Abstract
Support for large scale agricultural investments in Africa has been mainly premised on their employment prospects for local populations. However, despite earlier calls by Tania Li to centre labour in the land grabs debate, labour is generally invisible in both mainstream policy and academic research. This paper, through a governance lens, draws attention to the implications of the global land rush on wage labour. In principle, policy frameworks that emphasise the labour potentials from large-scale land investments also gravitate towards regulations that seek to facilitate capital accumulation and mitigate negative impacts on communities – congruent with Ghana’s policy direction. This paper assesses the political-economic context of the legislative gaps in the current governance framework for wage labour and large-scale agriculture in Ghana; characterised mainly by absent, illusively present and repressive institutions. It is supported with empirical findings from the nature of farm workers’ incorporation into a transnational oil palm plantation in Ghana, their struggles over the nature of the investment, and the political orientation of the existing regulatory institutions. The study calls for policy measures which address power relations that shape the distribution of benefits from land investments, and also recognise structural inequalities that exist in and outside of agriculture.
Highlights
The past decade has seen an overwhelming amount of literature on the impacts of transnational agricultural investments in Africa
Modifications to land access are visible in the short term, while labour related impacts may only materialise at later stages (Cotula et al, 2014) full implementation of land investments occurs at later periods making it methodologically challenging to study (Oya, 2013a, Oya, 2013)
gathered and reviewed national (Ghana) appears to incline towards the first two regulatory tendencies of promoting land deals, but what does this mean for rural working people affected by land deals? This study aimed to investigate the effect of regulations intended to ensure responsible investments on labour outcomes for local people, in particular, marginalised groups
Summary
In 2015 the ministry of food and agriculture made available a list of public lands and priority crops earmarked for largescale investments while inviting partnership opportunities from industrialised countries Many times, these ideas resonate with traditional authorities who premise their expectations on jobs for the youth. The study explored the experiences of farmworkers on an oil palm plantation in Ghana and the capacity of existing land and labour regulations to ensure equitable benefits from land investments. It is important to note that the goal of this paper is not to present detailed empirical evidence of wage labour relations on the oil palm plantation Instead, it is a critique of the existing regulatory environment for governing wage labour and investments, while reflecting on the experiences of the farmworkers in order to ground the discussion in firsthand observations
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