Global forum on food security and nutrition

Sangeetha Rajeesh, LANSA Consortium, MSSRF, India

Dear Paul, I really like that you capture video footage and are able to use the same to shape policies and gain recognition for the intervention. Would you be able to share some Youtube links, as well as some documented success stories of the kind of policy impact you have had please? Look forward!

Joan P. Mencher, CUNY, Emerita Professor, United States of America

I have been working on women's involvement in agriculture in India for close to half a century. My intensive work has been primarily in South India, especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. One issue that I find left out of most discussion has to do with cultural attitudes towards women being allowed to make use of animal power, and more important for the present, their being allowed to use implements (such as some of the new ones being devised for sRI agriculture,) and women loosing work in agriculture as soon as implements to help do the work are introduced. I have published before on this, but am really struck by this right now. While I have been supporting the use of SRI/SCI approaches over the past 10 years, I have been really horrified that the moment implements come on the scene, then men claim the right to do the work women have been doing from time immemorial. I refer especially to weeding or the equivalent etc. I can wrote more about this, but first need to know if I can join the group writing ion this issue, and what kind of articles or information you want. While the women I knew best, especially the Dalit women liked working in the fields, certainly they were aware if the pains they had from doing this work. Still, it has meant a great deal to them. I have been told that ih Andhra Pradesh (and maybe in Telangana) women are allowed to use implements but I need to check this out further. Certainly in Kerala and Tamil Nadu they have not been. They have been able to manage their competing tasks quite well, especially with the help of both the elderly and even by bringing small children with them to sleep under trees. The women who do agriculture have always been clear that they do not want to give it up, unless they have access to other well-paying work. I would be glad to send you some iof my many articles and materials on this, but first I want to know what would be helpful. One thing I do know is that apart from areas where the daughters (even dalits) have SSLC degrees and can get factory employment by commuting to nearby factories, they might be willing to give up agriculture, but not elsewhere. I am preparing a paper for a meeting in November on this issue. Above all, they do not want outsiders (including the elites) or even (their own men) making their decisions about work for them. I was last in one of the tamil nadu areas where this is happening in February of 2015, but I also do manage to keep in touch with people there. Often some of the poorer women have even asked me to be their spokeswomen for them.  My former assistant, who runs an NGO in northern Tamil Nadu is on the ground and can speak on the behalf of the female agricultural labourers not only in this area but in all of the rice producing areas of Tamil Nadu. The Organization she has founded is GUIDE and her name is Vasantha. She is a mature woman with considerable experience on this issue.

I am a retired Professor of Anthropology from the City Un. of New York and have lived in India for over 20 years scattered in one month to two year segments. I first started in 1958. I expect to be back in India next winter.

Hira Iftikhar, University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan

To have a better future ahead as a society and country there is need to create gender equality. Women being most vulnerable group in South Asian region need to be empowered. As most of our economy depends on agriculture and women had played vital role in field yet have been unrecognised. In University of Agriculture Faisalabad, there programs being launched for women empowerment and gender sensitization in which rural women are being focused in terms of agribusinesses, health and sanitization, education and malnutrition issues. 

Nitya Rao, facilitator of the discussion, School of International Development and LANSA, India

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.