Is deagrarianisation real ? A study of livelihood activities in rural northern Ghana Joseph Awetori Yaro* ABSTRACT This article examines the livelihoods, portfolios and degree of deagrarianisation of the peasantry in three villages in northern Ghana. It argues that deagrar- ianisation should be seen as a process embedded in social change, bearing in mind the reversibility between farm and non-farm livelihood strategies used by households (reagrarianisation ?). A livelihoods research approach involving qualitative household interviews and quantitative surveys in three villages in the Kassena-Nankani district constitute primary data for this study. Contrary to the deagrarianisation thesis, this study found that livelihood adaptation, implying both a diversification to new or secondary livelihood activities and changing the form, nature and content of the farm sector, characterised rural livelihoods in the area. The adaptation process involves not just a move from the farm to the non- farm sector, but also an intensification of efforts in the farm sector with seasonal diversification into other livelihood activities. The supposedly ‘ booming non- farm sector ’ is not entirely real, for reasons of marginalisation and exclusion of the poor peasantry, resulting from spatial, capital, infrastructural and market limitations. INTRODUCTION This article seeks to delineate the nature of livelihood adaptation and income diversification in northern Ghana, to show that incongruent patterns emerge, resulting from different contextual local conditions and individual household idiosyncrasies. It questions the deagrarianisation thesis, and its assumption of an associated increasing well-being of the peasantry. The era of structural adjustment represents intensification of old influences on local structures that transform livelihoods and social relations in both rural and urban Africa. However, the processes of change in Africa are produced by a refraction of external forces through prisms of * Department of Human Geography, University of Oslo. J. of Modern African Studies, 44, 1 (2006), pp. 125–156. f 2006 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0022278X05001448 Printed in the United Kingdom