Is there a “feminization” of agriculture and the rural economy in Latin America?

There are several ways of examining empirically the changing gender composition of the rural economies of Latin America. A first step is to look at what is happening with regard to overall demographic trends in the rural areas to examine whether rural populations have become more or less feminized over the past several decades. A second level of analysis is to explore the sex-specific trends in rates of economic activity in the rural areas. And finally, we can look at data from the agricultural sector itself, to see whether women are increasing their participation, absolutely and relative to men.

TABLE 1
Latin America: Sex ratios of the rural population, 1970-2005

Source: CELADE/CEPAL (1999a).

Table 1 shows the rural population sex ratios in 19 Latin American countries from 1970 to 2000. With the exceptions of Bolivia in the 1970s and Mexico today, rural men have outnumbered women for the past 30 years. Currently, the number of women per 100 men ranges from a low of 73.7 in Uruguay to near parity in Mexico, with a mean of 92.5 for the region as a whole. The overall trend for Latin America since 1970 has been towards a slight increase in the male to female sex ratio of the rural population, although the shifts are distributed quite unevenly across the countries of the region. Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Honduras all experienced relative declines in the rural female population index of over 5 percent. Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Cuba saw their rural population sex ratios fall on the order of 1 to 5 percent over the last 30 years, while the balance actually shifted in favour of women in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Panama and Costa Rica. As we will examine in more detail below, one possible explanation for these differential shifts across the region lies in the distinct migratory patterns of the rural populations of different countries, and in particular the relative participation of women in internal versus international migratory movements.

Turning to the gender distribution of the rural economically active population (EAP), Table 2 presents regional and country-specific data, disaggregated by sex, for the years 1980-2000.^[6] Keeping in mind that these data include agricultural as well as non-agricultural activities, we note that for the Latin American region on average, approximately 77 percent of the rural male population over the age of ten is considered economically active, and this figure has been stable over the past 20 years. Women’s rate of rural labour force participation, however, has increased markedly since 1980: from under 23 percent to over 30 percent in 2000. Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras have more than doubled their rates of rural female economic activity in the past two decades, and the rates in many other countries have risen by over 50 percent.

TABLE 2
Latin America: Evolution of the rural economically active population by sex, 1980-2000

Source: Author’s calculations from CELADE/CEPAL (1999b).

Women’s share of total rural employment has also risen substantially over the past 20 years (see Table 3). For the region as a whole, women made up slightly over 21 percent of the rural economically active population in 1980 and comprise about 27 percent today. In Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras and Guatemala, where women form a large part of the non-traditional export agricultural labour force, the female share of the rural EAP has doubled between 1980 and 2000.

TABLE 3
Women’s share of total rural employment, 1980-2005

Source: Author’s calculations from CELADE/CEPAL (1999b).

Increasing female rates of rural economic activity also imply increased women’s participation in the agricultural sector, in the degree to which rural women are employed in agriculture as compared to other rural occupations. Table 4 shows that on average, less then one-third of economically active rural women are employed in the agricultural sector, compared to over two-thirds of men. There are important intra-regional differences: Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay exhibit very high relative rates of women’s agricultural employment (86, 70 and 43 percent of the rural female EAP, respectively), while only about 10 percent of economically active rural women in most of the Central American countries work in agriculture. Rural women’s employment is much more diversified: close to a third work in personal services, and another 25 percent are employed in the trade and tourism sectors. Rural industry is an especially important source of employment for women in Mexico, Central America and the Dominican Republic.^[7]

TABLE 4
Latin America: Distribution of the rural economically active population, by sex and sector, 1999

^a/ 1998
^b/ 1997
^c/ Includes mining, utilities, construction, transportation, communications and financial services.

Source: Author’s calculations from CEPAL (2002b), based on special tabulations of national household surveys.

Time-series data on women’s agricultural employment show an overall decline in female participation as a percentage of the total agricultural labour force between 1970 and 1990, but recent ILO data suggest a rising female share of agricultural employment between 1980 and the mid-1990s (see Table 5A). Based on national labour force data compiled by CEPAL (2002a) for the region as a whole, the female share of agricultural employment fell on the order of 20 percent between 1970 and 1990 (from an average of 13.1 to 10.4 of the total agricultural workforce), although 8 of the 17 countries for which there are data in both time periods exhibited a feminization of the agricultural workforce. The ILO data, extracted from their Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM) database, indicate a somewhat higher regional average female share of the agricultural labour force, including substantially higher estimates for women’s share of total agricultural employment in large countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Moreover, six of the seven countries for which comparative data are available appear to be undergoing a feminization of the agricultural workforce on the order of 1 to 4 percent a year since 1980 (Marcoux, 2001).

Additional data on women’s share of agricultural employment, found in Table 5B, are available from the agricultural censuses of seven Latin American countries during the 1990s (FAO, 2000). These data are useful because, for some countries, they differentiate between household and hired agricultural labour. In Brazil, for example, 38 percent of the household members reported as engaged mainly in agriculture are women, while 18 percent of the permanent hired labour on Brazilian farms is female. In Mexico, women make up 15 percent of the family labour agricultural labour force, 6 percent of the permanent and 9 percent of the temporary paid agricultural workforce.

A final source of information on women farmers comes from the most recent rounds of Living Standards Measurements Surveys, which recorded the sex of the “principal farmer” for owner-operated farms in five Latin American countries. These data indicate that women are primarily responsible for 9 percent of family farms in Brazil, 11 percent in Panama, 13 percent in Nicaragua, 16 percent in Brazil and 26 percent in Ecuador (Deere and León, 2002).

TABLE 5A
Latin America: Female labour force participation in the agriculture sector, 1970-1990s

^a/ Data for 1970 and 1980 are based on ILO standards; for 1990 from national labour force statistics.
^b/ Data years vary by country: 1990 (Cuba, Dominican Republic); 1993 (Paraguay); 1995 (Brazil, Panama, Venezuela); 1996 (Argentina); 1997 (Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico).

Sources: CEPAL estimates: Author’s calculations from CEPAL (2002a); ILO estimates: Marcoux (2001).

What do these demographic and labour force data allow us to conclude about the feminization of agriculture and the rural economy in Latin America? Based on the shifts in the sex composition of the rural population over the past thirty years, it appears that continued female outmigration has heightened across the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors relative to those of males. Unfortunately, the evidence on women’s participation in agriculture remains incomplete and contradictory. Different data collection methods yield widely discrepant estimates, although it seems likely that for a substantial group of the male bias in many Andean and Southern Cone countries, but that a countervailing tendency towards a relatively greater number of female rural inhabitants is taking place in Mexico and much of Central America. Regarding the rural labour force, the data are unequivocal in pointing towards significant increases in female economic activity rates, which are distributed more widely Latin American countries, women are making up a larger and larger share of both the paid and unpaid (family) agricultural workforces.

TABLE 5B
Latin America: Female labour force participation in the agriculture sector, 1970-1990s

^a/ Data years vary by country: 1988 (Argentina); 1990 (Panama); 1991 (Mexico); 1996 (Brazil); 1997 (Chile).

Source: Author’s calculations from FAO (2000).