Ghanaian feminist, academic and professor of African Studies
Dzodzi Tsikata is a Ghanaian feminist, academic, professor of Development Sociology and Director of Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Ghana.
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In Ghana, women produce in their communities until they get married. To live with their spouses, they leave their communities and go abroad in the new community and access to the land is mediated by their husbands. Then, when women grow old, if they don't have any men, they can lose access to the land. If they get divorced, they lose it automatically.
But there is the mistake of deciding that it is not necessary to produce [other things] because, if you produce raw materials for export, you can earn enough money to buy food. So many farmers are not encouraged to continue producing and are not investigating how to produce, store, process and improve food security. Agriculture focuses on commodities.
There are no policies that consider women as farmers. Then women are left aside and a cycle of disadvantages is perpetuated. It is not an economic question, but a matter of citizenship and rights. Anyone who declares themselves feminist cannot fail to recognize the connection between the rights of women and the right to the land.
Therefore, there are many complicated issues that we have to face to ensure food sovereignty. The first step is to guarantee the access of small producers to the ground for their own production, on the ground for the market. Secondly, we have to guarantee the questions surrounding the land posession. Some groups of farmers, especially women, cannot independently acquire land for agriculture.
Africa is a continent of farmers, of small producers who do not have a vast production. Which doesn't mean that this is a bad strategy, because I believe that small-scale agriculture is promising and often undervalued. For example, Ghana has become a world leader in cocoa production based on small-scale agriculture. This should teach us that small farmers can produce successfully for the market.
I believe there is a reason when we say that agriculture is increasing, but some of the most basic food security questions have not been addressed. In a country like Ghana, there are common illnesses related to food shortages and some people, at certain times of the year, do not have access to food. This is a very serious problem, particularly for children and women.