Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Ghana's twin agrarian questions -- the trajectory of agricultural productivity and the transition (or not) to large-scale private ownership in the countryside -- with emphasis upon the issue of transfers of capital from cocoa farming to manufacturing and other urban activities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines Ghana's twin agrarian questions, the potential for transformation of agricultural productivity and the trajectory - or otherwise - towards a capitalist countryside, through the lens of cocoa farming, the sector which, over the 'long twentieth century', c.1890-2011, has been usually the country's biggest foreign exchange earner and the primary field for accumulation by small and medium-scale indigenous enterprise. By the 1990s it was common to associate cocoa farming with static productivity and inequality without class differentiation: thus, no agrarian transition. It is argued that this view is exaggerated and misleading, in the light of recent research on the Ghana's three cocoa-planting booms, including the relatively neglected one of the 1990s and early 2000s. Particular attention is given to the issues of change in techniques of production, the continued lack of advantages of scale in cocoa production, the multiplication of population, the economics and politics of rural-urban transfers, and the highly contingent history of small capitalist farmers' capacity to organise themselves collectively. It is argued that the relatively rapid and sustained economic growth of the country between the start of Structural Adjustment in 1983 and the beginning of oil exports in 2011 featured a set of changes which, in combination, re-open the possibility of agrarian transition in Ghana, both in productivity and social organisation.