Gender and family farming
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•2,103 views
Focus on land as an asset downplays other natural & economic resources, and social support networks and services, critical to women’s identities
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Gender and family farming
Similar to Gender and family farming (20)
More from M S Swaminathan Research Foundation
More from M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Gender and family farming
- 1. Gender and Family Farming in the Context of Agrarian Transition Amit Mitra, Independent Researcher Nitya Rao, Professor, Gender and Development, University of East Anglia
- 2. Potential of IYFF The 3 Rs: • Recognising women and men as equal partners in family farming; • Redistributing resources across genders; • Representation and Voice in Decision-making. With in-built sensitivity to social differences
- 3. Family Farms • A way of life, not just an economic enterprise; • Variability in activities and across ecosystems; • Women (and men)not a homogenous group; • Definitions & methodologies of data collection not standardised across Asia.
- 4. Challenges Confronting Family Farms • Urbanisation • Climate Change • Decline of Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services • Globalisation, trade liberalisation and withdrawal of the state
- 5. CHANGES IN AGRARIAN STRUCTURE
- 6. Corporatisation of Production • Promotes high-value mono-cropping • Changes resources rights in favour of the rich (&men)
- 7. Migration and Diversification • Non-farm incomes a predictor of wellbeing • Strong interdependencies between farm and non-farm activities • Variability and flexibility in gender divisions of labour in family farming • Cooperation between genders and generations, including pooling of incomes
- 8. Feminisation • Regional and country-level variations • Drivers of ‘feminisation’ vary Region Male employment in agriculture 2000 2011 Female employment in agriculture 2000 2011 East Asia 41 32.2 55.8 39.3 South East 48.6 42.5 51.2 43.9 Asia South Asia 53.4 44.4 74.9 68.8 Source: ILO 2012: Appendix, table A10
- 9. SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND GENDER
- 10. Laws, Customs and Practices • Global and national frameworks recognise gender equality • In practice, many barriers and constraints to realisation • Interconnectedness of social institutions • Resistance and creativity of women for equality
- 11. Women’s Rights to land • Focus on land as the key productive asset for family farming • Main access route is inheritance, varies across Asia; but male bias entrenched • Women see land as source of security, and recognition of their status as productive and reproductive workers.
- 12. Technology and Knowledge • Mechanisation – drudgery reduction or labour displacement? • Gendered impacts differentiated by class • Access to transformative information, knowledge and skills denied; secondary roles reinforced • Technologies to reduce reproductive work burdens inadequate
- 13. HOUSEHOLD AS AN INSTITUTION
- 14. Intra-household relations • Asian cultures emphasise complementarity, not individual self-interest • Economic transactions reflect social relations, dependence, obligations • Assets have gendered meanings • Pervasiveness of domestic violence • Everyday negotiations over labour, crops, incomes
- 15. Armed Conflict • Civil war, ethnic conflict, insurgency has increased poverty and insecurity • Public infrastructure, especially irrigation, destroyed/not maintained, though majority dependent on agriculture • Men killed/migrate and increase in women and child headed, and multi-generation households
- 16. Nutrition • Diversified crop base, yet malnutrition persists • Joint contributions and reciprocity crucial for nutrition • State policies – Enhance women’s workloads and responsibilities – Pit men against women, or alienate men from meeting their nutritional responsibilities • Bio-fortified staple crops improve diets
- 17. Work intensity
- 18. Women’s Work & Nutrition • Time and health trade-offs impact nutrition • Energy consumption function of work intensity • Time allocation an inadequate measure of work intensity • Generic estimations of ‘need’ difficult, as influenced by biases of gender & age across different economic and social groups • Cultures of food consumption – taboos, feeding practices, notions of body and beauty
- 20. Key Insights • Agriculture seen as a ‘backward’, ‘unskilled’ sector, its contributions undervalued • Dependence on migration, non-farm and off-farm employment for wellbeing • This has led to changing structure of the family • Family farms seen as individual units, rather than embedded in larger ecosystems & social contexts, a way of life and livelihood, leading to losses in biodiversity, crop mixes, nutrition and knowledge.
- 21. Implications for Gender • ‘Feminisation of agricultural work’ – low-paid, invisible, insecure, and under-valued • Increase in women’s work burdens on family farms and unpaid care, but varies with social position • Focus on land as an asset downplays other natural & economic resources, and social support networks and services, critical to women’s identities • Responsibility for nutrition on women, without attention to the unpredictability of returns to their productive and reproductive contributions
- 22. Recommendations To Governments and UN bodies: Paradigm Shift needed towards agriculture-led growth 1. Recognise the centrality of women in family farms – Remove discriminatory provisions from all laws and policies – Develop UN convention to ensure equal entitlements to women and men family farmers 2. Ensure access to resources – Improve infrastructure and services to save time and reduce drudgery in productive and reproductive work – Actively support women’s managerial and entrepreneurial roles and knowledge
- 23. Recommendations 3. Recognise and research specificities across agro-ecological and socio-economic contexts, and over the life-course 4. Ensure policy convergence to focus on people rather than sectors.
Editor's Notes
- Recognises the role of small-holder family farming in the development process: To the reduction of hunger and poverty; Improving livelihoods, food security and nutrition; Managing natural resources and the environment class, caste and ethnicity
- Size criteria insufficient to understand the dynamics of small, family farms. Small farms – less than 2 hectares of land, and generally low asset base. The Indian National Policy for Farmers, 2007, defines the term ‘farmer’ to refer to ‘any person actively engaged in the economic and/or livelihood activity of growing crops and producing other primary agricultural commodities and will include all agricultural operational holders, cultivators, agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, tenants, poultry and livestock rearers, fishers, beekeepers, gardeners, pastoralists, non-corporate planters and planting labourers, as well as persons engaged in various farming-related occupations such as sericulture, vermiculture, and agro-forestry. The Women Farmer’s Entitlement Bill, 2011, extended this definition of ‘farmer’ to explicitly include any woman, irrespective of marital status or ownership of land, who lives in a rural area and is engaged in any agricultural activity, as defined above. Part of a larger ecosystem with interdependent relationships between resources and people across institutional levels Not just plots of land for crop cultivation, but involves multiple activities in mixed farming systems; Variations across agro-climatic and soil conditions, family size and socio-cultural context. Contributions vary by crop and season (subsistence production with/without men, commercial production) their relationship to the farm varies by personal characteristics of age, marital status, but also as owner cultivators, household labour, hired workers.
- Urbanisation: Declining viability of family farms due to inadequate price support and price volatility; Priority to industrial development involves take-over of agricultural lands & labour polices that support migration Climate Change: High exposure to environmental risks especially in coastal areas, river banks, sleep slopes Decline of Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services: Support livelihoods and a good quality of life Withdrawal of the state has meant decline in public investment in agricultural research and development has negative impacts on health and nutrition: Decreases production for self-consumption; Increases prices for net buyers of food; Decreases marketable output, hence incomes. Trade liberalisation regimes: Removal of input subsidies leads to increasing costs, which women farmers unable to afford; Male farmers too cut down on hired workers, and bring in women as unpaid family helpers Removal of import restrictions drives down domestic prices, hence profits With lower access to infrastructure and services, women worse affected.
- Favours those with assets; leads to loss of assets for small holders and women, including by-products and common property resources Contract farming for high value products Provides employment but insecure, hard working conditions and gender differentials in wages. Cash economy controlled by men can shift consumption priorities against food and nutrition. Direction of impact on gender relations unclear – positive or negative – shaped by local power relations, value of food crops (sacred or not), vulnerability to sexual abuse.
- Men advantaged in migration due to higher mobility and fewer constraints, except in the global care economy Female migration varies by age – daughters often remit to mothers to strengthen their bargaining power and financial autonomy. Both men and women are concerned about women’s security wellbeing predictors - food security, housing, diet diversity, savings and consumer durables Changing structure of family, with women maintained households worse off
- Not an increase in women workers per se, but a rise in share of agricultural workers in the female workforce. Feminisation in south Asia, masculinisation in parts of south east Asia, and Geriatrification in East Asia – is it a result of state policy (lack of investment), low productivity, low social valuation.
- CEDAW and Beijing Platform for Action accord equal rights to men and women, far cry /difficult to realise. Social and legal legitimacy needs to be established to overcome different types of constraints: Gender-specific – responsibility for reproductive work Gender-intensive – differential investments in education, health, opportunities for work and earning Gender-imposed – by states and markets, e.g differential wages; benefits to male ‘head of household. States, markets, communities and households shape and are shaped by the changing rules & norms across institutions: Operate simultaneously Include cooperation and mutuality, not just conflict Women not a homogenous group – bear different interests Not just collective action, or everyday resistance, but use hybrid practices – customs to fight new laws. New forms of negotiation Can take different forms – from SHGs to federations, cooperatives, movements and political organisation Needs conscious mobilisation with a clear agenda change institutional norms to gain social recognition and visibility Implementation of existing policies Policy advocacy and change Control over the production process
- These include: a) the largely patrilineal South Asia, with land a private asset owned and acquired mainly through inheritance down the male line; b) bilateral and matrilineal South East Asia, where too land is a private asset acquired through customary inheritance systems; c) the communist/socialist states like China and Vietnam, where land is vested in the State but households granted use rights by the local village committees, and d) the Central Asian states marked by conflicts between centralised state institutions and private, clan-based, land management systems. ‘Asian values’ of service, sacrifice and peace. Separated women vulnerable, seen as deviants Has changed over time due to diversification, technological change, state policies: Lost access to customary resources Pushed into ‘housewife’ roles Women to be recognised as both productive and reproductive workers
- Per se not bad or good. contradictory effects drudgery reduction of work, but also lead to displacement of specific groups of labour. Gendered impacts differentiated by class: Divisions of labour in agricultural and domestic work (including environmental and health effects) Differences in control over and symbolic meanings of assets and activities – some cases men take over; knowledge about maintenance and repair not given to women due to assumption that they lack skills to operate. Pattern of distribution of earnings and expenditures – women disadvantaged due to lack of land, secure tenure, few female extension agents; Agriculture information to men, nutrition to women Technical skills not given to women – handpump mechanics Ignore drudgery in reproductive work of women farmers. but potential to change this with ICTs
- Oil palm growers in PNG, withdrew labour when found men failing to meet obligations Using the example of oil-palm growers and settlers in West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea, Curry and Koczberski (2012) demonstrate how labour relations sit within wider relations of reciprocity and obligations within households and kin-groups. While male ‘heads of household’ are responsible for organising harvest labour, payments reflect age, gender, kinship status, perceived need of the individual rather than only the labour provided. These notions of value however are contested and change, so growing market pressures (with contract farming and export crops), have seen more individualised patterns of harvesting coming into play. The implication has been declining cooperation between and within households and a consequent decline in productivity, given the difficulty of accessing adequate labour to complete harvesting within the short window of three days available for this purpose. Women gradually withdrew their labour from oil palm work as the companies paid cash to their husbands, who made inadequate contributions to the upkeep of the family (Koczberski, 2007). They preferred to grow vegetables, or engage in alternate income earning activities. They saw men as failing to meet the ‘implicit contracts’ (Netting, 1993) in terms of upkeep of the household, paying school fees, raising brideprices’ for sons’ marriages and other indigenous obligations. Companies found that 60 per cent of the loose fruit, collected by women, was lost. Technical solutions were attempted, but failed, as the problem lay in the lack of recognition of women’s labour. Once the companies realised this, they changed the system of payment to directly pay women for the loose fruit they collected. This recognition was not opposed by men; rather men supported it. They themselves added oil palm fruit to women’s collection, as their share of contribution to the household. Cash was a signifier of male prestige, so multiple demands were placed on it from multiple sources, making contributions to wives increasingly limited. Two lessons can be drawn from this experience. First, that all assets have a gendered meaning, be it land, labour, cash or particular crops. Secondly, and importantly for policy, intra-household disputes over labour and income distribution can be resolved by institutional mechanisms which recognise the different meanings of different assets and resources and find ways to equitably redistribute them in contexts of resource constraints and social change.
- Afghanistan – ancient underground irrigation channels destroyed by bombing Day to day violence accentuated by armed conflict, impacting work and lives by women – often due to substance abuse. Poverty food insecurity, ecosystem and soils destroyed Male migration to Russia and businesses – two predictors for improving incomes Tajikistan – 23% land ‘kitchen gardens’: used to grow wheat, barley, rice, vegetables Both men and women engaged, as lack of options Older women taking on marketing due to threat of local militia activities Multi-generational families for sharing tasks – change in gender roles
- Need to take account of social relations across genders and generations. Philippines example In a reverse case, Hill (2011) finds a contraction in men’s employment opportunities in the Philippines post-1990, with rapid conversion of farm land to other uses, while women’s have increased in range and financial significance, partly through better access to skills and credit. Yet the prevalent discourse remains one of male responsibility for bread-winning and the problem encountered through disruptions in irrigation, debts for machinery and inputs. Given the tenuous masculinities at stake, women supported male discourse as providers and devalued their own contributions. They represented their work, both reproductive and income-earning as ‘responsible motherhood’. Given men’s increasingly aggressive behaviour, taking to drinking, because of frustrated masculinities, women recognised the need to foster harmony within the household and beyond. By downplaying their income contributions, they could make claims on their husbands’ labour and time, and also demand that he fulfil his financial responsibilities. There is similar evidence from India, where confronted by few opportunities for employment, in contrast to their women who received both skills and credit, men either took to drinking and violence, or at best withdrew from work and allowed women to single-handedly manage the household (Deshmukh-Ranandive, 2003). It was to retain male contributions and a degree of household reciprocity that Santal women refused to take up ploughing, even though this sometimes delayed cultivation and reduced production (Rao, 2008). What Hill (2011) for the Philippines and Rao (2006) in the case of India, demonstrate is the role of state discourses and policies targeting women in increasing women’s workloads and responsibilities, but also pitting women against men, or worse, alienating men from the process of ensuring food and nutrition security. Biofortified crops can improve diets Women have control over food crops No additional labour or input requirements Can potentially reduce care burdens
- Agricultural employment of women doesn’t automatically lead to improved nutrition
- First give background to general agricultural scenario before going on to gendered implications Changes in nature of ‘family’ – female-only, skipped generation, multi-generation.
- Agriculture itself feminised in terms of characteristics of work, not just labour force, and feminine is inferior Social valuation by different insitutions – state , community of male and female contributions to the agrarian ecosystem informing and defining both life and labour processes, livelihoods included.
- To improve quality of life.
- While generic constraints are established, specifics are needed deepen understanding of institutional constraints (both formal and informal) in securing rights Identify intersectionalities that influence recognition/ denial of women as equals