Country specific recommendations

Two categories of recommendations developed by the consultation are those that are country specific and those that have a regional affect. The country specific recommendations are presented by country.

Bangladesh

• Development priorities must consider women’s needs in rice production and their relationship to biodiversity.

• National programmes should promote women’s seed preservation, conservation, regeneration and sharing practices.

• Biodiversity-based farming practices (subsistence-based ecological agriculture) should be supported, thus promoting enhanced diversity and systemic yield in an integrated farming system.

• Women’s traditional practices based on their local knowledge and cultural practices require attention.

• Women’s roles can be enhanced and the farming households’ value enriched by combining rice production, poultry, livestock and aquaculture.

• Economic activities of women with regard to post-harvest operations are important and need to be formally recognised.

• Poverty alleviation programmes should directly address agrarian development based on security of the farming communities.

• Evaluate the existing technologies used in agriculture from women’s perspective and restrict the use of technologies that have displaced women.

• Th e g ove r nme n t s h o u l d s t re n g t h e n wome n’s e x i s t i n g p ra c t i ce s to comb i n e rice-livestock and rice-fish production.

• Organise women in rice-livestock cooperatives and develop small and medium sized enterprises of women in agriculture.

Cambodia

In order to scale up the Multipurpose Farming adaptation and adoption in the rain-fed rice ecosystem, the following recommendations are made:

• MPF is a new farming modality, proven a successful solution for small rice farmers in rain-fed ecosystems. Extension service providers (both those from NGOs and those from government institutions) who work in this ecosystem should understand MPF through training supplemented by site visits.

• Extension services need to support and promote MPF in rice-based ecosystems. Small-farmers and women-headed families should be provided start-up capital for investment to convert rice fields into MPF. Governments should allocate funds to promote MPF and include MPF in national programmes.

• A programme for women in biodiversity conservation should be launched since women traditionally play an important role in seed conservation and work closely in managing those resources. MPF contributes to biodiversity conservation yet it should be expanded to incorporate the bio-resource management aspects to make the system more profitable.

• The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) should be developed in the rain-fed lowland rice producing areas to promote high yield with low-extension inputs. SRI can lighten women’s workload in rice production, especially in uprooting the seedling, and SRI can keep women free from exposure to chemical inputs in rice production.

China, PR

a. Policy recommendations for national interventions that are gender responsive to address food security and poverty alleviation in rice communities

• Infrastructures of technology, information, marketing systems and a stable policy support for households that produce rice are crucial to address gender issues.

• The government should consider processing and production subsidies to identify women’s contributions to food security and poverty alleviation. Some specific projects, such as riceintegrated production, could be key aspects of gender responsive plans.

• Extension and technology transfer should improve rural women’s access to technical knowledge and capacity building to improve food security and alleviate poverty.

• Unless women are fully included in all the benefits derived from improved rice-based systems, real strides in poverty alleviation cannot be achieved. There needs to be greater awareness of women’s work in rice farming, a corresponding increase in women’s access to improved crop production techniques and equitable national-level land and resource policies that are effectively enforced.

• Successful design and development of new technologies, such as improved varieties, must take into account the intra-household division of labour as well as gender differences in preferences, needs and criteria.

• A farmer-centred research approach could involve women in the research and extension system and could support their capacity building. This could be achieved through women’s participation in the whole process of problem identification, research problem diagnosis, research planning, experiment implementation and participatory monitoring and evaluation.

  However, the current character of participatory action research methods requires adopting institutions to scale up as well as to influence the research and extension system.

• Agriculture and rural development should not disadvantage and displace women from emerging economic opportunities for alternative livelihoods that will improve the rural economy and food security.

• Integrated and participatory development strategies could help men and women farmers produce grain, including rice, as part of the economic mainstream. Participatory village planning for poverty alleviation^[5] could be a model and a basis for further research.

b. Recommendations to strengthen gender responsive regional level actions to achieve food security and reduction of poverty in rice communities

• Implementation of macro-policies to improve agricultural and farmers’ incomes should include gender-mainstreaming starting with action planning through monitoring and evaluation.

• Local integrated agricultural development projects and adjustment policies could be linked with gender responsive items by mobilising cooperation among stakeholders, such as All China Women’s Federation, Poverty Alleviation Office and similar organizations.

India

• Give women cultivators better access to resources by providing executable property rights to land.

• Introduce legumes in the irrigated and non-irrigated rice farming systems to enhance the sustainability of farming.

• Train women in rice farming systems with skills in water conservation and water management to enhance productivity.

• Enforce equal wages for women in the rice growing areas; this is of utmost importance to bringing about gender equity.

• Diversify women labourers’ livelihoods by enhancing their employment opportunities in ricebased biomass industries during the off-season.

Indonesia

• Policy makers should consider women’s important role in rice production and as food providers in poor households by designing more gender-sensitive food policies, specifically rice policies.

• A gender-sensitive policy considers the positive and negative affects on men and women.

  To design gender-sensitive food policies, sex-disaggregated data in rice production and consumption should be available to policy makers at every level of government administration.

• A gender-sensitive approach to deliver new technology and information in food production and income generating activities should be created. All extension agents working in the villages or with poor people should be gender-sensitive, too.

• Extension agents should be able to do gender analysis, to collect, present and archive sexdisaggregated data from the farm level, and do gender-sensitive reporting. This gendersensitive knowledge should be integrated into training courses for extension agents.

Lao PDR

• Collect sex-disaggregated data in households and the agricultural sector. Based on these data, identify research priorities for the target group for policy and programme development.

• Based on good research, facilitate the linkage between the knowledge and skills of producers (indigenous knowledge) and programmes to reduce poverty.

• Based on sound field assessments of gender issues in the agriculture sector, develop strategies to assist women to reduce poverty and to improve economic conditions and food security.

• Focus on human resource development projects aimed at upgrading the capacities, qualifications and technical expertise at all levels in the short and long term.

• Pay more attention to female farmers and to training the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) female staff.

• Encourage the involvement of young female scientists and promote research projects on the issues of gender and equity.

• Foster partnerships between farmers and experts by bringing together the knowledge and skills of producers (indigenous knowledge) with those of professional scientists and technicians.

• Consider the needs of women in germ plasma selection and improvement in farmer participatory crop breeding programmes. Give more opportunities to young women at all levels for education and training.

• Reach women farmers through two kinds of training activities. One is the training of men and women extension workers on the importance of including women in their extension activities; identifying the needs of women farmers and what kind of technology transfer strategies are suited to them considering their level of education and their reproductive responsibilities. The other is the training of women farmers that should be done at the community level based on participatory approaches and learning by doing.

Malaysia

• Conduct a national study on the role of women and men in agriculture particularly in rice farming as part of the food security promotion.

• Collect sex disaggregated data of the rural and agricultural sectors as input into programme planning.

• Develop comprehensive rural entrepreneurial strategies, with a particular emphasis on women’s enterprises, to assure sustainability of women’s micro enterprises and to stimulate the rural economy.

• Accelerate efforts to develop appropriate technology to scale up women’s enterprises.

• Conduct gender sensitisation at all levels to facilitate rural women’s involvement in agriculture as well as national development.

• Conduct research and document all work done by rural women to account for rural women’s unpaid labour.

• Design appropriate programmes to enhance women’s contributions in development based on research of rural women’s contributions in sustaining agriculture and food security.

• Integrate the gender strategies into biodiversity conservation in all relevant agencies.

• Consider gender dimensions in efforts to develop appropriate and affordable technology in agricultural and food production systems.

Nepal

• Provide women with adequate access to information, without which they quickly fall behind the learning curve.

• Include the following actions to promote gender responsiveness: (a) policy measures to equalise opportunities and access to irrigation water usage; (b) specific actions that target women; and (c) strengthening the organisational capacity of the Water User Association to promote elements of good governance such as representation, participatory decision making, and transparency for improved service delivery and equitable distribution of benefits.

• Incorporate efforts to improve gender responsiveness in the overall process of institutional development so that men understand and support the changes taking place in social organisations.

• Promote gender responsive technology that is beneficial to women in terms of reducing women’s drudgery while ensuring that women’s labour is not displaced. Upgrade women’s skills and capabilities, and conduct a needs assessment (with the client) for technology development and proper targeting for improved labour productivity, and increased women’s participation in the formal labour force.

• Provide detailed information on the negative and positive aspects of technology including benefits (economic, social and health) that will accrue to male and female family members.

Pakistan

• Train rural women to prepare nurseries for mechanical transplanting and parachute planting.

• Introduce crop diversification by incorporating legumes and vegetables into the existing ricewheat cropping system.

• Introduce small-scale poultr y and sheep-goat farming to generate employment opportunities.

• Train rural women for employment in non-farm sector industries present in the area.

• Recruit more women agriculture graduates for the extension wings of the Agriculture Extension Department, Livestock and Dairy Development (L&DD) and the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority (SMEDA) in order to provide a free interaction environment to rural women.

Philippines

• PhilRice should establish a comprehensive gender strategy to ensure equal opportunity of men and women within the influence of its activities, products and services.

• PhilRice should use planning, research, development, documentation, review and updating of comprehensive gender programmes and objectives to improve its gender sensitivity and awareness. It should communicate this policy to increase the awareness of its stakeholders and the public.

• The PhilRice gender team should involve women in its projects, studies and training.

Sri Lanka

a) Policy related recommendations:

• Maintain a database by gender within the Socio-economic and Planning Centre of the Department of Agriculture (DOA). This could assist in planning research, training and extension activities within the department and for policy formulation at the ministry level.

• Include in the Department of Agriculture’s annual report, data analysis by gender in the labour force by crop.

• Coordinate cooperation between the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Census and Statistics to develop and maintain a gender database for the food crops sector.

b) Extension and technology transfer related recommendations:

• Develop institutional policies to collect and analyse gender-differentiated data when developing and transferring technologies in rice livelihood systems at the national and district levels.

• Ensure that the introduction of new technologies does not affect adversely the economic benefits enjoyed by women and men farmers.

• Develop a mechanism at the national level with responsibility delegated to district officials or agents to monitor women’s access to technical knowledge and skill in rural production systems.

c) Rural development approach recommendations:

• Formulate timely development interventions at the national and district levels to incorporate the changing scenario in agriculture with parallel changes in women’s and men’s roles in rice livelihood systems.

• Maintain national and district level viability and sustainability in promoted rural production systems by facilitating appropriate assistance from relevant sources.

Thailand

• Encourage organic farming and fair-trade as integral components of livelihood improvement programmes.

• Develop a comprehensive support system to assist farmer conversion to organic production.

• Give a people-centred focus to the strategy for livelihood improvement.

• Assure project success and sustainability through public-private partnerships (PPP).

• The FAO should promote the rice livelihood system by work ing direc tly with non-government organisations in developing countries.

• Rice-based farming systems that adopt the use of chemicals should train men and women farmers in their appropriate use.

• Adopt gender responsive machinery in rice production and processing.

• Give rural women income-generating alternatives to rice farming.

• Conduct research on the feasibility and profitability of commercial scale organic rice farming, and on how it would affect gender roles and small-scale rice farming households.

• Make rural development strategies people-oriented and gender responsive.

• Make policy recommendations that consider the gender viewpoint, and include concrete plans that translate easily into project implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

• Involve women and the civil community in PPP, a critical strategy for project success and sustainability.

• The FAO should work directly with NGOs as well as governments in developing countries to promote the rice livelihood system.

• Women farmers should evaluate factors that affect the development of by-product enterprise.

• Eliminate factors that impede rural women’s development of rice by-product enterprises.

Viet Nam

• Ensure land law enforcement that strengthens proper land administration and monitoring systems and the timely implementation of entitlements of men’s and women’s land use rights.

• Increase women’s and men’s understanding of laws and their property rights through training and Information, Education and Communication (IEC) programmes including an appropriate education strategy.

• Develop special legal counselling services in communities for vulnerable groups of rural women and men to support them when their property rights need protection.

• Encourage women’s participation in land, water and credit planning and programmes in the community to make sure women have a voice in decision-making processes for resource planning.

• Encourage women’s equal participation with men in agriculture extension training in new production technology.

• Promote appropriate transfer of new knowledge, especially to poor women who have limited educational levels and limited time to attend extension and other technological training.

• Provide women-friendly technologies to reduce women’s labour in rice and agricultural production, and to improve rice, rice by products and other products that broaden women’s economic opportunities in the commodity market.

• Create favourable conditions for rural women to access credit with larger, longer term and optimal rate of interest loans for investment in agricultural activities.

• Promote strategies that improve women’s and men’s opportunities to engage in incomegenerating, off-farm activities that diversify agricultural production.

• Facilitate networking among professionals for sharing the "best practice" to ensure rural women’s equal access and control over production resources, especially in land tenure as a means for livelihood security, and to achieve food security and reduction of poverty.

• Conduct regional gender analyses to develop a framework that improves our understanding of common issues such as the affect of feminisation in agriculture, the affect of rural-urban migration, the gap between laws and customary practices influencing women’s land security and the role of a social safety net on development of appropriate programmes that support rural women in sustainable livelihoods.

• Conduct research on the affect of land concentration and land transactions on landless women and men farmers’ livelihood strategies.