Ghana's Slash-and-Burn Farming Crisis: How Crop Residue Burning Is Fuelling a Public Health Emergency
In the farmlands stretching across Ghana’s Shai Osudoku District and beyond, a centuries-old agricultural practice is exacting a devastating modern toll. Slash-and-burn farming and the open burning of crop residues are generating air pollution levels so severe that scientists say they exceed World Health Organisation safety thresholds by more than a hundredfold, fuelling a public health crisis that is overwhelming rural hospitals and threatening the nation’s long-term food security.
A forthcoming study by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), previewed in a report by MyJoyOnline, found that burning just one kilogramme of crop residue produces smoke concentrations far beyond what is considered safe for human exposure. The findings are alarming but, for those who work the land, hardly surprising.
“Anytime I burn the bush, the smoke catches me and my asthma starts at once,” said Mathias Kwame Nunekpeku, a 48-year-old farmer with two decades of experience. His account of chest tightness, wheezing bouts that halt work entirely, and the slow erosion of stamina brought on by diabetes is echoed across farming communities throughout the country. “Farming is all I have. When my body is slow, everything suffers. I lose time, I lose money.”
The economics of the problem are straightforward. Herbicides are expensive. Manual weeding is labour-intensive. For smallholder farmers operating on razor-thin margins, fire remains the cheapest and fastest way to clear land for planting and to dispose of stalks, husks, and leaves after harvest. In northern Ghana, where the long dry season makes burning especially convenient, studies show that as many as 60 percent of farmers burn their crop residues as a matter of routine.
The health consequences extend well beyond the farmers themselves. Public health specialist Benson Owusu warned that smoke from bush burning exposes entire communities, including children and the elderly, to dangerous levels of particulate matter. Data from the Ghana Health Service underscores the point: in the Ayawaso West Municipality alone, outpatient visits for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease nearly doubled to some 26,000 cases in the two years to 2023, a rise officials link partly to worsening air quality driven by seasonal agricultural burning.
Cecilia Teye Ameh, a rice farmer with 15 years of experience, described how smoke from burning has triggered asthma attacks and high blood pressure. “When I inhale the smoke I get sick and I go to Juapong Hospital for medicine. When it enters my eyes it burns like someone rubbed green pepper in them,” she said.
The environmental costs are equally severe. The CSIR report found that a decade of widespread burning has devastated vast tracts of farmland. Fire destroys the living organisms in soil that support plant growth, strips nutrients from the earth, reduces fertility, contaminates water bodies, and accelerates land degradation. The irony is acute: a practice meant to prepare the soil for food production is, over time, undermining the very capacity of that soil to grow food at all.
“We are destroying the very foundation of our food systems,” said Charles Nyaaba, former secretary of the Peasant Farmers Association. “Burning kills the living organisms in the soil that support plant growth. This is why we now depend heavily on imported fertilisers and even food.” His call for a transition to agroecological methods, mulching, cover cropping, crop rotation, and organic fertilisation, is shared by a growing number of experts and development organisations. The country’s struggle to achieve rice self-sufficiency, as detailed in a recent analysis of Ghana’s rice importation crisis, illustrates how deeply these structural challenges are embedded in the agricultural system.
Ghana’s Bushfire Prevention and Control Act provides a legal framework for regulating fires, and the Ghana National Fire Service says it has trained more than 6,000 fire volunteers in fire control practices. But enforcement remains weak. Nyaaba complained that the Fire Service lacks the personnel and resources to monitor rural areas, leaving farmers to burn without permits or consequences.
Dr Robert Amesiya, Greater Accra Regional Director at the Ghana Health Service, called for urgent inter-agency collaboration and stronger public education on the dangers of smoke exposure. Experts meanwhile point to alternatives such as bio-based herbicides, manual weeding, and mulching that could reduce both health and environmental risks, but acknowledge that these options often require more labour, time, or upfront investment than many farmers can afford.
The challenge is not a lack of knowledge about what should change. It is the absence of viable, affordable pathways for some of Ghana’s most vulnerable citizens to change it.
Image Source: MYJOYONLINE
