“In faith work, you want your faith to fuel you, personally, and it will shine out in what you do—you won’t have to try to convert anyone. We don’t want to tell people what to believe. But we do want to beg the question, ‘Oh my gosh, why are things going so well for them?—Well, let me tell you! It’s because of the light of the lord. And you know I’ll answer questions if people ask, but I won’t push it. And lots of times people start asking these questions in our garden”

– Carly Smith, co-founder of a Midwestern urban-agriculture centered faith based organization (FBO).

Federal welfare rollback has made nonprofits and faith-based organizations like Carly’s increasingly responsible for urban governance and welfare provision in the United States (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Swyngedouw 2005). The 1996 Personal Work and Responsibility Act (PWORA), specifically, ushered in drastic policy changes—PWORA’s “Charitable Choice” provision opened up funding for religious nonprofits, allowing them to retain religious identity while competing for government contracts (Nagel 2006). Concurrent with these policy changes has been the rise of new, youth-led conservative Christian movements—championed by former mega-church attendants, disenchanted with what they see as “consumer Christianity” and outmoded methods of evangelism (Bielo 2011b; Clayborn 2006). Many of these movement participants, largely white, upper-middle class Americans in their 20s and 30s, attempt to enact their faith through simple living and social service—an increasing number are moving to urban areas, staying in Catholic Worker houses, neo-monastic intentional living groups, forming non-profits, and working in service of the urban poor (Bielo 2011a; Bielo 2011b).

A dominant trend among these “new” Christians has been to utilize urban agriculture and community gardening as a means of feeding and creating community with the poor (Carnes 2011; Clayborn 2006; Roberts 2009). The garden, however, is also emblematic of new methods of domestic evangelism (Elisha 2008)—as outlined by Carly, above. For the evangelical urban gardeners involved in this study, the garden served as a site to recruit new church members and to ‘model’ several aspects of their conservative religious ideology—most notably, as I’ll argue, a heteronormative patriarchal family structure and gendered division of labor.

Here I draw on ethnographic research conducted over the course of 2013-2014 in a large Midwestern city in the US. In addition to living with a FBO for 5 weeks—the Urban Pioneers, a 501c3 nonprofit—I conducted 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with FBO staff and volunteers, who collectively represent 10 FBOs. The Urban Pioneers is headed by a husband and wife team, Carly and Mark Smith, and draws on volunteer labor from a 35-family Christian intentional community located nearby. The Urban Pioneers purchased 10 large abandoned lots in what they identify as a “blighted” area of the city, and at the time of this research were placing raised garden beds—to be used by community members—on each lot. The organization also offers training courses in small-scale aquaponic tilapia farming and chicken and rabbit husbandry. This research was conducted collaboratively with the Urban Pioneers and other local FBOs—staff and volunteers spoke to me about their work in exchange for my labor in their gardens, and feedback on how their efforts were being perceived by community members.

Sharing the Gospel in the Garden

As Carly’s quote illustrates, urban agriculture and community gardens serve as important sites of evangelism for new, urban-relocated Christians. These domestic methods of evangelism draw on long traditions of intentional Christianity—in which faith is lived in daily life, rather than in a church—and place focus on becoming embedded in impoverished urban neighborhoods, forming cross-racial relationships, and sharing the gospel by example, rather than proselytization (Kauffman 2009; Bielo 2011b). For the Urban Pioneers, having a prominently placed garden—colorful and overflowing onto the sidewalk—and clucking chickens that could be heard several blocks away, served as a means to meet “non-believers” and form relationships that could eventually lead to acceptance of faith. Numerous times per day, during my stay with the Urban Pioneers, neighborhood children would walk past the home-based nonprofit and comment—“That’s a good lookin’ garden!” which prompted one of the staff or volunteers to invite the neighbor in for coffee or snacks. Visits like this had led to at least five Christian conversions at the time of my stay in the summer of 2013. Jonas, a 23 year old volunteer at Urban Oasis—a nonprofit offering free gardening plots to the homeless—states:

There’s enough food pantries and charities, we don’t want to do that. You know, people just come in and use up the resource and that’s that—we’re not trying to knock on  people’s doors and answer questions they’re not asking. But these things often come up while we’re working in the garden, you know?

In this statement, Jonas echoes Carly’s assertion that conversations about religion are easily broached during garden work. He also points out that in contrast to food pantries or other traditional methods of feeding the urban poor, there are fewer perceived guarantees that community members will regularly return. FBO staff like Jonas voice the idea that when community members are placed in charge of their own garden plot, they’re more likely to regularly return, form relationships with FBO staff, and are ultimately more likely to be receptive to evangelization.

Shaping Patriarchal Family Futures

In addition to providing a space in which to meet and possibly convert neighbors, the Urban Pioneers and other Midwestern FBOs involved in this study envisioned their gardens as “modeling” sites, where conservative Christian ethics could be demonstrated and hopefully imparted. The most prominent “modeling” I witnessed was of heteronormative patriarchal family values, and a gendered division of labor. Evangelical Christians strive to fulfill a “nineteenth-century model of the bourgeois family,” in which “the family operates as a haven from the outside world, characterized by romantic love, the glorification of childhood, unquestioned parental authority and instruction, and clear hierarchical roles for men and women.” (Wadsworth, 1997, p. 346). Within this “haven,” gender roles “find expression in traditional ideals regarding wives’ domesticity and husbands’ leadership”(Gallagher, 2003, p. 9). For many conservative evangelical men, leadership and authority—within and outside of the family circle—are important definitions of identity (Gallagher, 2003; Bartkowski, 2000; Bartkowski, 2002).

These ideologies were prominent at community garden workdays at FBOs involved in this study. I was told by Samuel, founder of a soup kitchen that asks neighboring homeless to help out in the garden—tending bees, chickens, and citrus trees—that part of the reason they moved [to the inner city] was to “provide a strong male presence, show neighborhood boys what it looks like when a man provides for his family.” This patriarchal discourse is racialized—African American men were often spoken of as particularly devoid of leadership skills, and in need of the hard labor and consistency that garden work teaches. Elijah, speaking of the Urban Pioneers, where he volunteers on weekends, states:

One of their goals is to produce food, but also their goal is to help [community members] to find out what their gifts are, what their talents are, what their abilities are, and help them invest them. A man largely gets his identity out of what he does. And a woman often gets her identity out of her family. You know if I say who are you to a man, he’ll tell me about his job. If I say who are you to a woman, she’ll tell me about her family. And if a man is not investing his talents, his self-esteem is low and he’s a lot more susceptible to the temptations that are around. So that’s one of the things that [Carly] and [Mark] and ministries like theirs are doing.

In this passage, Elijah clearly establishes masculine identity as work-derived, and feminine identity as borne out of motherhood and family. Manhood, for Elijah, cannot exist without the investment of energy and work into proper pursuits.

Consequently, in order to reform “dysfunctional” urban families according to conservative Christian ideology, the Midwestern FBOs involved in this study modeled “proper” investment of labor for men and women during community garden workdays. The Urban Pioneers solely recruited men—predominantly African American men—for their aquaponic tilapia farming and chicken and rabbit husbandry training courses. Several neighborhood women expressed interest in these courses, and were redirected into canning and preserving seminars held by Carly. During community garden workdays at the 10 FBOs involved in this project, women—regardless of skillset or expressed interest—were consistently given “feminine” tasks, such as watching the children of other volunteers, picking berries, or providing water to rabbits and chickens. Men were handed power tools, charged with building raised beds, slaughtering rabbits or chickens, and tasked with tree pruning. This gendered division of labor frustrated women in particular, many of whom were interested in learning to use tools and build garden structures at their own homes.

This focus on the reformation of urban male labor and behavior draws on ideology concerning the dysfunctional black family, as evidenced most prominently in the 1965 Moynihan Report (Lewis 1996; Goode 2009; Di Leonardo 1998). Many US conservative evangelical Christians have been found to draw on the culture of poverty thesis, and believe “African Americans do not have good ‘family values’ or have bad relationships with others” (Tranby and Hartmann 2008:344). Hannah, a staff member at Urban Oasis, spoke to me at length about the issue of urban fatherlessness, and the abandonment of fatherly duties by urban black men.  During one of our conversations she argued:

A big factor we’re seeing is a generational fatherless-ness, where…the fathers are the beginning and it just snowballs from there. But when kids are taught from a young age that they don’t have to take responsibility for their children, or their wives, or vice versa—that the wives aren’t responsible for being a good wife to their husband and raising their kids, then kids grow up without any kind of role model. I mean, our father is usually the one who teaches us about responsibility, and what it looks like to take care of something, and to go to a job faithfully, and to fix things, and take care of things, and all that. As good as mothers try, they can’t always do it all—and especially not without good male role models.

The onus of teaching children about responsibility, work ethic, and stewardship are placed solely on the backs of fathers—mothers can try, but they can’t really teach children about such things. This patriarchal conceptualization of parental roles manifests as gendered labor roles in the garden, and the dismissal of single mothers who express interest in Urban Oasis’ programing on turning local food production into a small business.

Implications & Suggestions for Future Work

Religious ideology consciously and unconsciously permeates the actions of religious actors. Policy changes placing the onus of caring for the urban poor on nonprofits, and increasing the access of religious organizations to federal funding, raise the importance of studies examining how such organizations actually interact with and disperse aid to the needy. The creation of urban green space and community gardening plots, in particular, are often seen as an unequivocal good—by troubling this narrative and interrogating the different ways garden sites are employed by different actors, we gain a better understanding of how urban agriculture is actually functioning in today’s US cities.

The manifestation of these gender ideologies in the garden created uncomfortable distance between these FBOs and those being served. The dominant idea that women-headed households were deficient both socially and economically resulted in the exclusion of many single-mothers from FBO programming. Perhaps a viable method of reform would include educating faith-based welfare actors in diverse family structures, specifically, female-headed households. More broadly and ambitiously, training for FBO staff that dispels the culture of poverty myth—which includes many of these discriminatory ideas against women-headed households and black men—would work to ensure equitable welfare provision for all.

References

Bartkowski, John P., and Xiaohe Xu. 2000. Distant Patriarchs or Expressive Dads? The discourse and practice of fathering in conservative Protestant families. Sociological Quarterly 41(3): 465-485.

Bielo, James. 2011a. City of Man, City of God: The Re-Urbanization of American Evangelicals.  City & Society 23(S1):2-23.

Bielo, James. 2011b. Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity.  New York: New York University Press.

Carnes, Tony. 2011. Back to the Garden: Row by row, urban Christians learn to bear literal and spiritual fruit. Christianity Today, July 27.

Clayborn, Shane. 2006. The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical.  Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elisha, Omri. 2008. You Can’t Talk to an Empty Stomach: Faith-Based Activism, Holistic Evangelism, and the Publicity of Evangelical Engagement. In Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets and Culture Wars. Rosalind J. Hackett, ed. Pp. 431-454. London: Equinox.

Ellison, Christopher G., and John P. Bartkowski. 2002. Conservative Protestantism and the Division of Household Labor among Married Couples. Journal of Family Issues 23(8): 950-985.

Gallagher, Sally K. 2003. Evangelical identity and gendered family life. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Goode, Judith. 2009. “How Urban Ethnography Counters Myths about the Poor.” In Urban Life: Readings in Urban Anthropology, edited by George Gmelch, Robert V. Kemper, and Walter P. Zenner, 1–440. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Kauffman, Ivan J. 2009. “Follow Me”: A History of Christian Intentionality. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.

Lewis, Oscar. 1966. “The Culture of Poverty.” Scientific American 215 (4): 19–25.

Morgen, Sandra, and Jeff Maskovsky. 2003. “The Anthropology of Welfare ‘Reform’” New Perspectives on U.S. Urban Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32(1): 315–38.

Nagel, Alexander-Kenneth. 2006. Charitable Choice: The religious component of the US-welfare-reform: Theoretical and methodological reflections on “faith-based-organizations” as social service agencies. Numen, 53(1), 78-111.

Roberts, Tom. 2009. A Place for Renegades: Camden Community Confronts ‘Dark side of the  American Dream.’  National Catholic Reporter, December 25:12-13.

Swyngedouw, Eric. 2005. “Governance Innovation and the Citizen.” Urban Studies 42(11): 1991-2006.

Tranby, E., & Hartmann, D. (2008). Critical whiteness theories and the Evangelical

‘race problem’: Extending Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47(3), 341-359.

Wadsworth, N.D. 1997. Reconciliation politics: Conservative Evangelicals and the new race discourse. Politics & Society, 25(3), 341-376.

Introduction

Climate change disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable people in the world. In the sprawling global region where I have been working over the past decade, Western and Eastern Africa, it is even more biased against the fortunes of people struggling against parching droughts and sweeping floods. The ways that communities respond to these climate extremes are disparate and not established, but certain variables such as conflict and strong political social institutions have a profound influence on the suite within which communities can situate their responses. Communities that live in conflict zones often don’t have the ability to adapt to climate extremes, while communities facing similar problems in relatively peaceful areas with stability and stronger social and political institutions can take certain risks that increase their resilience and adaptability.

I began my research on climate change adaptations in 2009 in Ghana. I found farmers in the forest-savannah transition area of the Volta Region redundantly planting cassava and adopting agricultural practices from their northern neighbors in the savannah to adapt to an environment transitioning from lush rainforest to a grassland Sahelian environment characterized by fluctuations between desiccation and oversaturation (La Rose 2011). From there, I began working with farmers in South Sudan in facilitating and supporting their own adaptations to climate change. In both instances, the weather fluctuations and unpredictable transitions into the rainy season that I had come to learn so much about in Ghana surfaced to challenge farmers.

In both countries, a similar cycle of agricultural uncertainty prevailed: timely land preparation, early light showers, optimistic and appropriate planting, and then a cruel wait for the rainy season followed by the death of seeds and need for replanting. Though the narratives were couched in different interpretations and embedded worldviews, the overall hydrological pattern was the same. Social institutions and embedded worldviews were metamorphosed by the cracking clay of the dry season stretching endlessly into sudden temperamental rainy seasons of battering storms and engulfing floods. Environmental perturbations were challenging, refining, and broadening agricultural practices. Resilient crops and mixed agricultural practices buffered against the vulnerability that intensive cultivation of cereals created. In Ghana, I found farmers trading the economics of mono-cropped cereals for the security of crop diversification and the intensification of food and drought tolerant crops like cassava, sweet potatoes, and other less marketable crops.

In South Sudan, the negative impacts of climate change are exacerbated by other social upheavals. These social upheavals are often the result of climate change or other social and cultural tensions piggy-backing onto the historical currents which define nations’ and ethnic groups’ current anxieties. In areas consumed by conflict, climate change deepens the hunger of displaced peoples and routs the attempts by rural, sedentary farmers to produce enough food to buttress some form of local or domestic food security. In these contexts, the option to adapt to climate extremes is replaced by the need for external assistance, displacement, or a combination of the two.

In the following, I will discuss the ways climate change is impacting dissimilar ecological, social, and cultural contexts and the way people are or aren’t adapting to the challenges that it presents. In the case of Ghana, I argue that the relative peace and prosperity of the country and a supportive political and economic system allow farmers to adapt to environmental changes using local, imported, and hybridized environmental knowledge. In South Sudan, the civil war that has engulfed the country since 2013 has limited the options of agriculturalists and pastoralists and plunged both rural and urban households into deep food insecurity. Working in South Sudan from December 2014 to the present, my experiences with farmers have transformed my understandings of the resilience that rural farmers have towards adapting to climate change. Even communities who have adapted to climate extremes and disasters through the deployment of traditional and hybridized knowledges are unable to deal with environmental fluctuations when there are no social and economic support systems or military or non-military organizations to protect them from violence. In fact, conflict fuels and is fueled by climate change in South Sudan. People who can’t cultivate their land or secure their livestock become internally displaced and a) face hunger from being divorced from food production and b) indirectly cause hunger by not generating food within the local economy.

Ghana

Ghana is one of the most iconic nation states in sub-Saharan Africa. Africans all across the continent gaze towards Ghana as an example for their own political and economic development. It is reputable for having a robust liberal democracy characterized by free and fair elections, an economy that has mostly seen consistent growth for three decades, and a highly skilled population that is transforming the country and the continent to meet locally identified needs with African solutions. In the 1960s, Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah led an ambitious newly-independent country with his ideology of pan-Africanism – the desire for a self-reliant African continent that looked inward for solutions and shook off colonial ties and economic exploitation by Western powers.

This ideology predicted and promoted a “United States of Africa” which would take the form of an African federation of states. Elements of isolationism within pan-Africanist ideology eventually ceded to a more globalized perspective wherein African nation-states held on to sovereignty and the politics of patronage within fragmented political institutions, ethnic loyalties, and nationalisms. Both ideological systems were undercut when the Cold War kicked-off proxy wars throughout the continent, including the deposition of Kwame Nkrumah himself in a CIA-backed coup following his warming to the Soviet Union. After decades of coups and countercoups, Ghana emerged from the ashes in the mid-1990s with a liberal democracy that led the country on an exponential growth curve from economic deterioration to applauded heights. The economic recession over the past decade has hit Ghana hard, spurring inflation and setbacks in the struggle against poverty. However, Ghana has maintained its robust political system and is undoubtedly still the beacon of liberal democracy in sub-Saharan Africa.

The less told story is the one of climate change and agricultural transformation in rural Ghana. Taking all variables into account, the fact that Ghana has become less agriculturally productive over the past decade is a testament to the country’s struggle against climate change (FAO 2015). This can be seen in macro level analyses of the agricultural economy as well as embedded anthropological perspectives at the community level. There have been valiant efforts by the government of Ghana and international organizations to reverse this trend, but these efforts have, at best, stalled the deterioration of agricultural production. An increased focus on chemical fertilizers has not led to a marked improvement in the yields of cereal crops.

The research I undertook between 2009 and 2011 in a rural farming community in the Volta Region of Ghana demonstrated that farmers are embracing crop diversification, agricultural strategies from their northern neighbors in the savanna, and the redundancy of crops such as cassava and plantains in place of more valuable cereal crops as a means of adapting to climate change (La Rose 2011). Cassava in particular emerged prominently among farmers’ narratives about climate change and their adaptability strategies. Farmers talked of their increased reliance on cassava as, according to them, the last crop available once all of the other crops had withered away. As Vivian Kesee, a peasant farmer in her late 40s who had increased her cassava production as a result of lower maize yields and closer brushes with hunger explained to me, “I plant a lot of cassava because it will not fail me, it will not deceive me” (Kesee, Personal interview, August 15, 2010). Plantains and bananas also figured prominently in their narratives about climate change adaptation. According to the data I collected, 88% of farmers grew cassava in 2010 compared to 30% in the 1990s. While most farmers still maintained plots of maize for income-generation, they had reduced the amount of land they grew maize on by 70% over the past twenty years, and they had almost completely abandoned mono-cultural systems of maize production. Only wealthy farmers and people who had secondary agricultural investments practiced intensive maize cultivation and were secured by access to chemical fertilizers.

Innovative farmers and early adopters in the community had started implementing agricultural practices more common in northern Ghana, particularly on marginal lands. Whereas the methods of intensive cereal cultivation and agroforestry had begun to shrink their yields, farmers picked up hoes and tilling tools and started to cultivate the land in rows and ridges. They planted more beans and yams – crops that weren’t cultivated in the area until recently – and started building live fences out of cassava and maintaining small “reserve plots” with scattered crops consisting mostly of cassava and plantains. Gone were the multi-story farms crowned by tropical hardwoods and cocoa trees. They were replaced by low-lying meticulously intercropped pulses, cereals, and tubers that were fenced in by live fences.

Even on satellite photographs, one can see the chess-board pattern which is emerging along the forest-savanna transition zone. One element of the pattern demonstrates farmers sticking with more traditional cultivation practices and the other shows farmers who are adopting new strategies in response to climate change. These practices aren’t just being deployed by farmers at the local level, they are also producing a feedback mechanism which is inspiring the government to support this transition. Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) extension workers travel to communities throughout the district supporting farmers that shift to these methods with technical expertise and government incentives.

South Sudan

The immediate impacts of climate change look far different for farmers in Ghana than South Sudan. Since December 2013, South Sudan has been mired in a violent civil war that has split the country into multiple factions. The government of South Sudan has focused its energy on defeating the opposition rebel group, and thus neglecting services for farmers and other actors in the broader local economy. While NGOs and donors try to fill in the gap, the lack of a political solution often undermines their efforts to aid farmers and pastoralists throughout the country. The food production system is thus undermined by both insecurity as well as unprecedented droughts and floods. Where in Ghana the government might work with international organizations to find solutions to changing environments and fluctuating food production, in South Sudan farmers are essentially left on their own to battle climate change with no safety nets. As a result, more than 5 million people face hunger and starvation. In addition, the 2.5 million people who have been internally displaced as of July 2015 are thus a mosaic of peoples displaced by civil war and agriculturalists and pastoralists displaced by their politically induced inability to adapt to an unpredictable environment.

Farmers in South Sudan are eager to take up agricultural adaptability strategies. In communities I have worked with in Warrap State in northern South Sudan, farmers are cultivating vegetable plots along extensive snaking rivers and using treadle pumps to irrigate them. Farmers are learning the merits of tilling their land and row planting sorghum and groundnuts, shifting the crops each season to maintain soil fertility. They are embracing principles of natural resource management that focus on keeping livestock out of plots through natural fencing strategies, soil and water conservation through mulching and buffer strips, and the importance of trees in land management. Farmers are using compost and other means of managing soil fertility to increase their crop yields. This eagerness to adapt to climate change through tailored agricultural practices, however, is being sapped by the presence and/or prospect of violence. Farmers in South Sudan can only be as eager as the situation permits.

Talking about climate change with farmers in South Sudan is often a very sobering experience. It is also the touch point where their agricultural adaptation strategies quickly divert course with the strategies explained by rural Ghanaian farmers. As one farmer in Warrap state explained to me,

I used to have a lot of cows, and I had to destock [cull] them as grazing lands became less healthy due to the weather problem. Now I am indeed cultivating more and more crops, and there is an unlimited amount of land that is accessible to us. The government encourages us to expand our farmland and vegetable plots. I have been following their advice, but I don’t get enough technical support and there are no reliable market linkages if I do produce a surplus. Also, there has been a conflict here that stopped me from farming for more than one month this year and now you can see half of my sorghum is dead and the vegetable garden is choked with weeds (Deng, personal communication, April 2015).

What is notable in this comment is the realization of a “weather problem” that had impacted the livelihood of this pastoralist and pushed him into crop and vegetable farming. However, this transition – or adaptation – has been impacted by a lack of quality extension services and the time needed to dedicate himself to cultivation while conflict engulfs the country. A lack of good market access – and, indeed, good markets – further disincentivizes him from focusing on producing the kind of surplus the country needs to meet its food security needs.

Conclusion: Climate Change, Social Institutions, and Vulnerability

While it might seem peculiar to compare the impacts of climate change on agricultural production in Ghana and South Sudan, the two countries offer unique insights into the ways that communities respond to climate change at the local level and the ways that the relative social and political contexts impact farmers’ ways of responding to environmental perturbations.

In Ghana, farmers have freedom from both violence and isolation and the luxury of multiple layers of economic buffers to allow them to devise and deploy agricultural adaptations to climate extremes. These adaptations are hybridized solutions based in farmers’ knowledge sources on the local level, the national level, and the international level. Farmers have the freedom and means to seek agricultural knowledge and the support systems necessary to take risks.

In South Sudan, farmers have the desire to adapt to a changing environment through fine-tuned agricultural practices. The civil war and political situation, however, both prevents farmers from completing their work and disincentivizes them by eroding markets and market linkages. While some farmers are able to deploy these strategies to maintain food security, other farmers don’t receive the support or conditions necessary to adapt to environmental changes and feed themselves.

Environmental anthropologists examining climate change adaptability strategies should examine the conditions on multiple layers of social organization. Most communities have the willingness and capacity to both devise agricultural strategies on their own and successfully implement them. However, communities who are exposed to political uncertainty, violence, and a lack of support systems may not have the necessary conditions to enable them to adapt to climate change. Where this line is drawn is important for understanding the situation on an anthropological level as well as devising impactful solutions at the humanitarian level. For example, in some situations farmers might be free from violence but lack the support systems required to adapt to climate change. In other situations, farmers might have the support systems necessary to adapt but be impacted by social or political violence. In ideal situations, farmers would be able to provide food for themselves and their agricultural economy as well as take risks and devise new production systems in anticipation or response to further environmental changes. Climate change, social institutions, and vulnerability levels are interconnected, inseparable, and provide the conditions wherein a community may or may not be able to maintain its livelihoods.

References

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2015, Country Fact Sheet on Food and Agriculture Policy Trends in Ghana, Ghana, viewed 15 June 2015, < www.fao.org/3/a-i4490e.pdf>

La Rose, D. 2011. Buem Crop Choices and Agricultural Strategies as Adaptability Practices: Social Responses to Environmental Change in a Rural Ghanaian Farming Community. M.A Thesis. Montezuma Publishing, San Diego, CA