Meet Eric Mensah Kumeh.
Eric is jointly appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. He studies critical agroforestry and land-use and supply chain governance, including cocoa and coffee.
His research includes decoloniality, equity and transformation frameworks, and the role of power in land degradation, biodiversity loss, and historical inequities where forests and farming landscapes intersect.
Eric grew up across the rural and peri-urban landscapes of Ghana where land use was very diverse. Raised in a migrant household, they were not guaranteed land access by birth. Eric had to earn it and often found creative ways to grow vegetables, legumes, grains tubers in abandoned building projects and fallow lands.
As we welcome Eric to the Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, we spoke to him about his work and what he hopes to achieve during his time at UBC.
What are your research areas?
Drawing on my personal experiences with land, my research pays attention to how power influences how people’s ability to benefit from land. Using my training in agroforestry and land-use governance, I am drawn to interdisciplinary projects that employ political ecology approaches to understand how different actors assemble and use various constructs to legitimize who governs and benefits from the forest-farm nexus.
I connect this with broader debates around global value chains, landscape restoration, and climate justice. I am particularly biased towards developing equitable solutions that confront and redress the structural, material and epistemic asymmetries that not only drive but exacerbate land use challenges.
What inspired you to pursue this area of research?
My experiences in Ghana quickly made me aware of the challenges of land access and the importance of negotiating with pluralistic actors. We were not successful all the time. I still remember how broken I was seeing a developer destroy about an acre of our cassava without compensation because they had accelerated their project schedule. This, my parents struggle to secure land for housing, and my experiences of how different traditional rulers settled land disputes shaped my thinking profoundly.
It made me realize that accessing land is not about entitlement or need. On the contrary, it’s about power and asymmetrical struggle. When contestations emerge, it is a question of who can outlast the other, using both convention and unconventional means. Over the years, I have tried to better understand the elements of such struggles, how they are institutionalized, and how to develop more equitable alternatives.
What brought you to UBC Forestry & Environmental Stewardship?
I joined FES to expand my research and teaching on land-use governance. My experiences across Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe enables me to bring international perspectives to the teaching, learning, and research at the faculty. Besides, with my interest in issues at the forest-farm nexus, working across FES and Faculty of Land and Food Systems provides a good opportunity to build interdisciplinary collaborations for impact.
What do you hope to achieve at FES?
I hope to lead teaching, learning and research in Agroforestry, particularly Critical Agroforestry, which focuses on how to systematically reflect on and integrate power perspectives in the design, implementation, and evaluation of agroforestry systems globally.
Many governments, development agencies and private companies around the world define agroforestry as the deliberate integration of trees with crops, and/ or animals. Often most of these actors fall short to consider adequately who designs agroforestry for whom and with what implications for different social groups’ access to the distribution of land, capital, labour to address basic needs and concerns, including poverty and food insecurity.
Neglecting discussions on this creates a situation where agroforestry is becoming a tool for marginalizing different actors as we are seeing in Ivory Coast where Cocoa Agroforestry has been legislated by the government as an instrument to control who can benefit from land. The International Development Research Centre of Canada played a pivotal role in developing agroforestry as we know it today from 1975. Perhaps it is only fitting that the Faculty and UBC become a leader in taking a more power-responsive approach to agroforestry of the future.
What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
Between catching up with my family and friends around the other parts of the world, I volunteer at the Pacific Spirit Park Society and enjoy walks with Richmond Fitness and Wellness Association. I also love watching and playing football (soccer, as its often called in this part of the world).