Study title

Kenya, Zambia, Ghana

Household

The study was conducted in three countries: Ghana (West Africa), Kenya (East Africa) and Zambia (Southern Africa). These countries have contrasting historical experiences with land tenure institutions (statutory and customary), large-scale commercial farming and agricultural liberalisation. While Kenya is a former settler economy with a significant core of commercial agriculture, with large-scale farming accounting for 30 percent of marketed agricultural produce, including tea, coffee, maize, wheat and livestock, Zambia has repeatedly struggled to establish such a sector, and has liberalised through privatisation of state farms and provision of state infrastructure in ‘farm blocks’. Ghana, by contrast, has an established system of peasant-based commercial agriculture undergirded by customary land tenure systems and informal land markets. In all three countries, a policy environment favouring the liberalisation of land markets and foreign investment facilitates large-scale land acquisitions. Case study choices were informed not only by the type of institutional arrangement or ‘model’, but also different kinds of agriculture, including production of staple grain crops, horticulture and feedstock for biofuels. Within each country, the findings compare outcomes across the three models, exploring which models of commercialisation are potentially more successful, across different indicators. Such an approach enabled us to understand the implications of the different commercial agriculture models, and across sectors, in countries with different agrarian structures and histories. Overall, the studies provided a series of cases, rather than a systematic comparative assessment; but nevertheless offered some important insights, and challenged some of the simplistic narratives of agricultural commercialisation in Africa.Our study was divided into three phases. In the first phase, we conducted in-depth qualitative studies on the origins, scale of operation, labour regimes, value-chains and wider politics of the commercial farming cases, via in-depth interviews, archival research and focus group discussions. In the second phase, we designed a questionnaire and administered a household survey in the case study areas. We drew a random sample of the entire area, including the case study sites, within a 5km radius from an identified centre-point (N = approximately 100 per case study). A third and final phase of field research involved in-depth life histories of rich, middle and poor households in each study site, including those involved in various ways as well as those not, in order to locate our analysis in the context of longer historical shifts in livelihood strategies, and to explore intra-household relations and dynamics. The qualitative research also included in this final phase a process of mapping input and output markets, in order to identify the forms and extent of linkages between our case studies and the local economy.