Food-security corridors: A crucial but missing link in tackling deforestation in Southwestern Ghana

Forest conversion for farming remains an issue of scientific and societal concern due to its growing impacts on biodiversity and climate change. Therefore, scientists and policymakers emphasise the urgent need to find a balance between forest conservation and agriculture. Meanwhile, across tropical Africa, subsistence farmers account for nearly two-thirds of forest conversion to farms annually. These farmers’ perceptions and experiences about forest conversion may offer alternative perspectives about the problem and how to tackle it. However, such viewpoints remain scanty in the sustainable forestry literature. This paper employs narrative policy analysis to disentangle the stories that underpin farming by forest-fringe communities (FFCs) in protected forests. The FFCs’ narratives were identified through fieldwork in 12 forest communities of Southwestern Ghana and juxtaposed with forest regulators and cocoa sector actors’ narrativization of forest conversion in Ghana. The results indicate that a combination of factors incite FFCs to farm in protected forests, but the perceived need to respond to food insecurity is the most crucial factor. In the absence of strong grassroots organisations, FFCs cannot convey this crucial need to the forest policy arena, leaving it largely unaddressed in forest policy. Thus, forest encroachment has become a tool for FFCs to resist forest conservation, and generally, as a means for their survival. The paper proposes food security corridors (FSCs) as an integrated landscape management option that can enable FFCs and other policy actors to negotiate and institute food security and conservation goalswithin communities trapped in blocks of forest reserves. The potential FSCs hold to overcome forest conversion for subsistence farming can be unleashed when governments, development partners invest to refine and pilot the concept. Overall, the paper contributes to the land-use conflict literature, showing how context-specific food insecurity can accelerate deforestation. Forestry sector actors need to guard against oversimplifying their assumptions about forest conversion in order to find pragmatic and sustainable solutions to the problem. •Smallholder farmers account for about 65% of forest conversion to farmlands in tropical Africa.•The experiences of these farmers have often been neglected in forest policy formulation.•Disentangling the farmers’ narratives show food insecurity is most crucial reason why they farm in protected fore