Dry-Season Watermelon Farming in Northern Ghana

By S. Soeters and R. Stam

study area: Farfar

Farfar has a population of 9,420 of which 4,984 are female and 4,436 male. In total there are approximately 506 households (based on average household size of 8). The Farfar community is located within the Sudan Savannah with one dry season (October-April) and one rainy season (May-September) annually. The vegetation consists of trees, shrub species and herbaceous grasses. Some of the natural resources include land, rivers, streams, wildlife and economic trees such as the Shea tree, Mahogany and Dawadawa. The landscape is generally flat, with some gentle slopes. Soils are loamy mixed with gravel. A chief and council of elders constitute the traditional governance system. However, within the community development planning and decision making process other stakeholders hold key positions. These include the District Assembly (DA) sub -structures such as the Assemblyman, members of the Unit Committees (UC) and the Mangazia (women's leader). Natural resources within the community such as land, economic trees and water bodies are owned and controlled by the indigenous people. However, settlers may buy or rent land and employ it for their own economic benefits. Women and youth also have access to land and other natural resources (such as the Shea trees) but cannot own them or transfer them to third parties. The majority of household decisions continue to be made by men. 

 

Adaptation Learning Program (ALP)

The Adaptation Learning Program (ALP) was implemented in rural communities in Ghana, Niger, Kenya and Mozambique. Its overarching goal is to increase the capacity of vulnerable households in Sub-Saharan Africa to adapt to climate variability and change. The community-based approach emphasises a flexibility that results in significantly differences in implementation and focus between ALP target communities. Thus, although ALP is much broader than dry-season farming alone, in Farfar, focus groups and interviewees emphasised that ALPs support of the watermelon sub-sector was its most significant contribution to local development and adaptive capacity. Importantly, dry-season watermelon existed prior to the implementation of ALP, resulting from the experimentation of watermelonm farming by migrants around 2005. ALP has worked to make watermelon farming more effective and more inclusive, with a special emphasis on women. The high costs associated with watermelon farming (seed and pesticides and increasingly, fertilizer) create exclusionary dynamics – those without access to capital cannot farm watermelon during the dry season. In order to address this barrier to entry, ALP facilitated the establishment of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA), with a predominantly female composition. Farmers have also been linked to the Presbyterian Agricultural Station-Garu for a supply of certified seed, although most interviewed farmers that they usually acquired seeds in the open market. Access to land, the second barrier to entry for women, has been addressed by sensitising men to the importance of allocating some of their land to allow women to farm watermelon. Finally, in order to address the third barrier to entry, namely, infrastructure deficiencies, ALP provided advocacy training to enable local groups to lobby local government to provide the necessary infrastructure. ALP also provided communities with (commonly-owned) water pumps and generators to enable farmers to water their watermelon fields from the nearby river.

Research

A low-lying flood plain, 7 kilometres south of the Farfar community, accessible only along a small footpath, wedged between the Gambaga escarpment and tributary of the White Volta, provides conditions for dry-season watermelon farming. Through the Adaptation Learning Program (ALP), farmers from Farfar, a small, rural community, are able to access certified seed, water pumps and generators and community credit facilities to finance inputs. The research seeks to understand new dynamics of conflict and cooperation which emerge from the explosion of watermelon farming including intra-community conflict and cooperation as well as that between communities, including migrant pastoralist communities, for who the land serves as pasture lands and a means of accessing drinking water for their cattle.

The first phase of fieldwork sought to profile dry-season watermelon farmers. It sought to identify conflicts arising from dry-season watermelon, as well as understand mechanisms through which conflicts either escalated or were resolved. A review of individual contestations over watermelon land reveals four sources of contestation: Urban elites from the nearby district capital, Garu; those belonging also to the Farfar community who do not have land to farm watermelon; those residing in Nakpanduri, also a primarily Bimoba community who claim the land, being located in the Northern Region, is rightfully theirs, and Fulani herders who migrate southwards from surrounding countries during in order to access greener pastures and water for their cattle during the dry season. The last of these conflicts were the most likely to escalate. The second phase of fieldwork using social capital theories not only to explain why may result from adaptation interventions, and what intervention design considerations are required in order to avoid conflict and foster cooperation. Particular attention is paid to relations between farmers and pastoralists.

Research Findings

  • The community focus of Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) may decrease 'bridging' social capital, and thereby increase the risk of conflict between communities, including migrant pastoralist communities. Practitioners should take a social landscape approach rather than a community-based approach.
  • Territoriality and non-territoriality provides a useful analytical framework for making sense of farmers-herder conflicts in the context of CBAs
  • The creation of new opportunities by planned adaptation interventions, may change local and longstanding patterns of mobility, and thereby have adverse effects for local adaptive capacity
  • Tensions between civic and customary institutional structures within ‘communities’ may exacerbate conflicts and/or cooperation in the context of Community-Based Adaptation.