Ghana: Loggers and politicians, not small farmers, are to blame for deforestation
Even by conservative estimates, less than a quarter of Ghana's pre-colonial forest remains. Loggers and politicians caused most deforestation, though they like to shift the blame to farmers. But the fact is that throughout the Twentieth Century farmers have had little control over the trees on their land.
SOURCE: WORLD RAINFOREST MOVEMENT
MOVIMIENTO MUNDIAL POR LOS BOSQUES
International Secretariat
Maldonado 1858; Montevideo, Uruguay
E-Mail: [email protected]
Web page: http://www.wrm.org.uy
Editor: Ricardo Carrere
**********************************************************************
=================================
W R M B U L L E T I N 85
August 2004 - English edition
This bulletin is also available in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Please
let us know if you wish to receive it in some of these languages.
Ghana: Loggers and politicians, not small farmers, are to blame for
deforestation
Even by conservative estimates, less than a quarter of Ghana's
pre-colonial forest remains. Loggers and politicians caused most
deforestation, though they like to shift the blame to farmers. But the
fact is that throughout the Twentieth Century farmers have had little
control over the trees on their land. British colonialists gave timber
rights to chiefs, who promptly sold them to loggers, or ordered them
cleared and replaced with cacao plantations. After independence, the
government claimed ownership of all trees and land, and sold most of it
off to loggers. Cocoa farmers followed the loggers, settling in the newly
cleared areas. Because cacao trees grow better under shade, small farmers
usually conserve forest cover. But decades of bad forest policies and a
corrupt forest department meant that farmers received no compensation
-only ruined fields- for the trees that logging companies cut from their
land. Government officials -often receiving kick-backs from loggers- set
extremely low royalties on logged trees, and failed to collect most
anyway. Booming foreign demand in Asia combined with new timber mills
financed by the World Bank plunged the timber sector into crisis.
Reforms in the 1990s came too little and too late. After substantial civil
society and donor pressure, the government reluctantly implemented a few
token reforms to involve communities in scattered projects. But farmers
still have no say over forest policies, over whether their land is given
off as a concession, nor over which trees companies cut from their
backyards.
By blaming farmers, politicians and loggers evade responsibility. Similar
scapegoating happens in Madagascar, Senegal and many other countries
across Africa. Such stories about destructive slash-and-burn farmers are
then picked up by naïve scholars and self-seeking international agro-input
companies. Fertilizer companies say governments must get 'destructive'
'slash-and-burn' farmers to buy more fertilizer in order to raise
productivity on existing land thereby stopping expansion. Biotechnology
firms argue that new genetically engineered seeds will enable farmers to
boost yields on current land. In the process, we are blinded to the real
villains, and we lose opportunities for real changes in policy and
government to foster conservation and rehabilitation.
By: Aaron deGrassi, e-mail: [email protected] . Note based on:
deGrassi, Aaron (2003). Constructing Subsidiarity, Consolidating Hegemony:
Political Economy and Agro-Ecological Processes in Ghanaian Forestry.
Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Environmental Governance in
Africa Working Paper No. 13. deGrassi, Aaron (2003). (Mis)Understanding
change in agro-environmental technology in Africa: Charting and refuting
the myth of population-induced breakdown. In, Zeleza, P. T. and Kakoma, I.
(eds.), In search of modernity: Science and technology in Africa. Trenton:
Africa World Press. pp. 473-505.
************************************************************