Projekt

In the last three decades, the dynamics of the global economy - in complex interaction with their domestic complements - have constituted a perfect storm of socioeconomic transformation in the countryside of Africa. In specific terms, and following Fine and Rustomjee (1996), this transformation is spawned (and continues to be spawned) by what will be conceptualised in this study as the minerals-energy-food complex (MEFC) land acquisitions in Africa. Ghana, the empirical referent of this proposed study, is a classic case of MEFC land acquisitions in the West Africa sub-region. Since implementing structural adjustments programmes (SAPs) in the early 1980s, it has witnessed stupendous mining-foreign direct investment (M-FDI) involving large-scale land acquisitions by transnational mining companies. It is also a country in which both the state and international development agencies are vigorously promoting agribusiness and agroindustry as rural development strategies. It has also become one of the key targeted countries in the recent large-scale corporate land acquisitions in Africa. Between 2007 and 2012, large-scale land acquisitions by foreign food and biofuel corporations is one of the major globally-driven transformations occurring in the rural parts of Ghana. Together with surface mining, corporate land acquisitions have created a typical case of MEFC land acquisitions in Ghana; and together with the promotion of agroindustries and agribusiness, a perfect storm of socioeconomic transformation in the countryside of Ghana it witnessed. The two phenomena call for theoretically and empirically grounded research in order to understand their economy-wide development implications.

• Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara

  Universität Frankfurt am Main
  Zentrum für interdisziplinäre
  Afrikaforschung (ZIAF)
  Campus Westend
  Frankfurt am Main
  

• Dr. Jasper Ayelazuno

  University for Development Studies
  Communication, Innovation, and Technology
  Agribusiness and Communication Sciences
  Tamale
  Ghana
  

• Water and land investment in the overseas of Northern Ghana: The land question, agrarian change, and development implications

• Ghana s Hydrocarbon Industry: A Look Backward and Forward from the Perspective of Coastal Communities

• Large-scale Mining and Ecological Imperialism in Africa: The Politics of Mining and Conservation of the Ecology in Ghana