The main objective of the survey instrument was to assess and analyze the economic impact of the three farming models – plantation/estate, commercial farming, and outgrower – on the local people’s livelihoods and local economy in general. The population of interest consist of both those who are directly involved in these models and those who live in the nearby villages but who may not necessarily engage in the models for various reasons. The survey was administered to a representative sample of the population with the aim to: 1) describe the economic impact of the farming models on the local people’s livelihoods in particular and the local economy in general; 2) undertake a cross-countries comparison of these economic impacts; and 3) enabled the researchers to look at the changes/trends in these economic impacts over time. Resource scarcity is at the centre of the new geopolitics of growth and development. In global markets, scarcities have been felt in the forms of food price hikes and volatile oil prices. Many investors have responded by acquiring large tracts of land in African countries in order to secure a new base from which to supply growing markets, often changing land uses and displacing existing populations in the process. This can threaten existing efforts to alleviate poverty and undermine geopolitical stability, as competition grows over access to and control of natural resources, particularly land and water on which to produce food, fuel, feed and fibre. This trend is most marked Africa, where land rights are often inadequately recognised and protected. These same countries are hungry for investment, seeing it as essential for growth, yet substantial evidence now shows that African governments are not concluding the most advantageous deals possible, leading to costs at both the local and national levels. This situation raises an urgent policy question: how can the new land investments driven by perceptions of rising global resource scarcity be used as opportunities to promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality in developing countries. We hypothesise that the impacts of such investments are contingent on their terms and the institutional arrangements that structure them. Institutional arrangements matter. The research will investigates the different institutional arrangements and associated business models for such investments, their respective impacts on livelihoods and resource utilisation, and their implications for land use planning and agrarian transformation in three countries in Africa: Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. The purpose of the research is to determine what forms of investment can promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality, while also improving the productive utilisation of natural resources for national development. Five sets of questions – see below – will frame the research. These focus on: Global drivers and resource scarcity; Mapping land deals in Africa; Historical experiences; Institutional arrangements and Livelihood impacts.

The study was conducted in three countries: Ghana (West Africa), Kenya (East Africa) and Zambia (Southern Africa). These countries have contrasting historical experiences with land tenure institutions (statutory and customary), large-scale commercial farming and agricultural liberalisation. While Kenya is a former settler economy with a significant core of commercial agriculture, with large-scale farming accounting for 30 percent of marketed agricultural produce, including tea, coffee, maize, wheat and livestock, Zambia has repeatedly struggled to establish such a sector, and has liberalised through privatisation of state farms and provision of state infrastructure in ‘farm blocks’. Ghana, by contrast, has an established system of peasant-based commercial agriculture undergirded by customary land tenure systems and informal land markets. In all three countries, a policy environment favouring the liberalisation of land markets and foreign investment facilitates large-scale land acquisitions. Case study choices were informed not only by the type of institutional arrangement or ‘model’, but also different kinds of agriculture, including production of staple grain crops, horticulture and feedstock for biofuels. Within each country, the findings compare outcomes across the three models, exploring which models of commercialisation are potentially more successful, across different indicators. Such an approach enabled us to understand the implications of the different commercial agriculture models, and across sectors, in countries with different agrarian structures and histories. Overall, the studies provided a series of cases, rather than a systematic comparative assessment; but nevertheless offered some important insights, and challenged some of the simplistic narratives of agricultural commercialisation in Africa. Our study was divided into three phases. In the first phase, we conducted in-depth qualitative studies on the origins, scale of operation, labour regimes, value-chains and wider politics of the commercial farming cases, via in-depth interviews, archival research and focus group discussions. In the second phase, we designed a questionnaire and administered a household survey in the case study areas. We drew a random sample of the entire area, including the case study sites, within a 5km radius from an identified centre-point (N = approximately 100 per case study). A third and final phase of field research involved in-depth life histories of rich, middle and poor households in each study site, including those involved in various ways as well as those not, in order to locate our analysis in the context of longer historical shifts in livelihood strategies, and to explore intra-household relations and dynamics. The qualitative research also included in this final phase a process of mapping input and output markets, in order to identify the forms and extent of linkages between our case studies and the local economy.