Whoever controls our seed, our soil and our stomach will control our future. A warning to Ghanaians and Africans.
Africa once lost its land while its people were being taught to pray. Today the threat has moved from the pulpit to the farm gate.
Ghana now depends on imports for more than 95 per cent of its agricultural inputs, including fertiliser, pesticides and improved seed. In March 2026 the price of urea rose by more than half in a single month because of conflict in the Middle East. Government had to move from subsidised to free fertiliser to keep farmers planting. That is what dependence looks like.
At the same time, our farmers are abandoning the slow, natural methods that fed our ancestors. Weedicide has replaced the cutlass. Chemical fertiliser has replaced the fallow. Purchased seed is replacing the seed our grandmothers kept above the hearth. Ghana has approved its first genetically modified crops and passed a seed law that critics say favours commercial breeders over farmers. Vultures, wild mushrooms and land snails are vanishing from our landscape.
This article explains how we arrived here, separates the real dangers from the rumours, and sets out what Government, traditional authorities, farmers and families must do now. A nation that cannot feed itself from its own seed will one day take orders from whoever sells it food.
- The Bible and the Land
A saying is often repeated across Africa. When the missionaries came, they had the Bible and we had the land. They told us to close our eyes and pray. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
Whatever one’s faith, the lesson is about method. Conquest rarely announces itself. It arrives through something we trust and welcome. Faith was one such door. Trade was another. Today the door is the input shop: the bag of seed, the bottle of weedicide and the sack of fertiliser.
Kwame Nkrumah warned in 1965 that the new form of control over Africa would be economic rather than military. He called it neo-colonialism. A country can hoist its own flag and still have its policies shaped by those who hold its purse. The same is true of its stomach.
- How Our Forefathers Farmed
Our ancestors practised shifting cultivation, which agricultural scientists call bush fallow. A family cleared a plot, farmed it for two or three seasons, then moved on and allowed the forest to return. Leaf litter, ash, roots and soil life restored the fertility over several years. No bag of fertiliser was needed.
Weeding was done with the cutlass and the hoe. It was hard work, and it kept people strong. Our grandparents walked to the farm, carried their harvest home and ate what they grew: cassava, plantain, cocoyam, yam, garden eggs, kontomire, palm nut soup and fish from our rivers and sea. Many of them remained active and clear-minded into very old age.
Seed was a family inheritance. The best maize cobs were hung over the hearth. The best groundnuts were set aside before any were sold. Each community held its own varieties, suited to its own soil and rainfall. No company owned them and no one paid a royalty to plant them.
- What Has Changed on Our Farms
Some of the change was unavoidable. Our population has grown many times over, so land can no longer rest for ten or fifteen years. Fallow periods have shrunk and soils are tired.
Much of the change, however, is a matter of choice. Many young people no longer want to weed by hand. They want to plant today and harvest tomorrow. Weedicides such as glyphosate and paraquat are sprayed in place of the cutlass. Insecticides are applied without measurement, without protective clothing and often close to harvest. Empty chemical containers end up storing drinking water. Spray drift reaches the streams that villages drink from.
As a safety and environmental professional, I see the consequences. Acute pesticide poisoning among farmers is under-reported. Residues are found on vegetables sold in our markets. Fish and soil organisms suffer in sprayed catchments. These are documented hazards, and they are preventable.
Our health has changed too. Strokes, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and obesity now strike Ghanaians in their forties and fifties. Doctors attribute this to many causes acting together: refined and processed foods, sugar, less physical work, stress and tobacco. Careless chemical use on our food adds a risk we do not need. The common thread is our distance from the way our ancestors farmed, ate and worked.
- The Real Battleground Is Seed
In June 2022 the National Biosafety Authority approved Ghana’s first genetically modified crop, a pod borer-resistant Bt cowpea. In early 2024 it approved fourteen more genetically modified products, eight of maize and six of soybean, for food, feed and industrial use. A long legal challenge by civil society groups was later dismissed by the Human Rights Court.
Fairness requires that we state the other side. The Bt cowpea was developed by Ghanaian scientists at CSIR-SARI. Its supporters say it needs far fewer insecticide sprays than ordinary beans, which would reduce chemical exposure. Regulators say every approval passed a safety review.
The deeper question is ownership. In November 2020 Parliament passed the Plant Variety Protection Bill, modelled on an international convention known as UPOV 1991. The Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, the General Agricultural Workers Union, the National Catholic Secretariat, the Ghana Muslim Mission and others objected. They warned that it restricts farmers from selling and exchanging seed of protected varieties and tilts the law towards large commercial breeders.
Worldwide, a small group of corporations controls most of the commercial seed and agrochemical trade. Monsanto, the best known, was bought by the German firm Bayer in 2018. These companies sell seed and the chemicals designed to go with it. Many hybrid seeds do not breed true when replanted, so farmers must buy again every season.
When our own varieties disappear from the hearth and the market, we lose the ability to say no.
- Whoever Controls Your Stomach
This year has already shown us the danger. The World Bank projected that global fertiliser prices could rise by about 31 per cent in 2026. Ghana imported roughly 554,000 tonnes of fertiliser in 2024, nearly all of it from abroad. Decisions made in distant capitals and shipping lanes reached every farm in Ellembelle and Ejura within weeks.
Seed can follow the same path. A bag that is cheap or free today may cost many times more in ten years, once local seed systems have collapsed and farmers have no alternative. Nobody can predict the exact price, and that uncertainty is the risk. A people that cannot plant without permission is not fully free.
This is how food becomes a weapon. Sanctions, export bans and price shocks have been used against nations before. Africa, with the fastest-growing population on earth, will be the largest food market of this century. Those who own its seed will hold great power over its governments.
- The Silent Disappearance of Our Wildlife
Ask anyone above sixty. Vultures once circled over every market, abattoir and refuse dump in our towns. Today many of our children have never seen one. Ghana has eight vulture species. Six are now of serious conservation concern, and three, the hooded, white-backed and white-headed vultures, are critically endangered. Their last secure nesting grounds are in places such as Mole National Park.
Poisoning is the biggest killer. Farmers lace dead animals with farm chemicals to kill predators, and one poisoned carcass can wipe out a whole flock. Poachers poison vultures on purpose because circling birds betray their kills. The trade in vulture parts for charms, and the felling of the silk cotton trees where they nest, add to the loss.
Vultures are nature’s sanitation workers. They clear away dead animals before disease can spread. Where they disappear, rotting carcasses, stray dogs and rats multiply, and so does the risk of disease to people and livestock.
The losses on the forest floor are just as real. Wild mushrooms and giant land snails were once free food and income for rural families after the first rains. Both are now much harder to find. In 2022 Nana Boakye Ameyaw Pentenprem II, Nifahene of the Techiman Traditional Council, warned that careless use of pesticides and weedicides had already wiped out some herbs, trees, mushrooms and snails in his area.
Deforestation, bush burning and over-harvesting have played their part. Chemicals finish the job. Mushrooms grow from living networks of fungi in the soil and leaf litter, and snails lay their eggs in the soil. Ground that is soaked season after season with weedicide and insecticide cannot sustain either.
- We Are Wearing Out Our Land
Continuous chemical farming without returning organic matter to the soil acidifies it and destroys the life that keeps it fertile. Each season more fertiliser is needed to produce the same yield. Our cocoa belt shows the result, with old, exhausted farms and falling output. Add galamsey, which has poisoned rivers and turned farmland into craters, and the scale of the loss is frightening.
Land that is degraded today will not feed our grandchildren. As custodians of stool lands, chiefs carry a particular responsibility. The land was given to us by our ancestors in trust for those not yet born.
- What Must Be Done
Government should:
- Establish national and district community seed banks to collect, store and multiply indigenous varieties before they are lost.
- Review the Plant Variety Protection Act to guarantee farmers’ rights to save, share and sell seed, through a home-grown (sui generis) system suited to smallholders.
- Keep seed research in public Ghanaian hands, funding CSIR so that improved varieties remain affordable and royalty-free to our farmers.
- Enforce the existing GMO labelling guidelines so that every Ghanaian can choose what to eat.
- Back domestic organic fertiliser production alongside the larger chemical fertiliser projects now planned.
- Direct the EPA to tighten control of highly hazardous pesticides, train farmers in safe use and enforce safe disposal of containers.
- Make it a serious offence to poison carcasses with farm chemicals, and protect vulture nesting trees.
Traditional authorities should:
- Set aside stool land for fallow, agroecology demonstration farms and community seed custody.
- Make bylaws against spraying near rivers and drinking water sources.
- Declare vultures and their silk cotton nesting trees protected on stool lands.
- Use durbars and festivals to honour farmers who keep traditional seed and soil practices alive.
Farmers and the youth should:
- Return organic matter to the soil through compost, mulch, animal manure and crop residues.
- Rotate cereals with legumes such as cowpea and groundnut, which fix nitrogen naturally.
- Save and exchange their best seed every season.
- Use mechanical weeders and protective equipment, and never apply chemicals without training.
Families and consumers should:
- Buy and eat local, whole foods and cut down on processed and sugary imports.
- Teach children where food comes from, and that farming is honourable work.
Conclusion
Our forefathers did not have tractors, laboratories or loans. They had the land, the seed and their own strength, and with these they fed generations. We have far more knowledge than they did. We must not end up with less control.
The first conquest of Africa came with a book and a prayer. If we are careless, the next will come in a seed bag. Ghana must decide now who will own the seed our children plant. The decision is ours, and the time is now.
By Nana Annor Amihere II
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