
Agricultural Commercialization, Gender Equality and the Right to Food: Insights from Ghana and Cambodia
Edited by Joanna Bourke Martignoni, Christophe Gironde, Christophe Golay, Elisabeth Prügl and Dzodzi Tsikata
Strategies for agricultural commercialisation have often reinforced and exacerbated inequalities, been blind to gender differences and given rise to violations of the human rights to food, land, work and social security. While there is a body of evidence to trace these developments globally, impacts vary considerably in local contexts. This book considers these dynamics in two countries, Cambodia and Ghana. Profoundly different in terms of their history and location, they provide the basis for fruitful comparisons because they both transitioned to democracy in the early 1990s, made agricultural development a priority, and adopted orthodox policies of commercialisation to develop the sector. The chapters bring into relief multiple dimensions shaping the outcomes of processes of commercialisation, including gender orders, food cultures, policy translation, national and subnational policies, corporate investments and programmes, and formal and informal legal norms. In doing so, the volume also provides proposals to advance rights-based research on food security.