Adapting to Climate Change: Plight of Smallholder Farmers in Ghana
By Philip Acquaye
Ghana’s economy is predominantly agriculture driven with majority of the workforce in that sector being smallholder farmers (70% of the estimated 7.3 million farmers in Ghana aresmallholder farmers). Their mode of farming is rain-fed and a reliance on traditional farming methods and equipment.
Despite the challenges confronting them, their contribution to Ghana’s economic growth is immense. An assessment of the agriculture sector in Ghana by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations indicates that, generally, agriculture contributes to 54 % of Ghana’s GDP, and accounts for over 40 % of export earnings, while at the same time providing over 90 % of the food needs of the country. As a major life support to the country’s economy, any natural or human activity, therefore, that tends to threaten the growth of the sector equally threatens major developmental drives meant to improve the well-being of the citizenry.
In the recent past, several reported incidents of pest invasion on farms, occasional delays in rainfall patterns, and rising temperatures have been cited as some of the challenges that have stalled sustained growth in the agriculture sector in Ghana. However, studies by climate scientists indicate that these challenges faced by the sector are manifestations of climate change. According to the United Nations, climate change is along-term shift in temperatures and weather patterns. These shifts may be natural or human-caused which results invariations in the solar cycle. Effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occurring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves, frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions and an increase in the number, duration and intensity of tropical storms.
With the climate change and its impact not seeing any end in sight, there are calls from stakeholders in the agriculture sector for a robust solution to be found to mitigate its effect on annual crop yields. With Ghana’s agriculture sector heavily dependent on rainfall for the cultivation of crops, the effect therefore of rainfall variations, (a direct effect of climate change) on farming is dire. Ultimately, negative impacts on annual crop yield poses a national food security threat.
A World Bank Group’s report on Ghana’s climate risk profile states among other things that the country will experience severe yield losses as interannual rainfall variability increases and the length of growing seasons shorten. The report further projects that rising temperatures are likely to increase the presence of pests and diseases leading potentially to crop failure and reduced yields. Reduced rainfall will also shorten growing seasons and the desertification of agricultural land brought about by unsustainable farming practices, such as limited crop rotation and poor soil management, will further inhibit production.
Narrating his frustrations on the erratic nature of rainfall patternsin Ghana, a cabbage crop farmer in the Eastern Region of Ghana, Philip Quao, bemoaned the frequency of unreliable rainfall patterns and its impact on crop yields and on their meagre investments. According to Quao, his crops were destroyed by floods after weeks of torrential rainfall.
‘’The rains came at a time when it was least expected and stayed for days when it was also not needed. My entire farm was submerged under water for days. This made most of the crops go bad making me lose all my capital I invested into the farming.The changing rainfall patterns makes farming so difficult nowadays’’, he recounted.
The experience of Quao is not an isolated case as many of suchreports indicate that across the country, farmers experienced severe droughts while others got their farms submerged in water. A 2018 study on the impact of floods on agriculture shows that Ghana lost 20 million dollars of impact of floods on agriculture. This, obviously, impacts negatively on food production thereby posing a food security situation for the country.
Plight of Smallholder Farmers
In the wake of growing concerns about the debilitating effect of climate change across various sectors and in particular the agriculture sector, the need to profile these challenges in order to find immediate solutions have become more than urgent.Among other things, the major climate related challenges confronting smallholder farmers today include erratic rainfall patterns, and the lack of knowledge on the use of science and technology in predicting weather conditions.
