Vulnerability of smallholder agriculture to environmental change in North-Western Ghana and implications for development planning
Emmanuel Kanchebe Derbile, Dennis Chirawurah, Francis Xavier Naab
Abstract
Smallholder agriculture, particularly food crop production in northern Ghana’s savannah ecological zones, is faced with several environmental change stressors and risks. However, most studies on the vulnerability of agriculture focus on socio-economic indicators with little attention to the comparative analysis of smallholder crop production’s vulnerability to different environmental stressors. This paper draws on a mixed-method research design for analyzing smallholder farmer vulnerability to various environmental stressors in the Wa Municipality. Farmers identified these stressors to include climatic factors (drought, rainstorm, and flood) and non-climatic factors (sand mining and bush fires). The results reveal vulnerability at two levels. First, smallholder farmers are more vulnerable to non-climatic environmental stressors than climatic factors. Secondly, crop-specific vulnerability analysis reveals that legumes and tubers, including beans, groundnuts, and yam, are more susceptible to climatic stressors than cereal crops. The paper underscores that urbanization and its associated patterns of consumption in housing demand are the primary drivers of these emergent vulnerability patterns. The paper emphasizes that an integrated approach to Environmental Change Adaptation Planning (ECAP) is imperative for reducing agriculture’s vulnerability to environmental change in the Municipality.