Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Individuals derive their access to land through membership of the land-
owning group, inheritance, gifts, outright purchase, pledging, or renting. Rent is
either in cash, or in kind by sharecropping whereby payment takes the form of
sharing of the farm produce or of the farm itself between the landowner and the
operator in varying proportions, locally called
abunu
,
abusa
, etc., depending
upon the proportionate distributions. In a third form of sharecropping, the
operator retains maize while cassava and the land revert to the landowner in
a maize/cassava intercrop.
Cash renting of land is preferred to sharecropping for the production of
vegetable crops such as tomato, garden eggs, and pepper.
In Tano-Odumasi virtually every household, including those of migrants, has
access to land for subsistence through routes other than renting or sharecropping.
For example, in a survey of 123 households only three had access to land through
tenancy only (Table 19.1). For a majority of individuals (77 per cent) in this
survey, tenancy provides the means for accessing additional land for cultivation
beyond subsistence levels. Renting or sharecropping is the preferred mode of
exercise of rights by landowners.
Land-use forms/stages
The PLEC Biodiversity Advisory Group (BAG) recognizes the following land-
use forms or stages:
•
house (home) gardens
•
annual cropping
•
agroforests
•
grass-, shrub-, and tree-dominated fallows
•
orchards
•
native forests (Zarin, Huijin, and Enu-Kwesi, 1999).
Within these general land-use categories the common field types identified in
Tano-Odumasi are described below. A summary of the relationship between the
Table 19.1 Land access categories in Tano-Odumasi
Access/ownership category
Male
Female
Total
Owner-operator only
21
4
25
Tenancy only
1
2
3
Combined owner-operator
36
59
95
and tenancy
Total
58
65
123
