Public Lecture on "Land markets and the reinvention of customary land administration in Ghana"
December 18, 2014 | 13:30 h - 14:30 h
We are pleased to invite you to our next Public Lecture at ZEF with
Dr. Kojo Amanor, Deputy Director, Institute of African Studies (<link http: ias.ug.edu.gh>IAS), University of Ghana, on
Land markets and the reinvention of customary land administration in Ghana
Date: Thursday, December 18, 2014, 1:30-2:30 p.m.
Venue: ZEF, Walter-Flex-Straße 3, 53111 Bonn, ZEF’s right conference room, ground floor
Abstract:
This presentation critically examines contemporary trends in land administration in Ghana and in neoliberal frameworks. It places land reforms in Ghana within a historical perspective concerned with the evolution of land administration and agricultural policy in Ghana. This argues that the concept of customary land has been re-invented and shaped to suit policy concerns since the early colonial period. The two dominant approaches in contemporary land administration are based on a market and communitarian perspective, but work in synergy to bring about reform. While claiming to empower rural people these two approaches work to undermine farmer rights in land, transforming and re-assembling customary arrangements as private capitalist property that can be transacted in land markets, and facilitating the conversion and appropriation of land as market property by chiefs. However, there are tensions within agricultural policy and land administration, between support for large corporate estate agriculture and support for agribusiness, smallholder producers integrated into value chains and contractual relations with agribusiness. Further complications result from attempts by chiefs to use this process of recognising customary arrangements to appropriate land for personal accumulation, and by the growing market for land among residential property developers and land speculators.
About the speaker:
Dr. Kojo Amanor’s main research interests are in the land question, smallholder agriculture, agribusiness food chains, and participatory methodologies for rural development. See his profile <link http: ias.ug.edu.gh index.php>here.
