Tape #503 - Women in Agricultural Development

The same general topic, Women in Development Women in Agricultural Development.  And so, I was asked to sit in today.  What I'm going to talk about is from a research perspective.  I am myself an agriculturally kind of missed in work in the economic research service and so from that perspective, understanding gendered work roles and how they impact on women's involvement in development and in particular, women's ability to engaged in productive activity to support themselves and their families.  And the basis really of that is understanding what women do that as people doing research in Ag development, we have to understand how women spend their time if we're going to be developing or evaluating assessing policies that are trying to impact on women's economic well being.  So I'm going to talk first a little bit about domestic and then in international perspectives on women in agriculture.  Then address why it matters, what do we care.  What are women's roles and how do they impact on their ability to engage in productive activity and then what we need to be doing to understand this better.  So let me start with a domestic picture.

 

After the Beijing conference, the USDA along with every other government agency was asked to write a response, basically, to the platform for action.  That was the policy platform statements coming out of the Beijing conference.  And out of that process of assessing the department's programs and how we are serving or are not serving women in agriculture and women as consumers of food, came some revelations about where we are as a department and perhaps as a society, a reflecting society and how far we have to go to recognize women's role.  First of all, in just looking at women's status in farm programs, and asking the question, can women be farm operators?  And obviously, women can be farm operators, but the way that we collect data right now, doesn't reflect that and even in the design of programs and the way programs are administered, there have been fundamental ways in which women's role has not been recognized.  Up until 1991, women could not sign commodity program application forms.  If a woman walked in to a USDA local office to fill out these forms to participate in a commodity program and get the benefits of that program, the subsidies, they would have to come back with their husband, or they'd have to send their husband.  They could not sign those forms, they were not recognized as farm operators.  That's only 8 years ago.  It's amazing to me.  Another aspect of that.  Women receive only 2% of farm ownership loans.  Yet, there are more than 2% of farm operators are women.  What we do know about women farm operators, how many and what' happening to them, despite some past discriminatory practices, since 1978 which is the first year that data became available, and that in itself is a fundamental problem, if we're not tracking how many women are involved in farming, we don't know whether they're increasing, decreasing, how many people there are to serve, whether we're serving them or not.  That's what I'm looking for.  So, since 1978, the number of women farm operators, both in absolute terms or absolute numbers, and their proportion of all farm operators has been increasing.  And women are the only demographic group of farm operators that has increased over that period and there continues to be this gradual decline in the number of farm operators.  So while all farm operators numbers are declining, the numbers of women are increasing.  Women make up as of '92, women make up 6% of all farm operators, according to the way we measure it right now, and there are some problems with that.  The actual number of female farm operators has increased from 113,000 in '78 to 145,000 in '92.  Ok.  So, women are there whether they're recognized or not.  But the data still don't reflect women's role entirely, yeh?  Census of Agriculture, which did not record gender of operator until 1978, so that's why we're not able to go back further, ok?  Women's participation as farm managers and farm operators isn't complete recognized because of the way the data are collected and an example of the impact that this can have, and in the U.S. Census, Egg Census, a farm must list only one operators.  It can be jointly owned, but they'll have to list only one operator and then the gender of that one operator.  In Canada, they recognized that this was a bit of a problem, and in 1991, for the first time, they asked respondents to report more than one operator.  What happened was they found out that 26% of farm operators in Canada were women.  In British Columbia, is was as high as 35%, 35% of the farm operators were women.  So, there's an untold story there, that we still don't have the data to really take account of how many women farm operators we have in the U.S.  Let me go now to the slides and talk a little bit about what we know about women do. 

 

These are kind of old slides, but, to illustrate the range of activities that women are engaged in and how that differs somewhat by gender and how that affects their economic will being. 

 

We know what women's traditional roles have been in household production, in cottage industry, as well as in agricultural production.  This is a typical activity women engaged in marketing in household production.  Does everybody see what's going on here?  There's... yeh.  A woman gathering fodder for livestock.  I mentioned cottage industry, hulling rice.  And this is actually a girl who is 13 or 14 with the rest of the village children with her.  Ok.  Versus these examples of some of women's typical activities versus activities that are more likely to be performed by men.  Land preparation.  What's happening here is that men are working with animals that increases their productivity, that increases their ability to generate income.  Working with some capital.  Women are engaged in hand labor.  Here it's pulling rice seedlings out of a nursery and then here's a man who's transporting those to this cart and they're going to be moved out to the field.  But here again, it's men working with capital, women working with their hands.  This is the actual transplanting.  Weeding, another hand labor activity that women are primarily engaged in.  And in this case they have a male manager.  this is an activity applying pesticides that men are more likely to be directly involved in and in a case like this with packpack sprayers and mixing in an open barrel and walking through a field and walking directly into the spray, that the mend are getting the brunt of the health risks from this activity, but women are affected too.  This woman spoke of illnesses following having to work in these cottonfield after they'd been sprayed.  Harvesting here where mostly children are involved.  Men and women and children.  This is the threshing, men and women involved together.  Women doing most of the hauling and men doing the actual threshing.  Here just using a bench from the tesstall next door.  Drying grain on the side of the road.  Here, women are also, this is all in south India, women were involved in  research, in agricultural research and in some teaching in agricultural colleges.  However, in this college in south India, there were no women students and women students were not allowed, they did have a few female professors.  So, there are institutional barriers to women increasing their human capital and being able to therefore increase their incomes through education.  I want to talk a little bit about this individual.  A woman who was not economically disadvantaged but faced conventional barriers to increasing productivity on her farm.  She was a young widow, 26, 27 years old, had her late husband's farm was her inheritance.  It was a large farm, they were well capitalized, so that wasn't an issue, but access to technical assistance was.  This woman was very interest in research, this is her mother-in-law who also lived on the farm.  She was interest in breeding program for cattle, but couldn't et the local extension service to take her seriously at first.  She had to be very persistent about going back and going back and asking and continuing to ask.  This is another threshing activity, but what I wanted to show here is while the men is engaged in this harvesting and threshing, the woman in the foreground is gleaning.  She's picking up what's fallen off the platform on the sides, picking up that grain.  Another example, where here's a man's who's plowing with oxen.  Women in the neighboring field, hoeing by hand.  So here you have 6 women doing the job that one could do if they had access to the livestock, to the animals.  So, the story here is just that gender is affecting the work roles of men and women and hence, women's access to resources and it's limiting their ability to generate income.  And then there's the issue of caring labor.  Who's taking care of the kids while they're attempting to support themselves and their families.  Women face the burden of household production and it limits their ability to engage in productive activity.  So, and one of the things that amazed me, really, was in the, would you put the lights back on, please, that over and over again in the platform for action from the Beijing conference, there's mention of this burden of household production and the need to get men more involved in household work so that women can be more productive.  It just comes up again and again and again.  Ok. 

 

What does it matter, what difference does it make, if we understand what women are doing in a production process or in the economy?  Part of the reason why it matters is that perspectives do affect actions.  Perspectives affect people's opinions and there willingness to support different policies and to push different policies.  There was a study of the relationship of race to perceptions on or position policy issues that sort of illustrates this that I wanted to show.  What they did was they asked whites and blacks whether they believed that blacks were as well off, worse off or better off than whites on a number of issues, income, employment, housing, education and so on.  Most whites believe that blacks were as well off or better off.  Well, we know, in fact, blacks earn 60% of what whites earn, they have twice the unemployment rate, they're half as likely to have a college degree and much less likely to have health insurance.  So clearly, blacks are not as well off as whites in aggregate.  Then they went on to ask about opinions about different policies, different issues and they found that the whites whose perceptions were furthest from the reality, the whites who believes that blacks were as well off or better off, particularly better off, were most likely to oppose policies to end discrimination.  So, I'm suggesting, just take this and insert gender, instead of race.  So, when they asked whites who believes that blacks were as well or better off whether minorities can overcome prejudice and work their way up, 82% agreed with that statement.  Of those who believed that blacks were worse off than whites, only 41% agreed.  And the same with issues of reverse discrimination.  Is reverse discrimination a bigger problem than discrimination against minorities.  Those who thought that blacks were as well or better off were much more likely to agree with that statement than those who felt that blacks were worse off.  So, in the same way with women, if we don't understand what women's role is, where they are economically, socially, in relation to men, we're not going to see any need for change.  It's one of the things that the Beijing conference then illustrated and just share a little bit of that information with you.  Poverty can't be eradicated without, this is one of the positions taken in the platform for action from the Beijing conference.  Poverty can't be eliminated without women's involvement, in development, development projects, development activities.  How come?  If you look just internationally, globally, women's poverty is increasing.  There are over a billion poor people in the world, most of them are women.  One fourth of all households are headed by women.  And many more households depend on women's income.  That's why you can't eradicate poverty without women's involvement.  Another statement in the platform for action that equity is a necessary condition to women's development.  Again, where women's' role is not recognized, they're not going to be able to participate fully, they're not going to be able to benefit in proportion to their need.  In understanding the impacts of policies on women's development.  The relationship between caring labor and public social services, the actual practice of caring labor and public social services is really critical.  If programs, whether they are economic development programs or credit and loan programs, encourage or otherwise reduce social expenditure that go to fund social services, then it increases the burden on women, just because women provide income for their families and because women do most of the caring labor.  So, if there are fewer social services being provided, women are gonna be taking up the slack, and that's going to reduce their ability to generate income.  So there own labor's going to be withdrawn from productive activities and go into caring labor, whether that's caring for children, caring for ill or disabled relatives, insuring that their household functions, that they have water, that they have fuel, that they have food, preparing food.  All of those basic activities that women are primarily responsible for, in addition to providing income for their families.  so policies that reduce social expenditure, increase the burden on women, the burden from household production.

 

There is an example of this that I wanted to mention.  There was a program in among Mossite women in Kenya to... the purpose of the program was to assess development needs among this group of women.  And the way that they went about doing this was to give each woman a camera and send her out with the camera and ask her to take pictures of 10 good things and 10 bad things about their life, and then to describe, to write captions for those pictures.  And then they cam together and shared that information and came up with a priority of their needs.  And this was focused around development and water issues, issues of access to water.  These women were spending about 5 hours a day just carting water from the source to where they needed it.  And it's tat sort of one little piece of information that it having so much of an effect on their ability to produce.  5 hours out of the day just schlepping water back and forth.  During that time, they're not able to care for their families and they're not able to produce income.  If they had access to either animals to carry water or water sources developed closer to where they live, that more than anything else they found in this study, would increase these women's economic well being and the well being of their families.  So the Beijing advocated reducing the burden of household production and caring labor through gender based program planning and emphasizing access to resources and this, as I mentioned before, emphasizing increasing men's involvement in household work. 

 

So, what sort of an agenda does it suggest?  My feeling is that we don't have to reinvent a wheel to understand what needs to be done because there were thousands of women did get together in Beijing and draft a direction and a focus that was meant to be an agenda for women's empowerment and to achieve gender equity.  Those are the basic goals.  Some of the critical areas for action that were identified there that were most relevant to people doing research on agriculture and women, women in ag development.  First, strengthening the commitment to gender based research and data collection.  So, the thing I mentioned before about even in the U.S., this is an area in USDA's response to Beijing, we emphasized the need to continue to support and expand gender based data collection.  Secondly, to fully account for the work that women do.  Whether that is market activity, whether it is subsistent production, whether it is caring labor, household work, and how these activities affect their vulnerability to poverty, their access to education and their health, in terms of occupational hazards, as well as in the home.  We need to know what the wage differentials are.  How much are women being paid relative to men, when women are involved in wage labor?   We need to know what the support services are and what support services are needed and child care being an obvious one.  And training programs didn't have to be structured to be accessible to women.  If women have no other means of transportation than be foot, it doesn't do any good  to set up a training program that is 5 miles away from their home or 10 or 3.  And as close as you can get, makes a big difference.  Thirdly, the platform talks about relying on indigenous, local knowledge, local structures and practices to suggest solutions to problems.  It's the issue of women's participation, really being essential to having women's interests taken into account and that it seems obvious but it's still a radical statement.  In the U.S., the idea that women have to actually be there participating in leadership, in committees, in order for their interest to be represented and addressed.  It's fundamental, it's recognized in t he platform, it hasn't been completely implemented in the U.S. and in U.S. Egg policy.  If you don't do that, goals don't get met, gender analysis doesn't get done.  It's not well understood and until we have women involved, that won't happen. 

 

So, what does it take to integrate a gender perspective in policy?  It takes women being in responsible positions at the highest levels.  It means reaching outside of government, certainly involving NGOs where women have, to some extent, been active.   It involves a commitment of resources, both people and money, explicitly to these activities.  And creating opportunities to influence development of policies at all levels, so there's a lot of reaching out, really, that has to go on.  And these are our international goals, not certainly just directed at the U.S.  There's a couple of things that researchers can do to move this process forward, move the understanding forward of what women do, and so then what they need to increase their incomes to have a better life.  Simple things, simple, simple things.  But they don't get often emphasized enough.  Just as in policies and the first, is that women have to be collaborators in research and extension.  So, for someone like a ponama, the woman who was widowed and was trying increase productivity on her farm, if there had been women in extension, she would have been able to connect and get that process going more easily.  And more women, who don't have maybe, the persistent or the resources of someone like her, would have better access to those resources, those services.  And then, a second small step is having women involved in designing evaluation of projects, or research projects, I'm talking about.  And the mossi project that I mentioned is a good example of that, where the women were collecting the data, they were analyzing it and taking these pictures and putting their stories together and out of that figuring out what, where they wanted, what issues they wanted to put priority on.  And they were evaluating the project at the end.  So, they're very simple things to do if people are thinking about them.  If people are thinking about, gee, we've got only men involved in this project and how are we going to address... and this other project in Kenya where they tried to put some of this into practice there.  It was an evaluation of the Food for Work Program.  Are people familiar with that program?  the way it operates is communities, a village, for example, can apply to this program, proposed a development project that the individuals who live there can do themselves.  It's putting in irrigation systems or controlling erosion or improving pastures or rangeland, a number of activities that the individuals can do for themselves.  They make these proposals, and if they're accepted, they engage in the work, keep track of how much labor's going in, and then according to that, they receive food in return and it's distributed then among the program participants.  So, it's instead of just giving them food, it's saying, propose a project that will contribute to development of your area and we'll supply you with food.  In this evaluation in Kenay, they were looking at the impacts of the Food for Work Program on the ag production that the participating households were engaged in and in their consumption, food consumption within the home, and then on also the nutritional outcomes of the kids.  So they wanted to see whether the young children, the under 5 kids in these households, were better off as a result of their parents participating in Food for Work.  what they did to begin to incorporate a gender perspective, and here you see main individuals again, were all men. 

 

Yes?  They're still analyzing those data and so they don't have a result yet, they don't have a conclusion yet.  The program has been going on for many years, at least since the early 80s.  I don't know whether this type of evaluation looking at nutritional outcome has been done before this one.  They began to incorporate a gender perspective by first looking at who did the work, both in the program itself and in the production activities of the household, ag and household production.  So, they didn't assume that household had equaled a man, that they didn't assume that if a man and a woman were both present in the household, that all the household had was a man.  They also collected information about the women's activities.  These were the village and local officials involved in t eh project.  Again, all men.  But they did involved women as enumerators, so they were attempting to take into account the level of comfort of the respondents, of the people that they were serving.  So sending women to talk to women often times.  Yes.  Except for the 2 individuals who developed the project, who proposed the project to this local area.  One of them is from U.S. University and one was from a university in Kenya, so they proposed it to the local area.  The local area was already involved in Food for Work and then they brought in these two university professors brought in (end of side 1)

 

We have some work going on in economic research.  We were for many years just tracking a world ________ and a recent study that looked at metro and nonmetro women, living in metro areas and nonmetro areas and comparing them by characteristics, education, assets, transportation. So, there's some basic information available and there is... more work going on right now on around the impact of the Food Assistance Program and how those programs affect the well being families and the children. 

 

(Question, inaudible)

 

You want the audience to be talking into the mike, as well?

 

Right. No, not today, I wasn't reminded.  Thank you.  So, I need to pass this around if it'll reach.

 

I just wanted to saw that we founded CWW Associated Countries of the World, we've tried to find projects or apply for projects to try to help women and children around the world.  But in some countries, for instance, in Pakistan, they help the women establish an apricot project, and they were doing very well, and they wanted to expand it and they said no.  Because the men came and took the crop to market and took the money and took off and they still didn't have anything for their children.  And this is the problem, not only there, but I've heard this before.  If they don't get the benefit, the men just show up when it's time to harvest the reap the profits.  And buy radios or something instead of food, is what I've heard.

 

Just wondered if I could respond to you and comment about poverty in this country and in Australia.  I'm not familiar with Australia at the present time, but here I was at a session yesterday and some of the others may have been at the session with the whole array of food programs that are in this country for both urban and rural children, lunch programs, breakfast programs, women and infant children programs, and when you actually totalled up the amount, it was a very considerable amount of tax payers dollars that were going to these programs.  So, there is sort of a major, there has been a major effort in this country to attempt to insure that people are, at least, fed. 

 

That's one side of the equation, but that's actually not the question I asked.  The question I asked is what you are doing to address those recommendations that you put up in terms of the analysis in the research area to understand why this is happening?  I mean, I applaud those efforts.  But, they're not getting at the cracks of the problem in terms of the analysis and the recommendations from the Beijing conference.  And that's what I'm particularly interested.  Just to give you a contact, I head up a research and development corporation in Australia. 

 

Right, and that's one of the fundamental shift, really, in USDA in the last, or maybe it's been since 1990.  But in the last few years, the USDA budget has gone from being mostly devoted to farm programs to be mostly devoted to food programs, to food assistance programs.  So we now spend more on food assistance than we do on farm programs and subsidies.  So, to some extent, that's being recognized in the organization of the department and the research emphases and... well, there's certainly a long term trend particularly in the house of as populations become more urban, then there are fewer representatives from rural areas.  So that's something that's been happening over the last 50 years, really, of that gradual kind of decline of the power of farm constituencies in the house because of that population shift.  But, certainly impetus for ending farm programs or phasing out farm income supports and price supports is something that's generated by Congress.  Yes?

 

I am curious about the Work for Food Program with what is going on in Australia now, the Work for the Doll Program and I'm a bit surprised about they're being no research into it.  And yet, in Australia, well, now it's being pushed, but it hasn't been accepted widely.  The Doll in Australia is unemployment benefits, and there's a program of encouraging people to do work that, it's usually community work, that they're allotted to and therefore they get the pay.  The idea is to raise they're self respect, but with no research into it, I don't know about it, and I just wonder if more productive kind of government intervention, like in industry and things that will produce goods and services, are better than either both services?  The Food for Work or the Work for the Doll Programs?

 

The welfare to work programs in this country, I was interested in sort of how those programs play out relative to something like Food for Work, and the obvious big difference is that Food for Work is a community activity, that involves some collective work and decisions about development priorities for a community, whereas those programs here  are totally individually based.  So there's no, there's no development activity going on out of most food assistance programs here, except to the extent that there's nutrition education, so there's some education going on, but otherwise, it's a purely give them the fish, don't teach them how to approach.

 

Seeing no more questions, I think we're adjourned.  Thank you.