Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
subsequently reconfirmed by Ghana after independence. It is under these
legal terms that the government acquired the land at Tono and Vea schemes
from the farmers hitherto cultivating those areas. The latter were paid
compensation for their dwellings and economic trees but not for the land
itself (Tate and Lyle, 1982). In Tono chiefs and opinion leaders were in
agreement to give their land for the project. Also before the project there
were only few patches of land under cultivation within the Tono area, unlike
in Vea which was experiencing active farming within the project area. The
immediate effect of the government acquiring the land at Vea and Tono was
to dispossess farmers of a substantial proportion of their farming land.
The initial allocation of Vea irrigation land dispossessed original users of the
project land. This resulted in a series of struggles and conflicts over land
between the original users and the management of the scheme. After ICOUR
took over the management of Vea, land was re-allocated in Vea partially in
accordance with the priorities set by the Land Allocation Committee. The
land given to the dispossessed farmers was given to compound/family heads
who signed tenancy agreements with ICOUR instead of household heads.
The family/compound head then shared the allocation to the households
within the extended family. This allowed some degree of permanency on the
land in Vea since the land given to the family head became hereditary. In
addition, farmers in Vea insisted that during the rainy season they would
cultivate their lands without supplementary irrigation. This has continued to
a stage where the farmers have assumed some permanency on their lands
making it difficult for the management to assess and redistribute land in Vea
every 5-years as the policy states. As a result, it is these ‚landlords‛ who
rent out the land for irrigation during the dry season and collect the water
levies from their tenants and pay to ICOUR on their behalf. According to
the management, there have been several instances of farmers paying the
levies to the ‚landlords‛ but these ‚landlords‛ refusing to pay ICOUR. In
Vea local farmers' plots are supposed to range from 0.2-0.6ha, but one farmer
(who had taken over his father's land in the scheme) was controlling 10ha.
When asked whose name was with ICOUR as the registered farmer he
claimed it was his father's name. Because he could not cultivate all the
10hectares, he leased out land to interested farmers during the dry season by
charging them some money for the land. He also collected the water levy and
paid on behalf of the farmers on his plot.
Due to the land tenure challenges at Vea, contract farmers have been
reluctant to farm at Vea irrigation scheme. The water levy collection rate at
Vea is low and this has had dire consequences on the efficient management of
the scheme. Usually new projects or proposals received by ICOUR are
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