SAFN is pleased to announce that the 2020 Thomas Marchione Food-as-a-Human-Right Student Award winner is Gifty Dzorka from the University of Manitoba for her research project “Corporate Agricultural Production, Smallholder Farming and the Sustainability of Food Systems in Ghana”. The judges highlighted that her argumentation is clear and coherent, the value of the research is high, and that she is already in the field with some fieldwork completed making the practical realities of fieldwork more viable during this difficult time for international travel. For more information on the Marchione Award, please click here. The deadline for 2021 is June 15, 2021.
Gifty’s career objective is to become an applied anthropologist and pursue a position in a research institution focused on evidence-based research and policy analysis on sustainable food systems in Africa. As an applied anthropologist, she intends to conduct research that is relevant for enhancing cross-cultural understanding in addressing issues of hunger, malnourishment, and poverty reduction. Her research focus is to identify, characterize and compare economic, political, and sociocultural distinctions of social groups and how locally and culturally specific beliefs and practices interact with development projects geared towards eliminating hunger and reducing poverty.
By applying local ecological knowledge and principles to culturally distinctive productive resource management and development projects, she hopes to develop and advocate for intervention procedures for farming communities as well as marginalized and vulnerable groups in developing countries. Her current research therefore interrogates how the presence of corporate food production in the previously smallholder-dominated agricultural sector in Ghana influences the local economy and national food systems. Gifty’s research has won the International Development Research Centre’s Doctoral Research Award in 2019. She has also submitted a manuscript titled “Implications of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in agricultural production in Ghana: A case study of the GADCO-Fievie rice project” to the Journal of Peasant studies for possible publication.
FoodAnthropology 