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This paper provides a broad review of agrarian change in Ghana by highlighting the major developments in the agrarian political economy and their implications for agricultural commercialisation and its modifying influence on land tenure systems, livelihoods, production systems, social relations, and labour relations. While current land tenure arrangements and labour relations in Africa are often explained in terms of globalisation, we argue that the historical context of agricultural commercialisation in Ghana shows continuities and discontinuities in agrarian relations from the colonial period to the present. We also argue that changes over the years have blended with globalisation to produce the distinct forms of labour relations that we see today. The commercialisation of agriculture in Ghana has evolved progressively from the colonial era aided by policies of coercion, persuasion and incentives to its current globalised form. The expansion in the range of commodities over time necessarily increased the demand for more land and labour. The article contributes to the literature by providing great insights into changes in land and labour relations due to increasing commercialisation, and how these enhanced wealth accumulation for the richer segments of society and global capital to the detriment of the poor throughout Ghana’s agrarian history.

Since the 1980s, a neoliberal paradigm has guided agricultural policy formulation in Africa with an unflinching preference for the commercialization of agriculture through the incorporation of smallholder farmers into global circuits of accumulation via outgrower arrangements. The paradigm has claimed that the promotion of integrated value chains will create jobs and enhance incomes in agrarian areas. This article assesses the manner in which men and women are positioned differentially in the outgrower value chains in terms of employment benefits. Drawing on interviews, the article explores the employment pattern in the outgrower value chain system and the structural dynamics that lead to benefits, or otherwise, for men and women in Ghana’s largest fruit-processing company, Blue Skies, and its outgrower farms. This study finds that many jobs were created along the value chain for men and women, but that men have occupied the high-earning echelon of the value chain as outgrowers, as well as more secure positions as permanent staff in the factory, women have largely been employed as disposable casual workers in these two spaces.

Lands for domestic production in rural areas have increasingly shrunk and the rules of access have changed as corporate land grabs intensify in many parts of the Global South. These occurrences are outcomes of processes that are packaged in state policies that promote market intervention in agricultural production. In Ghana, state initiatives promote large-scale industrial cassava production in rural areas. This article discusses land grabs in cassava frontier communities, their impacts on land access rules, and social relations. It is argued that while land, gender, and class relations change as a result of competition over, and commodification of, land resources, community institutions, namely chiefs and families, play significant roles that legitimize dispossession of social groups whose land-use rights are derived from other hierarchies. The changes in production relations in the communities are linked to processes linked to older commodity production. Similar changes have occurred at the household level as circuits of commodity production integrate within domestic production. The article highlights different struggles by women and migrants to renegotiate their access rules and their local citizenship status.

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