Land tenure, food security, gender and urbanization in Northern Ghana

Urban Farm DB summary

A study of how land access and food access are linked in Tamale and its surroundings in Northern Region, Ghana, based on an ethnographic study and a food and nutrition insecurity survey conducted between October 2013 and November 2014. Shortage of land for agriculture was reported by 20% of households in urban areas, against 1.3% in peri-urban and 0% in rural areas, as infrastructural development and agriculture compete for the same ground. Food-insecure households were significantly more likely to name lack of land, rather than anything else, as the primary reason they could not grow crops (Fisher's exact probability = 0.040). Residents cope with the constraints of the communal tenure system through strategies such as urban–peri-urban–rural migrant farming and cultivation of buffer zones. Women, who carry the role of providing nutritious soups, use various mechanisms to circumvent their lack of access to land, so that the link between land and food is constituted by interacting political, economic and cultural elements.