WOMEN IN AGRICULTURE PROGRAMME

As farmers, women in subsistence production ensure the survival of millions of people in all regions. Women in sustenance economies, producing and reproducing wealth in partnership with nature, are experts in their own right with ecological knowledge of nature’s processes. Women’s livelihood strategies, and their support and means of food security are diverse and complex, from cultivating field crops to livestock rearing, to home gardening, gathering, fishing from sources such as swamps, forests, woodlands, wastelands and quarries, etc. But these alternative modes of knowledge and livelihoods are not recognised by conventional agricultural scientists and development experts, who fail to see the connection of women’s knowledge, work and skills with ensuring community food security, and the creation of wealth.

More than half of the world’s food is grown by women. Women’s work is both wide-ranging and multifaceted throughout the year, and they perform multiple tasks in the sphere of agriculture. Women’s indigenous knowledge and skills are vitally necessary for food production and sustainable agriculture. Women’s intimate knowledge of seed preparation and soil management, plants and pest control, post-harvest processing and storage, animal husbandry, as well as food processing and meal preparation are significant - crucial also to ensuring food security through sustainable agriculture. They are the authority on the interface of livestock keeping with farming.

However, there is little recognition of their significant role and contribution to the socio-economic development of a nation. The entrenched social and religious norms that define women’s role as secondary and subordinate keep women vulnerable and dependent and allow women’s exploitation as agricultural workers and farmers. Ensuring that the majority of rural women do not do not own land nor have access to productive resources.

As a result of rapid globalisation, this patriarchal construct of women’s role, position in society and the gender division of labour, in terms of production and reproduction, continue to operate. For example, women in rural agriculture face loss of livelihoods with the dumping of subsidised imported food products into her country. As a result, women who traditionally have the gendered responsibility of household food security are forced to work longer hours, and even harder to ensure the food security of the family. Women are faced with increased costs of food production as inputs costs rise, and women’s health is increasingly compromised from exposure to hazardous pesticides. All these factors have intensified rural women’s impoverishment, displacement and hunger. Another example, during the East Asian economic crisis, women again had to put more effort in trying to make up for lost urban incomes. In the absence of state-schemes of income and employment support, it was largely left to the so-called coping strategies of women to deal with the rural effects of the Asian crisis.

Globalisation in agriculture has further intensified the development of the corporate agriculture and contract farming that perpetuates monocultures and high input agriculture. It will also intensify the control of agriculture production and distribution, and inputs into the hands of a few Transnational Corporations (TNCs) with headquarters in the North.

Women are also exploited as workers in the corporate farms that are expanding into rural areas. In these large farms or plantations, it is the women worker who is sought out and hired. Employers see women agricultural workers, as unskilled workers who will accept low wages and increased workloads without complaining and women are known to rarely join unions or organise for their rights. Women are more exposed to pesticides that adversely impact their health and their family and community’s health. This system of agriculture undoubtedly marginalize women’s knowledge and skills with the introduction of new philosophies and technologies - thus eroding the base of whatever little power they had traditionally. For women it means loss of control over their knowledge and resources including seeds, plants, herbs and other devices for pest management, and commons and forestland for food and fodder gathering. Such knowledge will either become obsolete in the age of corporate agriculture or “stolen” for commercial distribution by TNCs. Productive resources will be corporatized in the name of development and globalisation.

Women are joining hands to resist this onslaught. They have continued to reclaim their rights, their knowledge and skills. There is a growing movement of rural women involved in asserting their rights as farmers and agricultural workers, work to spread and mainstream ecological agriculture and to mobilise against violence, against globalisation and corporate agriculture. PAN AP has been involved in this mobilisation and working with local partners contributing and supporting women’s rights to productive resources and food sovereignty and fighting hunger, malnutrition and the developments that intensify women’s vulnerability and exploitation.

“Women in Agriculture” is one of the core areas of PAN AP’s work identified internally as well as in the recent Evaluation Report 2005. One aim of the programme was to ensure that in all of PAN AP’s programmes and activities, women’s issues stay prominent and highly visible. In the last four years, PAN AP has been successful to ensure this integration. It was also evident from the People’s Caravan that women were at the forefront through their participation and leadership as resource persons and as main organisers of events in many countries. Research and information on the impact on women of corporate agriculture and TNCs, floriculture and pesticides and women’s contribution in ecological agriculture were made available and publicised. The leadership of women during and after the parallel process of the World Food Summit five years later and in the critical engagement with FAO was ensured by PAN AP and its partner groups.

LONG –TERM OBJECTIVES

• Make visible women’s role, contribution and knowledge and skills in food and agriculture

• Protecting women’s health and reproductive rights from hazardous technologies and corporate agriculture

• Facilitate the strengthening of women’s knowledge, skills, capacity and action in these issues

• Make the role and contribution of women in agriculture visible and support rural women’s reproductive rights and rights to health, land and productive resources