Declining cocoa and intensifying artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM): examining changing labour structures and livelihoods in rural Ghana

Ghana’s cocoa frontier increasingly overlaps with mechanised artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), creating competition over land and labour. This article examines how declining cocoa production and intensifying ASGM reorganise a local labour regime and reshape rural livelihood pathways in Juaboso District, Western North Region. It draws on 40 semi-structured interviews with cocoa farmers, ASGM workers and institutional actors, alongside observations at four ASGM sites, conducted in 2024. The analysis combines the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework for the 21st Century (SLF-21) with a labour-regime lens. The findings show that cocoa decline and political arrangements governing access to land, machinery, finance and licences create uneven openings for mining. Landowners and operators can convert cocoa land and capture mining rents, while young, often migrant, workers enter hazardous and insecure work. At the same time, ASGM expansion reduces labour availability for cocoa production, increases labour costs for cocoa farmers and degrades land and water used by farming households. Mining income can meet urgent household needs and, in some cases, support farming, but these gains coexist with risks that are shifted onto workers, non-mining farmers and younger generations. These risks are unevenly distributed across generations, with younger people likely to bear a greater burden through depleted land and water resources, and the health and educational consequences of mining-centred livelihood pathways.