Rome Food Agencies Defending Role of Women Farmers In the Third World

The video bleeped on. I watched a brightly kerchiefed dark-skinned woman materialize. Her thick hands held a hoe. Her arms rose and fell like the cylinders of an engine in circular motions. This farmer woman was angry.

The clod-filled soil she broke with her broad-headed hoe was in rural Gambia, a West African nation of 1.7 million which slices a horizontal path through the center of Senegal like a slithering snake. Here farmers – mostly women — cultivate rice swampland from dawn to dusk. But this woman, like many others, had just lost the field where she had sunk her slender rice bundles earlier in the season. The field had been appropriated by local village male farmers. She was given marginalized land instead. Now huge machines rolled in, lumbering like giant yellow reptiles across the land — operated by the local male farmers.

Replacing women with men in this low-lying paddy land was nothing short of revolutionary for traditional Gambian farming. Men had always been proprietors of the uplands, where they grew the cash-earning export crop of groundnuts. Women had always held rights over the spongy lowlands, where they grew rice mainly for household consumption. Now Gambia men were taking over the rice land, lured by the prestige and possibilities offered by agricultural modernization.

The machines, sent by the World Bank and China, had improved the land. But they had also taken it away. Now men worked what had once been her field, producing more rice than she ever had – with modern irrigation, better seeds, and the seemingly miraculous power of man-made fertilizer.

The faces of the kerchiefed farmer and her female co-workers in the field flickered across the video screen and then were gone. I had watched their disgruntled and enraged expressions from the Rome-based headquarters of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), established in 1977 by the United Nations to focus exclusively on the most marginalized people in rural communities around the world. The message captured in this video illustrated a startling fact: that women have long been neglected in the process of development, and in some cases, even harmed by it.

Figures from IFAD reveal that while 81 percent of the world’s rural women are farmers, they continue to become poorer and poorer. The consequence: poorer diets for themselves and their families, since women provide the overwhelming proportion of food for home consumption.

“It’s what you might call ‘reverse development,’ said Annemiek Decock, a Belgian consultant employed at IFAD.

“When agriculture or rural industries become mechanized, women’s traditional economic activities are taken over by men.”

Even when the incomes of husbands and fathers increased because of mechanized advances in food production, provided often did not improve family eating patterns because they were then poured into the production of more cash crops, leaving household crops to dwindle. Cash crops for export are grown predominantly by male farmers worldwide, Decock said.

She added that the impoverishment of rural women was also due to the fact that increasingly large numbers of men are migrating to cities in search of work, leaving the women to fend for themselves as providers for their children and the elderly.

“Over 30 percent of all rural households are headed by women,” Decock note.

If the goal of global food security is to be attained, more needs to be known about women’s specific activities in agriculture and rural industries, according to U.N. experts.

“For too long, ‘food security’ has been discussed at the national level. Finally it’s being discussed at the household level,” said Ruth Finney, an anthropology professor who now heads the Women In Agricultural Development Service at the Rome-based UN Food And Agricultural Organization (FAO).

Finney cited a development project in Pakistan designed to eliminate a poultry virus that involved the vaccination of thousands of the birds. The project failed.

“Then it was recognized that women were poultry producers too. So Pakistan’s minister of agriculture trained experts to teach women how to vaccinate their birds. If the division of labor had been taken into account at the beginning, the problem would have been avoided,” Finney said.

While previous emphasis was planned on improving home economics, nutrition, and childrearing, there is now a strong emphasis by UN food agencies on improving the circumstances of agricultural production for women.

FAO’s Women in Agricultural Development Service currently has 22 projects that related exclusively to women. Hundreds of other FAO projects have specific “women’s components” and FAO’s budget for women-targeted projects has doubled in five years.

IFAD has traditionally helped design credit plans which include rural women. Nevertheless the organization recently called a conference to solicit advise on how to better serve women in agricultural production.

How far the UN agencies go with their plans to integrate women into rural development remains to be seen.

Obstacles exist on many fronts. Donor countries remain indifferent. Recipient governments often resent intervention in an issue touching family structures. On the village level, where development has already brought great changes to relations between the sexes, deep and often subtle traditional rural values try to mask the fact that change has come.

Resistance also sometimes comes from women themselves, food and agricultural agencies say.

“Women elite in some developing countries resent the fact that poor women are being helped,” said Decock. “This is especially true in Asia, where the caste system is still strong. These women think, ‘they’re poor because they’re stupid.’”

On the local level, one of the toughest problems remains how to get agricultural extension workers in touch with women farmers.

Field work and research have found that rural women have longer working hours than men, meaning they do not find the time, as their mail counterparts do, to seek out the advice of agricultural experts. The “double workload” for rural women revolves around farm work during the day and cooking and caring for family at noon and night. If there is no male in the home, this workload increases.

One solution is to bring agricultural staff and research to them. This is being attempted in Zambia, where mobile “demonstration units” are driving out to the women’s fields, Finney noted.

But the fact that extension workers are virtually all male adds one more problem.

“In some developing countries, it may be culturally unacceptable for a man to make contact with individual women. So women are being encouraged to form groups to meet with extension workers,” Finney said.

The fact that most women do not speak pidgin English also hinders their access to extension staff, according to UN agronomist Roy Phrang.

“The men, on the other hand, speak both pidgin English and a major dialect. Since the extension staff teach in English or a major dialect, the men can all be helped. But women… are left out.”

Fortunately the Gambian women who had voiced their grievances on the video screen I had watched were ultimately not among those left out of development. Shortly after the film recorded their angry faces and stolen fields, the local all-male “land allocation committee” which had expropriated their land was disbanded. After careful negotiation between IFAD and Gambian governmental officials and the local farmers, a new committee was set up – composed of women.

The International Courier
11 May 1985