representative of the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, Ms Victoria Adongo, also indicated that the acquisition of land banks by the government for investors also threatened food security.
According to her, large-scale farmers did not have food security nor nutrition in mind but rather to feed industries and for export.
The Project Leader of the research, Dr Akosua Darkwah, said the conversation about food security and land acquisition had to be done at the national level as currently, there were no figures on how much land was under cultivation and in the hands of the real estate sector.
Research findings
Presenting her findings, she said the research showed that women were less likely to be in charge of the decision-making process by which land acquisitions took place and were also likely to be those not to have heard about the process.
The study, a two-and-a half-year project done in three countries: Ghana, Cameroon and Uganda, interrogated large -scale land acquisition and its implication for women in sub-Saharan Africa.
The researchers were particularly interested in how formal and informal rules that underpinned how land was transacted had implication for women on the continent.
It looked at a number of communities in the Greater Accra and Eastern regions, specifically at the process through which land was acquired and the extent to which compensation, access to employment and corporate social responsibilities matched the desires of the communities.
It found that the main issues were about the valuation of the land and the compensation process.
“This was not done in the manner in which it should be done. In some communities, the people did not even know the size of their lands and had to depend on the buyer’s surveyors.
“Families might know where the boundary begins and where it ends but don’t know the size in terms of acreage. If it is calculated by a surveyor, that has to be paid for and it is expensive. But people don’t have the resources to do that,” she said.
“The study,” Dr Darkwah said, “buttresses the need to support or highlight how crucial it is not just to have a Land Bill but an Act with all the legislative instruments fully developed and implemented”.
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