Agricultural polices and food security : impact on smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana

Abstract

Ghana’s government over the years has adopted and implemented several agricultural polices and programmes with the overall objective of stimulating agricultural growth and enhancing food security. This thesis uses the Oxfam model to assess the impact of agricultural policies on food security among smallholder farmers in northern Ghana. It argues that government agricultural policies have failed to a have positive impact on food security among smallholder farmers in northern Ghana because they were more geared towards promoting the large scale commercial agricultural sector than the smallholder agriculture sector. This claim is supported by the data in Ghana which proves that food insecurity is still a major problem among smallholder farmers in northern Ghana despite the policies and programmes put in place to tackle it. The analysis is based on two main sets of data: national agricultural policies and regional policies from 1980 to 2000.