Avert Challenges confronting smallholder farmers or risk Ghana’s transformation Agenda - UNDROP urges Government

The UN Working Group on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (UNDROP) has urged government to avert challenges confronting smallholder farmers or risk Ghana’s transformation agenda.

Speaking during a press briefing after ten days visit by the expert group, Uche Ofodile, Vice-chair of the working group explained that smallholder farmers including artisanal fishers are exposed to residual risks generated by decisions made by Government. The current transformational model, she says risks entrenching a dual food system in which large-scale, input-intensive commercial Agriculture serves as an integrated export sector, while the family-based agrarian sector is left increasingly marginalized.

She also further questioned the intended role of the millions of smallholders, women farmers, artisanal farmers and nomadic pastoralists who currently sustain Ghana’s food and rural social fabric.

‘’The central challenge documented during this visit is not the absence of a legal framework. It is the persistent gap between the law and policy and their meaningful implementation on the ground. That gap is a product of two forces of which we have heard repeatedly. Firstly, it is insufficient political will to challenge entrenched interests. Secondly, social norms continue to normalize the exclusion of rural communities, women and pastoral peoples’’, she said.

The group noticed that although Ghana presents a compelling case for the rights of small-scale farmers, fishers and pastoralists in the context of the country’s implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other people Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), more needs to be done.

It noticed that the Government has taken concrete and commendable steps towards boosting food security, rural development, agricultural modernization, climate resilience and export competitiveness.

Ghana has a robust, constitutionally grounded human rights framework. The country the group observed has enacted the Fisheries and Aquaculture Act 2025, the Social Protection Act 2025, and the Affirmative Action (Gender Equity) Act 2024.

These laws the group says signals Governments commitment to the respect of human rights and its obligations. The development of a National Action plan on Business and Human Rights further shows Ghana’s commitment to ensuring that corporate actors operating in the agricultural and extractive sectors are held accountable to international human rights standards.

On the peculiar issue of galamsey, the group emphasized that Ghana is simultaneously confronting a human-made disaster of the first order. Galamsey mining, the expert group warns

represents the most acute, rapidly expanding and politically charged environmental emergency facing the country.

According to the group, galamsey must be understood as as both a cause and a symptom. It is a cause of environmental destruction and socio-economic collapse in affected communities, and a symptom of the failure to offer rural youth a dignified and viable economic future. Sustained by powerful domestic and foreign interests with massive financing and heavy excavation equipment, it has become a national security, as well as a food security and public health emergency.

Traditional authorities, they noted represents a critical and largely untapped partner in the governance response to galamsey.