Socioeconomic Drivers of Cocoa Farmland Conversion to Illegal Gold Mining in Ghana

The intersection of agricultural livelihoods and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) across much of the global south has become a development challenge for policy makers. This study examines this dynamic through an empirical case analysis of Ghana, where cocoa farmers are increasingly relinquishing their farmlands to illegal ASM locally known as galamsey. This study asks: why are farmers, leasing, selling, or abandoning the cocoa farms that sustained their families for generations, to artisanal mining operators? Employing a political ecology lens, we analyze qualitative data from 50 semi-structured interviews and 11 focus groups involving over 300 farmers and community stakeholders across Ghana’s cocoa belt. Our findings reveal that farmers’ decisions to relinquish their cocoa farms are driven by a confluence of five main factors: (i) livelihood insecurity from volatile cocoa prices; (ii) a pervasive lack of non-farm employment opportunities, particularly for youth, intensifying pressure on household land resources; (iii) pressures from an aging farmer population combined with restrictions on family labor, which erode the viability of traditional farming; (iv) the lure of immediate, lump-sum liquidity from land sales or leasing, which contrasts with cocoa’s prolonged maturation and income uncertainty; and (v) coercive land acquisition practices by mining operators. Contrary to the dominant framing that frequently attribute the phenomenon to irrational farmer behaviour in policy discourse, and justifying punitive legal responses, the paper reframes the farmers’ decisions as calculated responses to systemic constraints rather than individual deviance. The study demonstrates that achieving SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 8 (Decent Work), and SDG 15 (Life on Land) necessitates a policy shift from overly concentrating on criminalization toward addressing the structural inequities within rural economies and global agricultural value chains.