Impact of land grabbing on food security: evidence from Ghana

Following the 2007-08 multiple crises, land-rich nations witnessed an unprecedented rise in land grabbing by different actors. However, there is a lack of evidence for the impact of land grabbing by actors even though such information could be very useful for development, theoretical and empirical studies. This study investigates the food security (i.e., household income food consumption score, household food insecurity access score, and self-reported food security) impacts of land grabbing by domestic (LGDE) and foreign entities (LGFE) in Ghana, using a farm household-level data from a survey conducted during the 2017/2018 cropping season. Specifically, we test two main hypotheses on food security impacts of LGDE and LGFE: (i) given that land grabbing leads to farmland loss and fewer job opportunities, food security will decrease under both LGDE and LGFE; and (ii) the decrease in food security will be higher under LGFE as compared to LGDE since foreign actors dominate in land grabbing, and control more land than domestic actors. The multinomial endogenous switching regression and multinomial endogenous treatment effect models were applied to control for potential selection bias and to test these hypotheses. The results revealed that a decrease in food security ranged between 15 and 61% for LGDE, and 11% and 49% for LGFE. These suggest that both LGDE and LGFE decrease food security but the decrease is much associated with LGDE as compared to LGFE. Thus, concerns about the negative impacts of land grabbing should be directed to all actors in land grabbing. The findings also have implications for development, theoretical and empirical studies which are presented and discussed.