Women in Agriculture

Lesson 25 : Feminization of Agriculture - Issues

Feminization of Agriculture - Issues

1. Gender segregated and segmented labor force: The non-traditional and high-value agricultural export labor force is highly segmented and gender segregated. It is evident is that employers prefer women workers for the labor-intensive tasks associated with nontraditional and high-value agricultural export production. Women are regarded as submissive and docile, having greater dexterity for tasks that require care and patience, and flexibility with regard to work conditions (work hours, wages, contracts). Agribusiness enterprises have gender-differentiated occupations: women do the labor intensive tasks such as weeding and pruning in the fields, selection and cutting in processing, and sorting and wrapping in packing. Men do the tasks that entail strength such as lifting crates and construction of greenhouses, or that involve machinery such as driving tractors and trucks, applying pesticides, and maintaining equipment. Women’s work is more likely to be considered unskilled and women are less likely to receive training and acquire skills that make them eligible for higher-paid work.


2. Flexible labor force: The defining characteristic of the new female wage labor in Latin America and Africa is its “flexible” labor force—seasonal, temporary, or casual women workers with an underpinning of a small permanent labor, largely male, labor force. Because the world market for vegetables, fruit, and other fresh products such as flowers, is very competitive, agribusiness seeks a flexible labor force that works long hours, only part of the year, for low wages and no social benefits. 6 The most critical groups of temporary workers are casual and migrant labor. In the casual agricultural labor market in Africa, for example, women’s casual wages (whether in cash or in kind) are usually half of men’s wages. Increasingly, the casual labor force is made up of women and in some countries they make up over 50 percent of casual labor force. While wage labor seems to significantly increase household income, bringing in higher returns than farming and self-employment, casual labor often indicates extreme poverty of smallholder agriculture particularly for women who are overwhelmingly clustered in low-entry, unskilled, and low-return activities. Women’s reserve price of labor is likely to be low where the income potential of their own production is low, where off-farm income generating opportunities are few or give low returns to labor, and where there is urgent need. There are few local opportunities and an excess of women needing work. When food supplies run out or they face other emergencies such as debt or illness, women seek casual labor, sometimes migrating to agri-business sites. Because of their urgent need and lack of assets, women will accept lower wages; often they are paid in kind (food) rather than in cash. Men are in a position to command better wages because they have assets and have better farming opportunities.


3. Wages and benefits: Agro-industry tends to label female tasks and skills as feminine qualities that do not warrant skilled wage levels or wages equal to men’s. On the other hand, many tasks undertaken by men are considered worthy of higher wages because they involve strength or operating machinery. As a consequence, women are concentrated in what are considered women’s (unskilled) work and remunerated at lower levels than men’s work Because of labor laws, permanent workers enjoy minimum wage rates and social benefits (such as sick leave, paid vacation, health insurance, pension). By hiring seasonal, temporary or casual labor (and mostly women), agro-industry avoids labor market regulation for the majority of its labor force. For women, who often have children and other dependents to support, lack of social benefits represents a particular hardship.


4. Training and skills: There are also gender differences in opportunities to acquire skills. Agro-industry generally offers formal training (for example, in management or the operation of machinery) to its permanent workers who tend to be men. The skills that women do acquire are generally acquired on the job through repetitive task performance (Dolan and Sorby 2003: 40). This means that most women do not have the opportunity to increase the wage level and to move into supervisory and managerial positions. women are a labor reserve for this type of production. In summary, although demand for labor in non-traditional or high-value agricultural export production has created new economic opportunities for women, their working conditions are characterized by insecurity, long working hours, environmental health hazards, low wages, and limited opportunities for training and skill development. The competition among agri-business firms, particularly horticultural export firms, pressures them to reduce costs by hiring unskilled women as informal workers (i.e., temporary, seasonal, and casual) at low wages and without social benefits. Little or no advance notice is given when workers are laid off.


5. Women working in smallholder agriculture:Rural families respond to these deteriorating conditions by diversifying livelihoods; often this includes migration of some household members to secure wage work. In some cases, these policies have allowed peasant producers to participate in the non-traditional agricultural export market. As a result, some women are increasing their participation in smallholder agriculture, either as principal farmers or as unremunerated family workers.


6. Women as principal farmers: Women are increasingly taking charge of farms as men either migrate for extended periods or engage in off-farm employment. Although national-level data is lacking with regard to women as independent producers, this type of feminization of agriculture has resulted in women’s increased visibility as farmers. Most agricultural censuses do not collect data on who exactly owns owner-operated farms, the assumption being that the principal farmer (assumed to be the male head of household) As smallholder production has become less viable and land ownership concentration has increased over the last half century, household members seek off-farm work, often through migration. In addition, male abandonment and death of husbands from HIVAIDS is increasing. Women left on the farm undertake more and more of the agricultural fieldwork and tasks, work longer hours on the farm, and make most of the decisions.


7. Women in smallholder production of agro-exports: The production of non- traditional agricultural exports is dominated by medium- and large-sized commercial farms and agribusiness. Nevertheless, smallholders with a certain level of assets are able to engage in contract farming of some agricultural exports, particularly those crops where human labor is not easily replaced by mechanization such as vegetables. The comparative advantage of smallholder families for labor-intensive production is unremunerated family labor. Agro-industry out-sources production of these crops to the smallholder sector, often under contract farming. Smallholder farms producing cash crops, particularly non traditional or high-value agricultural exports, are highly dependent on their women’s labor. For example, vanilla production by smallholders in Uganda found that the levels of female and male family labor were the same, and that family adult labor was ten times that of hired labor.


8. Feminization and empowerment: More recently, some scholars have mentioned a positive relationship between women’s wage work and their status in the household. It appears that women who work off-farm as wage workers and directly receive their wages have more control over those wages, over how it is allocated, and therefore have more power in household decision making. With the exception of female-headed households, women who work as unremunerated family workers are less likely to increase their status and decision-making power.


9. Household work and responsibilities: As women increase their time in wage work and cash cropping, their traditional responsibilities within the home are not assumed by men. Studies in Ecuador, Colombia, South Africa, and Kenya cited by Dolan and Sorby demonstrate that women and their daughters continue to put in the overwhelming majority of hours needed for domestic tasks. When women are away at work, their daughters take over the household work. This may mean that daughters are pulled out of school in order to stay at home to take care of younger siblings. The major exception is single women without children: they are able to escape household work while at work since they have no children to care for.


10. Control over income: The benefits of wage employment for women include economic independence, mobility, and increased ability to make their own decisions. In addition, women working in the nontraditional agricultural export industry earn more than women in other rural occupations, particularly if they work in a processing or packing plant. Single women have almost complete control over their wages; nonetheless many of them do hand over part of their income to their mothers, particularly if they are living at home. For married women, while it increases their decision-making power in the household, in some cases it also contributes to increased conflict and domestic violence in the home.


11. Differentiated access to productive resources and markets: Some of the studies cited in the previous section suggest that the potential for women empowerment and improved status, within the context of new economic opportunities offered by wage employment and cash cropping is influenced by their access to productive factors. Women’s land rights. Because of the patriarchal nature of most rural societies, women generally do not have the same rights to land as men. Sons, not daughters, inherit the family’s land and marital property practices in most of Latin America11 and sub-Saharan Africa results in wives not inheriting land from their husbands, nor receiving an equal share of marital property in case of divorce. State programs that allocate land, such as land distribution, land resettlement, and negotiated land reform programs, have targeted men as beneficiaries. In addition, women’s secondary status constrains their ability to access land on the land market (rental or sale), as well as other productive factors, such as credit and labor.


12. Data gaps in coverage on women’s labor: Women provide a large proportion of the labor that goes into agricultural production, even though official statistics based on census and survey instruments often under estimate women’s work and contribution to national wealth. Problems persist in the collection of reliable and comprehensive data on rural women’s work in agriculture and other productive sectors because of (1) invisibility of women’s work, (2) seasonal and part-time nature of women’s work, and (3) unremunerated family (mostly women and children) labor. Both Deere and Katz, who scoured data sources and studies in Latin America, conclude that the data regarding women’s work in agriculture is deficient, inadequate, and conflicting. They found little data on whether rural women who work in agriculture are non-remunerated family members, self-employed farmers, or wage workers. They were unable to determine how much total wage labor and total labor in agriculture (agricultural EAP) has increased. Both traditional export and peasant agriculture in Latin America have declined, but there is no adequate information on the size and distribution of the agricultural labor force across agricultural sectors: smallholder production, traditional exports, and non-traditional exports.