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Support for large scale agricultural investments in Africa has been mainly premised on their employment prospects for local populations. However, despite earlier calls by Tania Li to centre labour in the land grabs debate, labour is generally invisible in both mainstream policy and academic research. This paper, through a governance lens, draws attention to the implications of the global land rush on wage labour. In principle, policy frameworks that emphasise the labour potentials from large-scale land investments also gravitate towards regulations that seek to facilitate capital accumulation and mitigate negative impacts on communities – congruent with Ghana's policy direction. This paper assesses the political-economic context of the legislative gaps in the current governance framework for wage labour and large-scale agriculture in Ghana; characterised mainly by absent, illusively present and repressive institutions. It is supported with empirical findings from the nature of farm workers' incorporation into a transnational oil palm plantation in Ghana, their struggles over the nature of the investment, and the political orientation of the existing regulatory institutions. The study calls for policy measures which address power relations that shape the distribution of benefits from land investments, and also recognise structural inequalities that exist in and outside of agriculture.

The global land rush has spurred small, modest, and big anti-land grab mobilizations, notably the food sovereignty movement. The movement has been instrumental in representing the interests of small-scale family farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by capitalist control over land in the countryside. However, this dominant narrative tends to overlook or de-emphasize some important diversity within the peasantry. In West Africa, anti-land grab discourses emphasize family farming as a major collective action frame, focusing less on issues related to agricultural wage labour – farmworkers' access to land, food, and decent working conditions. If food sovereignty is to fully realize its potential power as a counter-narrative to neoliberalism, and as a possible democratic alternative for working people with differentiated and at times competing socio-economic interests, then demands that adequately reflect the agrarian struggles of the rural working people have to be put onto the agenda and engaged better than it is now.

This article explores the question of political struggles for inclusion on an oil palm land deal in Ghana. It examines the employment dynamics and the everyday politics of rural wage workers on a transnational oil palm plantation which is located in a predominantly migrant and settler society where large-scale agricultural production has only been introduced within the past decade. It shows that, by the nature of labour organization, as well as other structural issues, workers do not benefit equally from their work on plantations. The main form of farmworkers' political struggles in the studied case has been the 'everyday forms of resistance' against exploitation and for better terms of incorporation. Particularly, they express agency through acts such as absenteeism and non-compliance, as well as engaging in other productive activities which enable them to maintain their basic food sovereignty/security. Nonetheless, their multiple and individualized everyday politics are not necessarily changing the structure of social relations associated with capitalist agriculture. Overall, this paper contributes to the land grab literature by providing context specific dynamics of the impacts of, and politics around land deals, and how they are shaped by a multiplicity of factors-beyond class.

This article explores the question of political struggles for inclusion on an oil palm land deal in Ghana. It examines the employment dynamics and the everyday politic

This article explores the question of political struggles for inclusion on an oil palm land deal in Ghana. It examines the employment dynamics and the everyday politi

In this paper, we critically engage with SDG-2- Target 2.3 and SDG-5 to examine how and why large-scale agricultural land acquisitions modify the social relations of women's food access. Adopting qualitative methods and from agrarian political economy perspectives, we assess the implications of plantation investments on food security and gender equality in Cameroon and Ghana. The study draws on the impacts of various plantation schemes in Cameroon and Ghana to argue that the current allencompassing framing of the SDG-2, whereby support for small-scale production appears to co-exist with the promotion of corporate-led agricultural investments, tends to create a vague interpretation of food security, even when capitalist motives override the interests of rural working men and women. In both countries, plantations have been characterised by displacement, reduced food production and competition over land resources in rural contexts where women bear the burden of social reproduction, particularly in subsistence and food provisioning for their households. Restricted access to farmlands hampers petty commodity production, and provokes rural exodus among farming populations in Cameroon who compete with pastoralists for land; and in the Ghana case, where settlers and migrants compete with dispossessed indigenes for arable lands. The study shows the inherent contradictions and tensions within the narratives of sustainable development and projects which are considered as potential pathways to the SDGs. One of such tension areas is between local food security- which is a gendered role for women in West/Central Africa – and the accumulation imperatives of capitalist investors. We iterate that achieving zero hunger requires gender-inclusive land and labour policies that recognise, protect and empower small farmers and women, and create opportunities for local and national food self-sufficiency.