Photography: Rahat Dar
A little progress demonstrates the positive effects of a gender-sensitive policy for rural development. Agriculture and rural poverty are more ‘feminised due to economic and political dislocations. Equity in access to, and control over, rural resources for women farmers and farm laborers is essential for sustainable agricultural development in most of regions in the world.
Poverty, food insecurity,
and environmental degradation are recognized as critical development problems
and have been given highest priority on the international development agenda,
following the International Conference on Nutrition (ICN 1992), and United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED 1992), and the
preliminary Platform for Action for the Fourth World Conference on Women
(1995). These issues have a disproportionate negative impact on rural women,
due to their inferior socioeconomic, legal and political status as well
as their critical roles as producers and household managers. The cause
and effects of these impacts are systemic, with far-reaching implications
for agricultural products, and enhancing the living conditions of rural
populations.
Within this context, women’s
empowerment will be central to achieving initiatives aimed at raising levels
of nutrition, improving production and distribution of food and agricultural
products, and enhancing the living conditions of rural populations. They
have less access to productive resources e.g. labor, water, land, tree
crop, technology, agricultural inputs, credit, markets, extension, training,
and even their own labor, than do men. At the same time, women’s access
to social services, e.g. schooling, health care and information, family
planning, has been eroding. And all these constraints are compounded by
women’s lack of economic, political and legal power to improve their circumstances.
According to a large and growing body of research, direct responsibility for household food provision falls largely on women. They often provide most of the labor for, and make decision on, a wide range of post-harvest operations, including storage, handling and marketing, and predominate in off-farm food processing activities either in micro-enterprises or as wage workers in agro industries.
Malnutrition and hunger affect
more than 1.3 billion people in the developing countries. Most fall into
the following categories: children under five years of age, especially
girls, women of childbearing age, especially those who are pregnant or
breast-feeding; and low-income households, a large percentage of which
are female-headed. The 1992 World Declaration on Nutrition proclaimed that
“the right of women and adolescent girls to adequate nutrition is crucial”.
Yet, rural female household members often get less food than males both
absolutely and in terms of nutritional requirements. Indeed, it is estimated
that over 70 percent of those living in absolute poverty are women.
In rural areas of developing
countries like Pakistan, women spend up to 16 hours a day producing, processing,
marketing and preparing food, gathering fuel and water, and performing
other household tasks in addition to caring for their work. A women may
work 60 hours or more a week between domestic, farm and off-farm tasks,
and yet receive no wage of any kind. In fact, women in developing countries
work up to one-third more than men for an estimated one-tenth the income.
Therefore, rural women confront a specific dilemma: they are over-employed
in terms of hours worked and under-employed in terms of income received.
The economic crises of the 1980s, structural adjustment programs, armed conflicts and drought, are believed to have affected women more severely than men, leading to what has been termed by the United Nations as the “feminisation of poverty”. In particular, male labor force migration, forced migration i.e. environmental and civil conflict refugees, and the breakdown of the traditional family structure have dramatically increased the number of female-headed households. When households must generate additional earnings or confront a decrease in access to services due to economic crisis, structural adjustment programs or loss of resources, it is generally women who must mobilize their energies to compensate.
Policies on poverty, agriculture,
land reform, settlement and structural adjustment do not generally consider
rural men and women’s differential conditions and needs, nor are the differential
policy impacts on men and women considered. Rural poverty will only be
alleviated if these issues are recognized and fully integrated into policy
and program design, implementation and evaluation.
Many rural women lack access
to land or insecure land tenure. It is their husbands, fathers and brothers
who hold land title, a practice which essentially eliminates their eligibility
for formal sources of credit or membership in farmers’ organizations, which
could enable them to gain access to inputs that can help stabilize or enhance
their production systems. Rural women’s access to agricultural extension
services world wide is only about 1/20th of that of men. It is highly probable
that having a large number of children continues to be a major asset and
source of immediate and long-term social and economic security for poor
rural women, especially in the least developed countries (LDC). This is
reflected by the high value placed on child labor in the absence of labor-saving
home and farm technologies and of social safety nets. A better understanding
of the impact of macro-economic policies on rural women is needed.
Unfortunately, research on the impact on women of structural adjustment reforms in agricultural and rural development per se has been thin, despite the fact that establishing the linkages mentioned above requires a robust information system. Thus, many analysts, planners, and policy-makers are unaware of the implications for disadvantaged populations of varying policy decisions in agriculture and rural development. Also, there is a dearth of macro-economic policy specialists with social and gender expertise. And relevant data and indicators are lacking - especially as regards the full extent of rural women’s productive, farm household, community roles. Moreover, in the developing countries the conceptualization, collection, and analysis of gender-disaggregated data on rural people are inadequate. Women’s participation in organizations - including grassroots groups, professional associations, NGOs, and networks - is vital for political advocacy to win equity in development and improve women’s social and economic status.
While progress in the advancement of the status of rural women worldwide is difficult to measure due to the lack of reliable data, statistics and indicators, there is evidence, particularly over the last 50 years, which indicates that progress has occurred, although limited in scope. According to the UNDP report: “female life expectancy has increased 20 percent faster than that of male; females have advanced nearly twice as fast in adult literacy and combined school enrolment in the developing countries; more than half the women in the developing world now use modern contraceptives and their fertility rate has fallen from 5.4 in 1970-75 to 3.6 in 1990-95.
Progress on the advancement of the status of rural women has not been systematic enough to reverse the processes leading to the feminisation of poverty and agriculture, to food insecurity and to reducing the burden women shoulder from environmental degradation. In fact, the persistence of policies reversals of previous progress related to maternal and child mortality rates, female reproductive health and nutrition, access to productive resources and training, and educational status.
