Changes in land use and land cover and cocoa production in relation to gold mining in the Amansie West district, Ghana
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Date
2018-11
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KNUST
Abstract
Artisanal and small-scale gold mining can greatly impact cocoa production by reducing land cover, labour force and the quantity of cocoa produced, yet these effects have been scarcely studied. This study examined the effects of land use/land cover change as a result of artisanal and small-scale gold mining on cocoa production from 1997 to 2016 in the Amansie West District, Ghana, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Google Earth, Landsat images and Geographical Information System (GIS) were used to estimate and map land use/land cover changes over the period. Purposive and double-staged cluster sampling methods were used to obtain information on the subject matter from three relevant institutions and 434 cocoa farmers, respectively, in the district. The t-test was used to evaluate the differences in cocoa production between the periods 1997 to 2006 and 2007 to 2016, whereas the Pearson correlation was used to assess the relationship between the farm size and cocoa harvested over the same period. Change matrices for the periods 1986 to 2007 and 2007 to 2016 were used to ascertain the extent to which artisanal gold mining had taken over cocoa land cover. Results indicated a significant decrease in cocoa production over the period 2007 to 2016 compared to the period 1997 to 2006. There was also a statistically significant positive correlation between the extent of farms size and cocoa produced over both. The extent of land cover of cocoa farms accounted for 10 % variance in cocoa production. Subsequently the maps showed that the land cover of cocoa increased by 13% from 1986 to 2007 while in 2016 there was a 1.8 % increase in land cover. Artisanal and small-scale gold mining on the other hand experienced an increase of 124% in land cover from 1986 to 2007, and again, a dramatic increase of 12442% increase in 2016. The change matrices for both 1986 to 2007 and 2007 to 2016 showed that land converted to artisanal mining sites were covered mostly by cocoa farms. These outcomes reflected a direct linkage between the extent of land use and land cover changes due to artisanal and small-scale gold mining and cocoa production which can be effectively addressed if the plight of the cocoa farmer is made the prime focus.
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A thesis submitted to the department of theoretical and applied biology, kwame nkrumah university of science and technology in partial fulfilment of requirements for the award of Master of Philosophy degree in Environmental Science