**6.4 Land acquisition, local development and food security**

As evidenced in the study, women are predominantly involved in subsistence food crop production while men concentrate on farming cash crops (coffee, oil palm), underlying women's frontline role in ensuring household subsistence and their contribution in the supply of household food needs and the maintenance of food availability. Thus, the contribution of women to food security cannot be undermined as women contribute more than 70% of the available food in the household and in the market. Women farmers confirmed the centrality of subsistence food crop production first as a major livelihood option and secondly in promoting household food security as they argued that even though men's cash crops are a source of income, providing for household subsistence and food needs is predominantly done by women as men are less concerned about food supply but concentrate on other children's needs such as paying school fees.

The findings speak to extant evidence about food security by showing that women's contributions to household food security is more than one might expect. We find that while women are at the forefront of ensuring household food security and care more about providing for and ensuring the availability of basic household food needs, men are more concerned with cash crop production. The evidence from the interviews observed that.

*"…women in this community are the ones who struggle to provide food for the family; whether children eat or not is a major preoccupation of women and not men, who concentrate on their coffee and/or oil palm plantations, whose proceeds are often used to pay for the children's school fees".*

Despite promises of providing social amenities to the communities by local investors, this was scarcely fulfilled as confirmed by the findings. Local investors though reaping a lot of benefits from the communities where large scales of land were acquired did not provide any significant infrastructural development and investments in the communities. While some local investors promised to create employment, provide drinking water and electricity, farm to market roads, health centers, build schools and offer scholarships to the children of villagers, this was shelved and did not generate any meaningful development in these communities. The evidence from the survey and interviews show that local investors have made little or no contribution to improve on the health of villagers, neither have they provided farm to market roads and schools to the communities. Some of the villagers argue that *"roads constructed by local investors lead mainly to their plantations, while the hospitals provide free consultations only to staff and family members of staff".* The villagers also concord that *"when we fall sick, we consult with the integrated health centres in our communities or buy medication from medicine stores; our children attend mainly government and private schools with very few one time and irregular scholarships provided by local investors".* The lack of commitment by local investors in providing social amenities and infrastructural development to these communities is compounded by lack of accountability where

*Taking Stock of Local Land Rush and Their Development Benefits for Women Farmers… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108939*

according to [42, 43], the local investors are not made answerable to rural women and the villagers for breach of any development promises made prior to the acquisition. While noting that local investors created employment for villagers, it was argued that employment was mainly menial with very low wages and no social security. According to [17] some key functions and positions are often occupied by expatriates who meet the specific expertise and qualifications for the positions. Meanwhile, given women's low levels of education, they were by and large left out of the employment schemes of local investors.

The acquisition of large pieces of land for the cultivation of tea and palm oil in parts of the region, has taken huge amounts of village land with women affected disproportionately. Women lack ownership and inheritance rights though they can acquire use rights to cultivable land through male relatives [19, 21, 42, 43]. This limitation of increasing women's access to and control over land is exacerbated by the expansion of land grabbing phenomenon that has been observed in parts of Cameroon. This also places especially the rural women who scarcely enjoy security of tenure in a very precarious position as the least pressure on land as a result of high demand affects them as subsistence farmers. Women have experienced a reduction in cultivable land used for the production of food crops (vegetables, cassava, etc) and displacement from farmlands; thus, they have to walk for long distances very far into the villages in search of patches of available land for food crop production. In this regard, the land rush situation is more advantageous and beneficial to the investors leaving the communities and villages including the rural women (whose livelihood is highly dependent on land) in a worse off situation, notwithstanding the assumed benefits of socio-economic development and employment that such could bring [17, 43]. It is worth noting that land deals by and large miss the point that deals may to a large extent lead to landless peasants cum agricultural wage labourers [43] who may not be able to provide for basic household food needs, highlighting the consequences of deals on rural livelihoods and food security. The emerging evidence is that considering the meaning of food security as noted by [10], LSLA by local investors constraints the availability and access components of food security caused mainly by the displacement of women from cultivable farmlands. It also displaces the rural population in general and women in particular form their main livelihood options. From this perspective, local land grabs hinder and exacerbate women's limited access to land whose direct impact is a reduction in food crop production, a fall in women's farm related income, and a plausible shortage in the availability and access to basic household food needs.
