A United Nations Human Rights Working Group mission to Ghana has found that millions of smallholder farmers, artisanal fishers, and pastoralists remain trapped in poverty and exclusion despite a growing body of national agricultural legislation designed to protect them.
The working group, which monitors the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas, reported after its end-of-mission assessment that a persistent gap exists between Ghana’s legislative framework and actual conditions on the ground. The group acknowledged Ghana’s recent legislative output, including the Fisheries and Aquaculture Act 2025, the Social Protection Act 2025, and the Affirmative Action (Gender Equity) Act 2024, but concluded that for rural producers these instruments remain largely aspirational rather than operational.
“Small-holder farmers, artisanal fishers, and pastoralists, who constitute the actual backbone of food production, continue to suffer from poverty and exclusion,” the working group stated, noting that a policy push toward mechanised and export-oriented agriculture risks entrenching a dual food system where large commercial operators advance while local producers fall further behind.
The working group identified three distinct failure points in the current framework. On gender, it found that despite strong legal protections, women remain excluded from land ownership and meaningful decision-making, with deeply entrenched social norms consistently overriding written law and leaving women, youth, and the elderly at compounding disadvantage.
On pastoralists, it found that Fulbe community members face structural invisibility within a governance system built for settled residents. Many cannot obtain citizenship documentation, placing them outside legal protection entirely and fuelling recurring conflict with settled farmers as climate pressure and agricultural expansion reduce available grazing land.
On the environment, the group described illegal gold mining, locally known as galamsey, as a politically charged emergency whose contamination of rivers and destruction of farmland by heavy metals directly threatens food and nutrition security. It noted that the crisis is intertwined with elite interests that complicate decisive state action.
Beyond these pressures, the working group flagged persistent economic barriers including catastrophic post-harvest losses driven by a lack of cold-chain infrastructure, poor rural road networks, intermediary dominance that captures value away from the farmer, and financial exclusion stemming from smallholders’ inability to meet conventional bank collateral requirements.
The group acknowledged that Ghana has built a strong legislative foundation that commands international respect, but said bridging the gap between policy and practice would require political courage to confront entrenched interests and drive meaningful structural change in rural communities.
