Within the gender research conducted through LANSA in India, we have examined the impact of agriculture and the environment on food and nutrition security. In Koraput, Odisha, we found that women control the choice of crops and the output, critical for household nutrition, in the uplands. They grow millets, horsegram, niger and vegetables on these plots(Rao, 2017 http://lansasouthasia.org/content/gendered-time-seasonality-and-nutrition-insights-two-indian-districts). These contribute to the diversity of diets at home, but women also sell small quantities in the local markets, whenever they need cash for expenses.
Yet today corporate interventions, especially the rapid spread of eucalyptus plantations for the paper industry, across this region, is displacing women farmers from their upland plots. A Paroja woman in Koraput noted, “I used to grow mandya in two plots for our daily consumption. Someone from the company spoke to my husband and convinced him of the profitability of planting eucalyptus. He agreed, and now I have only one plot left. Only if there is food from our land, is there happiness”. The option of course is to purchase millets from the market, but this is hardly available and prices are unaffordable.
While denying the jointness of both production and reproduction in tribal areas, these interventions are gradually making male control of land, income and indeed women the norm, with negative consequences for nutrition. Baseline nutritional data from LANSA research in Koraput indicates that over 50% of both under-5 and adult population are underweight, especially amongst the STs and SCs. The National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (2009), noting a marginal decline in Chronic Energy Deficiency amongst STs between 1985-2008, alongside a secular decline in the consumption of roots and tubers, as well as other vegetables, confirms this finding.
This is really an important issue and I congratulate FAO for making it the theme for the next SOFA. I have a few specific comments. In section 3.3, drivers of migration, apart from poverty, employment opportunities etc, a major reason is the changes in land use patterns due to global and national business investments in agricultural land. Within academic debates, this has been called 'land grabs', 'green grabs' amongst others. Seccondly, in section 4.2, on migration impacts, while nutrition is important, the entire field of health, nutrition and wellbeing, of both migrants and those left-behind needs to be emphasised. In fact, for Scheduled Tribes in India, over a period of two decades, men (seasonal migrants) show a declining diet diversity, with implications for nutrition. In parts of western India, during peak agricultural seasons, often coinciding with male migration, women lack the time to cook and feed, themselves or their children. These insights on nutrition are emerging from research we have conducted as part of the consortium Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA). Third, an important use of remittances is for consumption and class mobility, apart from survival, and not necessarily for investing in agricultural productivity (section 4.3). I have case studies of this from Eastern and Northern India as well as Bangladesh, which I am happy to provide. Finally, and somewhat contradictory to the previous point, we find that certain sectors such as fisheries in India are being rapidly capitalised in a context of climate change and resource depletion (section 5.1). In order to survive in such a capitalised sector, migration becomes the only way of raising the required capital. Fisheries in particular requires substantial investments, and this scale of lending is not provided by the public sector banks. Private capital would be too expensive to make the venture viable. We have generated evidence from research based on a grant from the Norwegian Research Council, which we would be happy to share.
For gender transformative impacts, your first question already gives a clue, and that is, to understand the differences amongst rural women, in terms of needs and priorities, but also their coping strategies. We dont give adequate attention to the ways in which women are already using the resources they have to survive. Sometimes this involves risky strategies, including engaging in non-legal activities or transactional sex. Once we are able to map out women's gendered vulnerabilities, especially in a context of climate change and growing male migration, we then need to ensure that policies and strategies support or enhance their strategies, provide them information that can ensure safety, for instance.
In much of Africa, an analysis of data reveals an increase in the number of female-headed households. What this indicates is that often women are opting out of marriage, but making economic and emotional partnerships that ensure some support and reciprocity. This has implications for resource access, but equally health and fertility. Gender transformative impacts may then emerge from different starting points, but the bottomline is that the processes of engagement need to address unequal power relations, be it of class, ethnicity/caste or gender.
This is an important discussion in preparation for the CSW in March 2018. On behalf of LANSA (Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia), we had organised an FSN Forum last year (130) on Transforming gender relations in agriculture through women’s empowerment: benefits, challenges and trade-offs for improving nutrition outcomes. We had a very interesting discussion around similar issues and I will not repeat the points that emerged, but do look at the summary report attached.
While the feminisation of agriculture and agricultural labour is recognised in many countries of the world, women are still not adequately supported to perform these roles, their needs and interests not given priority attention within agricultural policies, research and extension services. Recognition of women's economic contributions to agriculture and provision of equal entitlements are central to protecting their rights and helping them overcome disadvantage. Explicit legal recognition as farmers with equal entitlements as men is a precondition to removing inequalities in access to resources and services.
An important issue that has emerged in our research is women's time burdens, especially during peak agricultural seasons, when they end up working close to 14 hours a day, in agriculture and domestic work. As agricultural work needs to be done, given the seasonal nature of work cycles, women's care-work is squeezed, with negative implications for their own health and that of their children. We find a particular trade off between agricultural work and care of the young child, contributing to the persistence of nutritional deprivation intergenerationally.
Apart from ensuring equal productive entitlements, it is therefore also necessary to support women's reproductive and care work. This can be done through public investments to reduce rural women's drudgery by provision of basic infrastructure as well as time and drudgery reducing technologies. Social protection programmes need to pay attention to increasing women's choices, especially with respect to the season work-care time trade-offs. Further, alongside encouraging men to share care responsibilities, states also need to ensure the provision of reliable and good quality facilities for child care and feeding, especially during the peak agricultural seasons. This is because amongst the poorest, men often end up migrating to towns to earn a living, and given their absence from rural areas, cannot share women's work burdens.
Thanks for sharing HKI's strategy of addressing malnutrition in Bangladesh. Nurturing Connections seems to be working well as it appears to address gender norms in a sensitive rather than confrontational way; at the same time aware of not overburdening women. This often seems to be the trade-off in attempts to empower women that we end up adding to their burdens.
Livestock and fisheries are clearly important sectors for women's engagement and income, but often marginalised in agricultural policies that focus primarily on cultivated crops. From a nutritional dimension, these are important sources of protein. It is quite shocking to hear about the poor nutrition amongst fishing communities in Pakistan, as one would assume that fish is a part of their diet. Thank you for raising these issues, as when talking of agriculture, and women's and men's roles within it, we need to keep in mind that this term includes livestock, fisheries and even forestry/agro-forestry.
There are several very interesting dimensions emerging from this discussion. Haris has picked up the issue of women's work, gender divisions of labour, and its links to both technology and wage markets. This is probably an area that needs more systematic research to understand its impacts on nutrition, as much research in south Asia points to the differential impacts of wages in terms of empowerment, linked partly to the motivation for work - whether it is out of necessity or choice - and the type of work. When new technologies are introduced, why do particular tasks/activities often shift to men, and consequently their value too rises? Can the better designed cotton bag described by Mahesh lead to significant improvements in women's health, but will it also lead to sharing of the cotton picking task by men?
Thanks Mahtab for raising the issue of nutrition awareness and education. This is crucial, however, rather than using a standardised approach, there is need to contextualise it in line with local food cultures and availability. The differential food preferences emerge also from some of the other contributions, especially from Africa. While several NGOs in India have been successful in working with groups of women to deveop nutrition-sensitve agriculture as well as awareness strategies, could these potentially be upscaled? The issue of sensitisation for men, raised by Barnali and Bhavani, is important, as despite women's work and incomes, sometimes it is the men who go to the markets and make the household purchases. Final decisions on what is consumed then often lies with the men.
It is very good to hear about the food safety act of Bangladesh. I think this is an important dimension, as despite all efforts, lack of adequate safety measures in both production and food processing/handling, can have adverse consequences for health and nutrition.
I would like to hear a little more about the seasonality dimension. Recent Lansa research in India seems to indicate that there are seasonal changes in food availability and consumption, leading to temporary energy stresses. whether these have any longer term outcomes is however not clear.
Poultry has the potential for both enhancing women's incomes and improving nutritional outcomes. Thank you very much for the information around poultry, especially the Women's Poultry Associations, in Afghanistan. The Associations have an added advantage potentially of giving both visibility and legitimacy to women's income contributions. How far they retain control over these incomes needs however to be examined.
It is true that in poor, rural households, whole families are nutritionally disadvantaged and not just women. The objective therefore is indeed to improve the wellbeing of the entire household and not just women within it. How can this be done? I think several strategies have been suggested in the discussions on this forum so far. An important one is to recognise and acknowledge women's contributions to agriculture and the generation of household incomes. Such recognition could be used to strengthen their legal entitlements to inputs and services, and also enhance their agency and say in household decision-making. Second, in most of South Asia, culturally and socially women are responsible for domestic and care work, including cooking and feeding the family. A second strategy is therefore to ensure that they have sufficient time for these tasks, without stretching their working day too much. This could involve the provision of fuel and energy, drudgery-reduction technologies, access to clean drinking water, sanitation and health services etc. It could also involve a more equitable sharing of tasks between men and women in households. Thirdly, we need to make sure that women too receive fair returns for their work contributions. Gender wage gaps in agriculture often disadvantage women workers, and this needs to be corrected.
Thanks Ramani for raising the very important point around seasonal variations. In some senses, given the seasonality of agriculture, this should be obvious, but it is quite often overlooked. In some new LANSA research in India we are finding similar results. During peak agricultural seasons, the time available for cooking and caring declines substantially, creating energy deficits in both adults and children. Thanks for the reference to your paper.
Look forward to the report Mar and to learn from the successful examples you mention. Recognising and addressing unpaid care work is clearly central to addressing the issue of malnutrition in South Asia, as despite new technologies as well as a host of nutrition interventions including take home rations, unless women have the time to cook and regularly feed the young child, the problem is unlikely to disappear. We often tend to look for technical solutions, rather than addressing the social issues including norms that tend to reproduce existing inequalities.
Digital technologies provide a powerful tool for sharing and accessing information, including on health and nutrition. There seems to be a lot of diversity even between villages in one area, Joanna, from your experience, is this right? Are there divisions of caste or class that mediate access to mobile phones and indeed to information? Are there particular groups where women are not allowed to go to the markets, for instance? In Puducherry, I found women freely using mobile phones to contact wholesaler suppliers of pulses and tamarind at a time when prices were high to see if they could benefit from some form of collective/wholesale purchase. We definitely need more research and understanding of the role digital technologies can play, but also specific constraints that restrict women's access and use. Please do share any papers you may have done on this theme.
Thank you very much for the insights from Ethiopia, Dr Kebede. Please could you also share the paper you mention, or provide references? It would be interesting to understand in more detail why female headed households are doing better in terms of dietary diversity score. Is it because of a smaller household size? Are they male absent households? What are the processes and mechanisms through which better outcomes are being achieved? This can be very useful for our own practice.
It seems important to advocate for a recognition of women's contributions to agriculture, in fact, for women as farmers, in all of South Asia, including Bangladesh. This really seems like a first step to ensure that women then have equal access to benefits and services in their own right. Such policy change will not happen without our collective advocacy. In India, a few years ago, the Women Farmers' Entitlement Bill was introduced by Professor M.S Swaminathan as a private member's bill in Parliament. This was however not taken up. There is now a network of over 70 women farmers' organisations across the country, called Makaam, which is in the process of drafting a revised bill, with support from UN Women and the National Commission for Women. Legal recognition will at least provide a basis for claiming these rights. Given women's central role in agriculture, this needs to be prioritised.
Really happy to hear about the initiatives taken by the Agriculture University at Faisalabad. I think it is very important for agriculture graduates to be sensitised to gender differences in roles and needs and respond to them. Joan Mencher has raised an important issue about small implements and animal power. We need to understand why a strong cultural taboo remains and how this can be changed? With women having the major responsibility for farming, we need to make sure that their work and contribution are recognised by policy-makers and extension workers. At the same time, we need to try and develop technologies and tools that can reduce the drudgery of their activities in farming. We also need to develop technologies to reduce the drudgery of domestic work and free up some time for child care and nutrition.
Thanks Joan very much for your comments and queries. I have followed your work in south India for several decades, and your 1988 paper in the collection edited by Dwyer and Bruce, A Home Divided, remains one of my favourites. The insights from that paper are still relevant today and pertinent to this discussion. While women contribute most of their income to household needs, including nutrition, why do gender wage gaps persist in agriculture? Secondly, as you rightly point out below, agricultural work remains more compatible with child care and domestic work than factory work. In recent research in Coimbatore district, I found that younger women did prefer working in factories for a few years, but had no choice but to give this up, at least temporarily, following the birth of a child. In the absence of reliable and good quality child care, reproductive work gets prioritised.
I am really struck by your comments on animal power and small implements, and how these lead to a displacement of women's labour. I would really appreciate if you could share any insights/research/papers on this theme, including on SRI. There have been few recent studies on gender divisions of labour in agriculture and how these are changing, except for the reporting of a general feminisation in the context of male migration. I would have thought that in the absence of men, investments in tools and technologies would increase, but from your comments it sounds as if when technologies are introduced, particular activities may be commoditised and performed by men for a wage, rather than by women farmers, who in India are still recorded as 'unpaid household workers'.
Your work on control of decision-making also sounds very interesting. I too found that women want to control decisions in relation to farming and have developed their own ways of resistance if they are forced into something they don't want to do. The forms of influence vary with context - in North India I found women doing the work and making the decisions, yet attributing these to men, in order to maintain a facade of male control in a patriarchal context. Please do share some of your recent work on control over decisions as well as the role of implements and animal power in shifting divisions of work in agriculture.
A final point in response to your comment on managing agriculture and childcare. While clearly agriculture is more flexible than other forms of paid work, it was interesting to find during a recent study of Kudumbashree groups in Kerala, that women with young children were largely excluded from these groups. Perhaps they are not able to fulfil the labour commitments at the allocated times by the group, though they do manage their own farms.
Thanks Dr Njabe, could you clarify what the gender agricultural policies and programmes are? If they provide women recognition as farmers, then they should contribute to also changing social norms and cultural stigma that invisibilise women's contributions? Within the discussions on unpaid care work, the 3 Rs framework is now the major demand within feminist advocacy. The first step is to recognise women's work. If this is adequately done in policy, the other two, namely, reduce and redistribute, could potentially follow. In the case of agricultural work, this would involve developing appropriate tools and technologies to support and reduce women's work.
Thank you Dr Peter for your contribution. The Kudumbashree programme in Kerala has indeed encouraged groups of women farmers to undertake collective farming. While such policy recognition clearly support's women's empowerment, do any of the studies undertaken by KAU you mention specifically focus on food security and nutritional outcomes? Do migrant men contribute incomes to their families, or is a large percent spent on liquor? Secondly, while women are clearly involved in all the activities from planting to post-harvest processing, do they receive any support in terms of improved inputs or equipment to help reduce the drudgery and time involved in some of these activities?
أستاذ دكتور Nitya Rao
This is overall a very good draft that tries to highlight the linkages between sustainable production and consumption, pointing to a range of entry-points for achieving sustainable food systems. Congratulations to the team.
While trade-offs are briefly mentioned, my main concern is the lack of adequate acknowledgement of power relations and hierarchies embedded within all stages of the process, that is, the distributional issue. We know that there is a huge gap between the rich and poor in terms of food consumption and dietary diversity, with indigenous people in India confronting a decline in dietary diversity over the past three decades, due to larger changes in land use patterns and the conflicts between macro-economic policies that encourage GDP growth through ‘industrial and infrastructure development’ often at the cost of biodiversity and local livelihoods. Divisions based on social identity – class, caste and ethnicity – need to be acknowledged, so the challenge of rising global income inequalities can be addressed.
We also know that there are power inequalities by gender which both shape divisions of labour and consumption patterns. Women in many contexts may be inclined to cultivate a diverse set of crops for food security, however, they may be excluded from decisions on land use, and lack control over inputs and resources. Greater attention needs therefore to be placed on social and gender power dynamics at each stage of the SFS, and the resource entitlements of women and men across diverse communities, in order to identify and address possible constraints.
A second element relates to shifts in diets to ultra-processed foods, contributing in turn to the double burden of malnutrition. There are many reasons for this, which are often not well understood. First, at a policy level, taxation policies need to restrict the sale and use of such foods, promoted often with several subsidies and incentives by the producing firms. On the other extreme, at the micro-level we need to better understand local livelihood patterns and the gender divisions of labour that may be encouraging the consumption of ultra-processed fast foods. In the hills of Uttarakhand in India for instance, where a majority of men migrate to the plains in search of employment, the entire burden of production and reproduction falls on women. Firewood for fuel is often not easily available and requires long treks. As a result, food that needs little fuel for preparation is potentially preferred. It is also easier for children to consume fast foods, when their mothers are absent from the home.
Third, several countries in the world today are facing growing youth employment, contributing to a competition for scarce resources for ensuring survival. I would like to draw attention to the marine fisheries sector in India. This continues to be dominated by small-scale fishers, however, over the past decade or so, there has been a push towards rapid capitalisation to enable boats to fish further from home. The size of catch has been declining, though with rising prices, earnings have remained stable. Sustainability however is in question on many fronts – ecological, economic and social. Overfishing has contributed to resource depletion, alongside rising pollution and other problems in the coastal environment. Economically, large export companies have replaced small-scale fish vendors, mainly women, depriving the latter of their livelihoods, as they can no longer access fish catch for local sales. Also, more young men are migrating to other countries to raise the capital for investment in larger boats and more technologically advanced gear (albeit often destructive). Socially, and in terms of diets, not just are women losing their source of income, but also access to fish for home consumption. Shifts in diets dependent largely on carbohydrates (rice), rather than including protein (fish) is enhancing problems of obesity, especially amongst women.
While I really appreciate the link being made between nutrition and health, social protection and agricultural production policies, bringing in social differences and power relations, based on gender and class in particular, will help move towards sustainable solutions.