Aid Thoughts

Once plentiful, land has become scarce, and competition fierce. The district population has been growing fast.......... Youths struggle to find any land to sustain their new families. In some villages, it is difficult to get even one hectare. In the village of Amanikrom a young man eager to farm could only get a fifth of a hectare. So the landless youth work their way up by starting as labourers or sharecroppers. In the past, sharecropping attracted migrants only from other parts of the country. Today, young members of the landowning family have to resort to sharecropping too. Meanwhile, much land is in the hands of absentee landlords who work in Accra and use part of their wages to pay for agricultural labourers.

That is from Lorenzo Cotula's recent book on land grabbing in Africa. For those of you who consider this to be a third world problem: read the segment above one more time, but replace "land" with "housing", "fifth of a hectare" with "studio apartment", "sharecropping" with "renting", and "agricultural labourers" with "council-approved extensions."