New studies by Dr. Stephanie Worlanyo Adator map a data-driven plan to protect farms, fix land governance, and restore mined lands in the wake of a time where Ghana’s cocoa belt is being squeezed from two directions—erratic weather and land loss to mining.
Dr. Adator maps a data-driven path to protect farmers’ livelihoods while modernizing land governance. In a paper titled “Climate Variability: Cocoa Farmers Perception and Coping Strategies, Suaman District of Ghana as the Focal Point,” a field survey of 120 cocoa farmers finds that barely half (48.33%) correctly perceive the climate signal—declining rainfall paired with rising temperatures—despite living on the frontlines of change.
The study shows that targeted know-how matters: recent farm-management training measurably improves the odds that farmers read the climate correctly and choose practical adjustments on their farms.
Importantly, the climate study moves past anecdotes to quantify which attributes shape adaptation. Older farms and larger farm sizes are each associated with adopting more coping strategies, with both effects statistically significant at the 1% level—evidence that experience and scale can grease the skids for change.
Yet the paper also overturns some assumptions. Membership in farmer-based organizations correlates negatively with correct climate perception at the 5% level, a finding the authors link to groups’ recent focus on markets and input access rather than climate literacy.
Even farmers who do perceive change tend to streamline, not pile on, their responses: on average they adopt five targeted measures out of eleven options—choices like improved varieties, mixed planting, pesticide use, and shifting planting dates—suggesting an emphasis on precision over volume.
Taken together, the results argue for scaling training that is practical, localized, and climate-specific.
If weather is the slow squeeze, mining is the rapid pinch. In “Farmers’ perception of the impact of gold mining on shrinking agricultural land and their livelihood in the Asutifi-North District” published in Resources Policy Journal, Adator and colleagues surveyed 300 farmers across five mining communities and interviewed five key stakeholders.
They find that gold mining—legal and illegal—has become the dominant competitor to farming for land, and that farmers’ own livelihoods are the single strongest driver pushing some into artisanal and small-scale mining, a result validated with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.6276 for the underlying “livelihood perception” factor.
The factor model explains 60.22% of variance in perceptions and clusters around four flashpoints: land grabs, degraded water bodies, in-migration pressures, and inadequate compensation—an unusually coherent quantitative signal in a complex, contested landscape.
The household-level numbers are stark. Nearly half of farmers (49%) report their farm size has shrunk since they started farming; just 3.33% report increases. Among those who lost land, 48.67% say it was leased out for mining, while about 21% cite land-tenure problems—double blows that erode both acreage and security.
Access to the very institutions that could cushion the shock is thin: only 5.78% have credit access, 11.32% receive extension services, and none report business-training centers from the major mining operator—figures that help explain why short-term cash from mining can lure farmers despite long-term risk.
Water, the quiet backbone of cocoa and food crops, is another pressure point: 58% of respondents say mining poses a major challenge to water availability and quality, echoing broader evidence of contamination and groundwater disruption near blast zones.
Compensation practices compound stress
While about 80% report receiving some compensation for land conversions, roughly one in five say they received nothing at all—a gap that can convert grievance into exit, often into illegal mining.
Threaded through both climate and mining stories is a third strand: how Ghana’s hybrid land rules shape who farms, who mines, and who bears the costs. Another research Dr Adator tries to unravel Ghana’s land tenue system and how that affect access to land.
She published this ground breaking study in a paper titled “Land Tenure System in the Pre-Colonial Era: Ghana as the Insight” traces how customary governance (including matrilineal inheritance in many areas and chiefs’ custodial authority) still undergirds access and legitimacy in rural communities.
Colonial-era policies layered statutory law atop that customary bedrock, creating a dual system that today recognizes customary tenure yet often fails to leverage its strengths in policy design.
The 1992 Constitution on freehold
The 1992 Constitution’s Article 267(5) forbids freehold interests in stool lands, formalizing leasehold as the operative instrument (typically up to 99 years for citizens and 50 for expatriates)—details that matter when mines negotiate access and when farmers seek compensation or secure replacement plots.
The historical shift to indirect rule and later statutes also diluted some local authorities’ powers and muddied lines between customary and state control, a legacy that complicates dispute resolution around land conversions today.
Practical levers
First, climate literacy and hands-on training demonstrably improve perception and uptake of sensible, targeted adaptation—an actionable blueprint for agricultural extension in cocoa areas.
Again, if policymakers want to slow the drift from farms into riskier mining, the data show where to start: expand credit and extension (today reaching barely 6% and 11% of farmers, respectively), strengthen transparent compensation frameworks, and safeguard water systems that over half of households already see as compromised.
Lastly, it is expedient that statutory land rules align with the lived logic of customary tenure—especially where inheritance patterns, chief custodianship, and leasehold realities determine how quickly land can be replaced or rehabilitated after a conversion.
Caution against one-size-fits-all fixes.
In the climate study, farmers who correctly read the signal tended to choose fewer, more precise strategies—on average five of eleven—suggesting that programs should privilege depth and fit over checklists.
In the mining study, the most powerful perception factor is livelihood, not environment per se; if compensation and enterprise support are weak, short-term gains from mining will keep outbidding long-term farm resilience.
Where land institutions are ambiguous, delays and disputes can magnify both problems.
Timely message for Ghana’s cocoa heartlands
Policymakers can scale climate-smart training that demonstrably shifts perceptions and behavior; mining regulators can enforce and publish compensation standards and fund real business training in affected districts; water authorities can target surveillance where communities already flag risk; and land agencies can harmonize leasehold practice with customary norms to speed fair replacement of lost plots.
These are not abstract goals—they are choices that line up directly with what farmers quantify in surveys and what history has carved into Ghana’s landscape.
As climate variability intensifies and gold prices continue to tug at arable land, the cost of inaction will be measured in smaller farms, murkier water, and younger workers choosing the pit over the plot.
These papers offer a coherent, quantitative map out of that trap. What remains is political will to follow it.
By Julius Kofi Satsi