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From possession to property: how the commodification of land affects youth participation in farming in Ghana

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With the gradual transition from the customary possession of land to property ownership based on a capitalistic logic, customary lands in the Techiman[1] area in Ghana have been commercialised and are failing to fulfil their traditional role as essential stepping stone for the youth to initial economic independence. Gertrude Aputiik argues that, contrary to mainstream assertions of the youth being disinterested in farming, difficulty accessing agrarian resources (land) could be seen as the major cause of poor participation of the youth in farming.

Clearing of agricultural land for construction in Techiman, Ghana. Photo taken by the author in August 2020

‘Possession’ and ‘property’ are two categories of institutional systems linked to land ownership. While rules on land possession are often inaccurately equated with property rules, there is a clear distinction between these two types of ownership rights. Possession rules refer to those regulating the material use and yield of resources, production technologies, products, and waste (Gerber and Steppacher 2017). In contrast, property rules are linked to property ownership and titles that enable land markets and credit transactions of land (when used as collateral). Property can be seen as the core institution of capitalism and as its institutional driving force (Hodgson 2015). This point has also been made by Hernando de Soto (2000), one of the most influential defenders of formal property rights, who said that for a modern property system to be fully operational, it must form a unified institutional system at the national level.

Thus, while both can be actualised in parallel – a plot of land for example can be inhabited (possessed) and at the same time used as collateral (owned as property) – the potential of property as financial asset to safeguard financial security strongly affects (non-)adherence to customary logics. More and more land is commercialised and traded, and customary land is declining. However, contrary to the belief that property ownership will automatically have beneficial effects, this transition to land ownership linked to market transactions seems to work only for a few powerful groups and individuals who are able to pay for land at market prices. Others are struggling to navigate this unequal system, including youths in Ghana.

In Techiman in Ghana, the reinterpretation of customary norms has led to a transition to property of Stool[2] lands that were hitherto managed following logic of possession based on the material use of the land. Rapid urbanisation in Ghana has led to increased demand for land; as a result, a widespread conversion of agricultural land into land for commercial use can be observed.

As part of my research on the commodification of land in peri-urban Techiman and its implications for youth participation in farming, I interviewed youths in Techiman in 2020. I observed that youths are struggling to get access to land despite their readiness to pursue farming on a full-time basis. In an interview, one of the youths described their plight:

“Since lands have become more and more costly, we have had no other choice than to move out of the town to work and pay for the small farm lands we can afford. It is also difficult to cultivate food crops these days, since landowners now demand that we cultivate cash crops on their farms.” (young male farm tenant, Techiman, 13 August 2020)

Beyond the high costs of land, the extract above also highlights the extent to which young farmers have limited agency in pursuing farming activities. Farming to them has now become just another opportunity to sell their labour power for survival and it is almost impossible to even decide the “when”, “how” and “what” of farming. Based on this finding, I argue that, contrary to mainstream assertions of the youth being disinterested in farming, difficulty accessing agrarian resources (land) could be seen as the major cause of poor participation of the youth in farming. This is the basic reason explaining why many of the young agriculturalists in the Techiman area are tenants with only limited farming rights.

The scholarly debates on customary land tenure in Sub-Saharan Africa in many ways have revealed the intensification of land commodification in peri-urban areas (Akaateba 2019). However, an elaborate analysis of the different transitory phases of this process is missing. One of my research objectives was to fill this gap by identifying some of the key phases in the transition from customary norms – possession – to market procedures in Techiman – property. In my findings, I identified four stages in the commodification process (Figure 1). The first stage corresponds to a fully customary system (no link to land markets). Gradually, chiefs started renting out lands in exchange for money (second stage). In the third stage, there is a shift from renting out lands to the outright sale of lands, albeit with no property titles, so informally. The final stage refers to the full commodification of land.

Operations under a property-based logic suggest that buyers would not only assume full ownership of lands, but also that they are entitled to use these lands as collateral for obtaining credit. A commodified system is strikingly unfavourable to smallholders. Unable to compete with wealthy farmers and entrepreneurs, smallholders are often prevented from accessing communal lands. My observations thus echo Frans Benda-Beckman’s critique of de Soto, who said:

“That formal property rights and free market for it to circulate under conditions of great economic and political inequality should work to the benefit of the poor is wishful thinking to me. I think that it is scandalous that the political aspects of property and the issue of redistribution are so downplayed [by de Soto].” (Von Brenda-Beckmann, 2003: 190)

In Techiman, the transition has not (yet) reached the final stage of a full commodification; yet, it is clear that the commodification process is already threatening the livelihoods of young farmers. Some authors have argued that even under a fully customary system, youth access to land has been impeded by the customary structure of land ownership, basing their argument on the fact that access modes such as inheritance only favour indigenous youths (Kiddido et al., 2017). While this indeed presents a challenge to the youth that has no access rights in any landholding family, customary landholding arrangements in which there is equal access rights could represent an egalitarian possession-based land system that provides more just and secured farming livelihoods for the youth.

The author wishes to thank Julien-Francois Gerber for his comments on an earlier version of the post.

Footnotes

[1] The case of Techiman is unique in many ways. Predominantly occupied by youth farmers and a small rural population, the region still remains the largest producer of Ghana’s food and cash crops. It is also widely known for the presence of what is believed to be the biggest market in West Africa. Customary lands, called Stool lands in the Techiman area, served as essential building blocks for the youth to start an independent economic life.

[2] They are called “Stool lands” because chiefs who are custodians over communal  lands,  sit on specially carved stools as a symbol of chiefly authority.

References

Akaateba, M.A., 2019. The politics of customary land rights transformation in peri-urban Ghana: Powers of exclusion in the era of land commodification. Land Use Policy, 88, p.104197.

De Soto, H., 2000. The mystery of capital: Why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else. Civitas Books.

Gerber, J.F. and Veuthey, S., 2011. Possession versus property in a tree plantation socioenvironmental conflict in Southern Cameroon. Society & Natural Resources, 24(8), pp.831-848.

Kidido, J.K., Bugri, J.T. and Kasanga, R.K., 2017. Youth agricultural land access dimensions and emerging challenges under the customary tenure system in Ghana: evidence from Techiman area. Journal of Land and Rural Studies, 5(2), pp.140-163.

GSS (2013) Ghana in figures. Accra, Ghana. Available at : https://eros.usgs.gov/westafrica/land-cover/land-use-and-land-cover-trends-west-africa (Assessed : 6 April, 2021)

Opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the ISS or members of the Bliss team.

About the author:

Gertrude Aputiik is a graduate from the Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies major at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS). Her research interest lies in areas of Political Ecology, Post-development studies, and Degrowth.

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Land and property rights in South Africa: questions of justice by Sanele Sibanda

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How we approach contestations over land and property rights in South Africa says a lot about what we believe a just post-colonial constitutional order to be. While politicians and political parties have exploited issues around land and property rights to garner votes, particularly in the 2019 election, what has become apparent from ensuing public and scholarly debates is that there is emerging a collective sense of an impending national existential crisis. At the heart of this crisis lies the thorny question: where to from here for South Africa’s constitutional democracy?

How the ground shifted in the 2019 general election

In early May 2019, South Africa held elections that were dubbed by South African Independent Electoral Commission head, Sy Mamabolo, as the “most complex, highly contested and logistically demanding”  since the commencement of the democratic era in 1994. The highly contested election saw the governing party, the African National Congress (ANC) and the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA) retain their overall positions as South Africa’s biggest political parties, while simultaneously losing a substantial portion of the national vote. These losses can be contrasted, first, with the continuing electoral rise of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose policy mainstay has been the promotion of a radical programme of economic freedom, focusing particularly on land redistribution. Secondly, there was the unexpected (re)emergence of the Freedom Front Plus, whose policies reflect a retrogressive, right-leaning, white separatist agenda that opposes race-based affirmative action in any form and the redistribution of land.

While the respective decline and rise in popularity of the four parties (who between them garnered over 90% of the national vote) is notable, these shifts in numbers are far from the most interesting aspect of the election. Rather, it was how the issue of land or, more broadly, the question of property rights dominated public discourses as well as the different parties’ electoral campaigns and manifestos. Nearly, all the parties took up clear positions around the question of whether or not section 25 of the Constitution (the property clause) should be amended. Unsurprisingly, this question generated much cause for hope and anxiety, depending on which side of the economic or class divide one falls; it hardly requires mention that in South Africa there is a close correlation between race and class, and indeed class often operates as a proxy for race.

Land and Property Rights Debates

The real significance of the heated debates around land and property rights is that they clearly indicate a collective sense of an impending national existential crisis. At the heart of this crisis lies the thorny question where to from here for South Africa’s constitutional democracy? In other words, whilst much of the contestation was rooted in the EFF’s original proposal – often dismissively dubbed as populist – for “land expropriation without compensation” to be realized by an amendment to the property clause, the questions raised are much more profound. Such as, what remains of the sense of possibility in the post-apartheid constitutional project in the eyes of those who, 25 years into democracy, continue to occupy the margins reserved for those historically disenfranchised and dispossessed? To be precise, at their core these questions reflect an increasing sense of marginality, exclusion and growing hopelessness experienced by multitudes of Black South Africans who continue to be asked to temper their expectations towards attaining the ‘improve[d] quality of life of all citizens’ promised to them by what many commenters regularly remind us is the best constitution in the world.

There have been calls for the land and property debate to be less populist and emotive, but more rational and pragmatic by many commentators, who also often call for a defense of the Constitution. These calls also often oppose the very idea of an amendment to the property clause. It is notable how in making these calls for level heads or pragmatism notions of justice (in light of centuries of colonial-apartheid dispossession) remain largely absent in the arguments and reasoning advanced. Instead, these calls justify persevering with the current governmental land policies (with the caveat that they be subject to faster, better, less corrupt implementation). This silence on the justice question is quite telling, as the question of who retained land and property rights acquired originally through violent racist policies, and who was conferred with a hope to acquire land and property in a post-apartheid future speaks fundamentally to what we understand justice to be, or more precisely, what type of justice has been or can be achieved under the 1996 South African Constitution.

It is easy to dismiss questions of what type of justice or whose justice as being overly philosophical, esoteric or ethereal even. However, what cannot be dismissed with equal ease is that South Africa’s fomenting crisis has profound implications for what the citizenry understand or believe to be the constitution’s vision of justice and its potential to undo unearned material and social privilege and change South Africa’s historically racialised property relations. What I am suggesting here is that those engaging in the debate about land and property rights should stop talking past each other as is the case currently. There should be less of a focus on abstract questions of the constitutionality or necessity of an amendment, instead what is needed is an increased emphasis on setting out, examining and elaborating upon the justice claims of the different positions advanced. Elaborating on the justice claims would entail requiring being transparent in naming or expounding on the ethical, moral, philosophical and/or historical justifications that ground positions advanced, as well declaring whose or which interests their positions advance.

Competing notions of justice

At this juncture, it is fair to ask what it would mean, in practical terms, to center the notion of justice in this debate. At the risk of over-simplification, I suggest that in public and academic discourses there are at least two identifiable streams of this debate. One stream (that I associate myself with) broadly speaking, advances a probing critique of the current constitutional paradigm and calls for a decisive change to the prevailing land and property relations achieved under the current dispensation which has left much of the land, property and wealth in the hands of white South Africans. Another stream defends the constitutional compromise that largely retained the status quo on land and property relations at 1994 whilst committing (at least textually in accordance with the constitutional property clause) to progressive, piecemeal redistribution and restitution of land; this stream tends to be simultaneously critical of government’s perceived failure to fulfill its constitutional mandate. To place justice at the center would be to require that both sides equally foreground their underlying justice claims, although in fairness it must be acknowledged that those calling for paradigmatic change generally do.

Earlier this year Time Magazine dubbed South Africa as “the world’s most unequal country”, this fact of a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots coupled with the increasing angst around land and property rights suggests an impending crisis is on the horizon. Continuation of the debate on current terms signals a failure to address the underlying justice questions of how this inequality was produced and has been sustained post 1994. To avoid the descent into a cataclysm, I suggest here that a first step must be to shift the grounds of debate away from political rhetoric, a focus on legalities and policy (over)analysis as this all too comfortably skirts the questions of justice implicit in really grappling with South Africa’s racially skewed wealth, land and property holdings.

Image Credit: Martin Heigan on Flickr

About the author:

IMG-20191030-WA0027Sanele Sibanda is a faculty member in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He has been a visiting fellow at ISS, a participant in the joint Erasmus School of Law – ISS Project on Integrating Normative and Functional Approaches to the Rule of Law, and currently serves in the supervisory team of one of the candidates in a joint ISS-Wits PhD programme. Sibanda recently completed his PhD at University of the Witwatersrand entitled “Not Yet Uhuru” – The Usurpation of the Liberation Aspirations of South Africa’s Masses by a Commitment to Liberal Constitutional Democracy.