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 percent 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.

The 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.

1. 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.

2. 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 clearminded 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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