Faculty Publications

Current Convenience, Desperate Deforestation: Ghana’s Adjustment Program and the Forestry Sector

Document Type

Article

Keywords

Structural adjustment, debt, deforestation, environmental destruction, Ghana

Journal/Book/Conference Title

The Professional Geographer

Volume

50

Issue

4

First Page

418

Last Page

436

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, most Sub-Saharan African countries have resorted to structural adjustment programs to reform their ailing economies. Adjustment, however, may provide a convenient means for governments of the adjusting economies and international capital to meet their current economic and political interests, usually by sacrificing the physical environment, with huge environmental costs for the adjusting country. This paper uses Ghana's forestry sector, which has been characterized by a dramatic increase in woodexports since adjustment, to demonstrate a direct link between adjustment and environmental destruction. Ghana's dramatic increase in wood exports, involving a rapid and extensive deforestation, results from the government's need to meet its increasing external debt service obligations, and is exacerbated by the series of massive local currency devaluation required under adjustment “to get prices right.” The systematic reduction in government revenue from devaluation to amortize the increasing debts, keeps the government and indebted wood processing firms on a treadmill of export-based extraction/deforestation.

Department

Department of Geography

Original Publication Date

1-1-1998

DOI of published version

10.1111/0033-0124.00130

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