Arable and forest land user rent in a peri-urban district, Ghana
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Arable and forest land user rent in a peri-urban district, Ghana Divine Odame Appiah . Emmanuel Mawuli Abalo
. Gabriel Eshun
The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Land-use policies meant to mitigate deforestation activities in Ghana will have to consider the heterogeneity of the drivers of arable and forest land degradation. This would help avoid the one-size fits all approach to solving this problem. The urgency for this realisation is premised on the recent increasing monetary incentive to convert arable and forest land to other land uses in peri-urban Ghana. This study hypothesised that there is no significant relationship between land rent and the conversion probability from arable and forest land to other land uses such as commercial, industrial and residential land uses in Bosomtwe, a peri-urban district in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Four-hundred and one usufruct or landowning households and individual landowners participated through a three-stage sampling procedure. The results indicated a significant relationship between
D. O. Appiah E. M. Abalo (&) G. Eshun Department of Geography and Rural Development, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana e-mail: [email protected] E. M. Abalo e-mail: [email protected] G. Eshun e-mail: [email protected] E. M. Abalo Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK
higher land rent and conversion probability from arable land to other land uses such as commercial, industrial and residential land uses. Specifically, receiving land rent above GH¢400 (OR = 1.979) predicted the outcome variable in all three models. Moreover, being a female (OR = 0.612), ageing: 56 and 65 (OR = 2.158) and 76 and above (OR = 11.781), traders/food vendors (OR = 0.423) and widows (OR = 2.050) had some odds of predicting the outcome variable. The study recommends a reformation of government land use conversion policies and decisions in collaboration with landowners, to include parameters which assess the effect and benefits of land conversion decisions on biodiversity before leasing out land rights. Keywords Forest land tenure User rent Conversion Arable land Land uses Bosomtwe Ghana
Introduction Forests play an important role in maintaining and balancing the natural ecosystem (Quacou 2016) by sequestering nearly 3 billion tons of anthropogenic carbon emissions annually (Canadell et al. 2007; FAO 2005). In monetary terms, the function performed by forested ecosystem as a carbon sink could be worth
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hundreds of billions of dollars compared to an equivalent sink created through artificial carbon capture and storage (Canadell and Raupach 2008; Jackson and Baker 2010). Deforestation and forest degradation disrupt the structure, function and role performed by the forest ecosystem and future food production (Francis et al. 2012). Both natural (Abalo et al. 2017a; Steffen et al. 2011; Lambin
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