Conflict between Fulani herders and village landowners in Ghana: capitalism, climate change, and peasant struggles

In discussions of the capitalism–climate change interplay in the agrarian world, the intrusiveness of corporate and state-guided capitalism has been pre-eminent. This ‘hard capital’ focus obscures indirect linkages like how ‘soft capital’, although disoriented from raping nature, unlike the former, exacerbates climate change effects in ways that accelerate the destabilisation of agrarian economies. This indirect connection is evident in agrarian settings in Ghana’s Northern Region, where the resultant peasants’ revolt is directed at neither corporations nor the state but rather local landowning elites (soft capital), who transfer the burden of the twin pressures of climate change and hard capital (state intervention and privatisation of fertiliser supply) to their labourers. Using Marxian social relations of production as a theoretical lens, this paper unpacks how this capitalism–climate change interface plays out in Gushiegu, Northern Ghana. By highlighting that interface and the resultant agrarian struggles, this paper does two things: (1) invites agrarian scholars to transcend the commercialisation of agriculture and carbon capitalism in analysing how the intersection of capitalism and climate change destabilises the agrarian world; (2) encourages scholarship that transcends the more obvious herder–farmer conflicts over land and water in examining the destabilising effects of the aforementioned intersection.