Evaluation of Farmland availability and Large- Scale Mining Sector Activities at Village Scale

The quest to achieve industrialisation and economic diversification has brought a new form of thinking current among African leadership, which has implications for geo-space and rural livelihood. Governments are leasing large tracts of rural lands for mineral resource extraction. However, little attention has been given to developing baseline conditions that would facilitate a possible peaceful co-existence between large-scale mining and agriculture which is a basic rural livelihood activity. Hence, this study appraises land use/cover conditions of the Northwest mining region of Ghana to identify the availability of space for farming and large-scale mining exploration activities at the village level. The study uses a combination of Landsat satellite imagery for the years 2000 and 2014, and Participatory Geographic Information Systems to classify the landscape into four major land use/cover types, namely: water, waterlog, vegetation and occupied lands. Occupied lands include farmlands, settlements and bare grounds. It is found that between 2000 and 2014, much of the area is characterised by waterlog features and flood potentials juxtaposed to an increasing large-scale exploration and mining activities interest in local space. Overall, the net gain of space by occupied lands is about 47% of total land cover in the area. Much of this gain is in the Nadowli-Kaleo and Jirapa areas of the study region where exploration leases are wide-spreading. It is also observed that there is an expansion of barelands and settlements in the villages around the exploration and mine sites. This phenomenon is a signal of potential land use conflict between mining and farming in villages nearby and must be addressed before mine commissioning.