Gender and conservation agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review

Conservation agriculture (CA) involves the practice of concurrent minimum tillage, permanent soil cover using crop residue, and crop rotation. Evidence indicates that CA increases agricultural productivity, reduces farming labour requirements, and improves soil quality. While CA is practised in several African contexts, little is known about its interaction with gender. This review synthesized knowledge on the interplay of gender and CA in sub-Saharan Africa. The review highlighted the relative neglect of gender issues in research on CA in SSA. Existing research was limited both in quantity and to a few countries in the region. There was also little critical focus on gender as a social phenomenon: a few of the studies conceptualized gender in terms of the socially constructed roles of men and women while the majority framed it in terms of the sexual categories of male and female. Compared to men, and due largely to gendered barriers, including lack of access to land; machinery; inputs; extension services; and credit facilities, women farmers adopted CA less and dis-adopted it more. CA increased women’s incomes, labour involvement, household food security, as well as risks for land and crop dispossession by men when farming becomes lucrative. It also increased workloads, employment opportunities and health risks for women. CA positively altered gender relations, boosting women’s participation in agricultural decision-making at the household level. Deliberately enlisting women as beneficiaries; working with men to advance their understanding of women’s needs in agriculture; and offering agricultural inputs directly to women are some strategies that enhanced women’s participation in CA. Gaps in current research on gender and CA include: critical focus on and understanding of gender as a social construct in relation to CA; the long-term impacts on CA for gender relations, incomes for men and women, and women’s empowerment; the sustainability of strategies for supporting gendered participation in CA; and the dynamics of gendered access to local farmland markets for CA.     

Experiments in farmers' collectives in Eastern India and Nepal: Process,benefits, and challenges

Do farmers' collectives, which pool land, labour, capital, and skills to create medium‐sized production units, offer a more viable model of farming for resource‐constrained smallholders than individual family farms? A participatory action research project in Eastern India and Nepal provides notable answers. Groups of marginal and tenant farmers, catalysed by the project, evolved into four different collective models with varying levels of cooperation, gender composition, and land ownership/tenancy status. Based on 3 years of action research, this paper examines how the models evolved and their differential outcomes. All groups have gained from cultivating contiguous plots in their efficiency of labour and machine use for land preparation and irrigation, and from economies in input purchase. Several collectives of tenant farmers have also enhanced their bargaining power vis‐a‐vis an entrenched landlord class and thus been able to negotiate lower rents and refuse long‐standing feudal obligations. However, the models differ in their extent of economic gain and their ability to handle gender inequalities and conflicts over labour sharing. The paper explores the historical, regional, and cultural factors that could explain such differences across the models. It thus offers unique insights into the processes, benefits, and challenges of farmers' collectives and provides pointers for replication and further research.     

Improving rural livelihoods through the conservation and use of underutilized species: evidence from a community research project in Yemen

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of a set of interventions related to conservation and use of neglected and underutilized species (NUS) on people's livelihoods. Specifically, a simultaneous three-equation model of households' participation on underutilized crops conservation and income generation activities is applied to evaluate the outcome of a pilot research project implemented by Bioversity International in Yemen between 2002 and 2005. Results generated show a relation between project participation and the perceived yield increase demonstrating the importance for farmers to actively participate in the project's activities and subsequently apply agronomic practices learnt to improve their livelihood. The generated benefits incentivized farmers to continue to apply the interventions beyond the lifetime of the project ensuring thus a sustainable process in which exogenous interventions, once adopted by farmers become integrant part of farmer's agronomic practices.     

Drinking water and off‐farm labour supply: between‐gender and within‐gender bias

In this paper, we use the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) panel data to analyse the impact of drinking water on off‐farm labour supply. A two‐stage least squares (2SLS) multivariate Tobit regression model with random effects was applied. We find that impacts of drinking water conditions on off‐farm labour supply may be greater for women than men but depends on the specific family role or family structure. A strong within‐gender effect exists in households. For example, daughters are not sensitive to water access nor water quality, but householder's spouses are sensitive to water access, and daughters‐in‐law are sensitive to water quality. Our findings suggest that infrastructure development in improved access to safe water has contributed positively to reductions in traditional gender biases, evening the playing field between daughters, daughters‐in‐law, mothers and mothers‐in‐law. We also find that water the infrastructure program may actually encourage off‐farm labour mobility, reducing the supply of agricultural labour and the share of household labour on the farm. Thus, a broader approach to water policy should also include public investment in achieving greater labour efficiency and productivity.     

Buddhist Feminist Transnational Networks,Female Ordination and Women's Empowerment

Consideration of the role that religion plays in women's lives in developing contexts can be important in understanding ways of approaching their “strategic gender needs”. Rather than rejecting religion for its inherent patriarchy, styles of “religious feminism” have emerged across the globe. These argue for reinterpretations of religious systems that are consistent with the “core” values of the tradition as well as various types of feminist thinking. The aim of this paper is to discuss the emergence of a transnational movement across Buddhist traditions and countries that is concerned to make full ordination an available option to women in contexts where it is currently prohibited. While becoming fully ordained is considered to be the most suitable way of becoming enlightened and escaping future rebirths, a strong theme within the movement is the argument that gender hierarchies within Buddhism have a broader cultural impact upon social attitudes that disempower women and limit their development. Dialogue between members of Buddhist communities across the world has encouraged reflection upon and a challenge to unequal and oppressive gender hierarchies within the Buddhist tradition and within Buddhist societies. This paper explores four “international” events/examples that enable information exchange as well as the flow of material support between women from different traditions.     

Labour Migration and Gendered Agricultural Relations: The Feminization of Agriculture in the Ejidal Sector of Calakmul,Mexico

We examine the nature of the ‘feminization of agriculture’ in the semi‐subsistence, peasant production sector of southeastern Mexico, as associated with male labour out‐migration. Presenting findings from empirical work with smallholder producers, we discuss the impact of men's migration to the United States on women's participation in agriculture and gendered relations of agricultural production. In 2007, we conducted a survey of 155 semi‐subsistence, smallholder households in six ejidos. This survey was supplemented by ethnographic research in a single ejido. Our findings demonstrate the need to distinguish between farm labour and management in this sector, and the potentially significant (but focused) changes in the local relations of agricultural production wrought by gendered patterns of labour migration – specifically in tenure, land‐use decision‐making and the management of hired labour.     

Experiencing primitive accumulation as alienation: Mangrove forest privatization,enclosures and the everyday adaptation of bodies to capital in rural Senegal

This paper examines primitive accumulation by studying changes in fishermen and mollusc collectors' labour before and after the privatization of 1,800 hectares of mangrove forest in rural Senegal through the creation of a tourism‐oriented protected area. Locating this privatization within a broader context of capital's enclosures, the paper shows a process of depeasantization, labour intensification (via the multiplication of petty commodity production activities and proletarianization) and changing socioecological relations. This is a process where enclosures continuously alienate workers by separating them not necessarily from the land, but, more generally, from the conditions of their labour even when these are already commodified. As workers cope with alienation, they encounter it anew, contributing to capital's survival through their search for money and other commodities (i.e., means of production and subsistence). Workers' everyday adaptations to capital, and hence alienation, need to become central in future research on primitive accumulation and agrarian change.     

Women's empowerment in agriculture: Implications for technical efficiency in rural Bangladesh

Although a great deal of research exists on gender and agriculture, few studies investigate the implications of reduced gender disparities in households for technical efficiency. In this article, I compare the levels of technical efficiency achieved on plots operated by households with different levels of gender disparities. Using plot‐level data from the 2011–2012 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey and drawing on indicators derived from the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index, I estimate a stochastic frontier production function model, which includes women's empowerment in agriculture as an exogenous determinant of technical inefficiency. I find that reduced gender disparities within households (measured in terms of the empowerment gap between spouses) are associated with higher levels of technical efficiency. This result extends to plots that women jointly manage with their spouses, as well as those that women do not actively manage.     

Hollow Lives: Women Left Behind in Rural China

This paper explores the situation of women left behind in villages when men out‐migrate for work and what it implies for gender relations in rural China. It is based on questionnaire survey data that covers 400 left‐behind women and extensive interviews in 10 rural communities. It reveals how the women take on multiple family responsibilities including mainly family care and agricultural production, and how they maintain their marital relationships in the context of a long separation. The discussion argues that even though the women's unpaid work becomes visible due to the absence of men in family life, there is a reaffirmation and reinforcement of gender traditions; women are more solidified in the unpaid and low‐paid field of work in this new era of rural social transition in China. Moreover, separated married life has made women more vulnerable. In the end, it points to the fact that rural women are experiencing a new and deeper form of exploitation of their labour. Thus they are among those paying a heavy price for the development in China.     

Gatekeeping as Accumulation and Domination: Decentralization and Class Relations in Rural South India

Gatekeeping is taken here to mean the act of channelling formal and informal resources between the state and society for private economic and political gain. Based upon fieldwork in Karnataka, India, this paper argues that whilst traditional forms of control over the labouring class have been eroded, gatekeeping increasingly allows the dominant class to exert a more subtle form of political control, which in turn facilitates processes of accumulation. Rather than equalizing political power and control over public resources, heightened levels of fiscal decentralization to village councils (gram panchayats) have increased levels of gatekeeping, which both provides a significant share of the politically active dominant class's income and forges new patterns of labouring class dependence upon the dominant class. This heightens socio‐economic differentiation and reproduces the latter's political dominance despite the loosening of labour‐related ties. In addition, it is argued that although a minority of gatekeepers are from the labouring class, their inclusion facilitates dominant class accumulation rather than their own upward mobility. The paper stratifies gatekeeping in order to locate it amongst the totality of social relations between and within classes, which collectively produce processes of accumulation, differentiation and domination within society. The paper concludes that although the forms taken by extra‐economic aspects of capital's control over rural labour have been altered during the erosion of traditional forms of dominance, they remain highly significant and are increasingly so in the fieldwork area in a context of decentralized governance.     

POTENTIAL GAINS FROM THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON LAND: A REPLY

This reply outlines the experience underlying the assumptions in the previous note by Baxter and Bottomley, referring particularly to conditions in Tripolitania. There is no dispute that increases in gross rural product can be expected from the enclosure of common land. It is argued in this reply that this will be accomplished by a migration of labour and capital to the hitherto commonly held land, while Baack's model leads him to suppose the opposite. Baack's theory is used to show that the authors of the original note would still be right if dynamics were introduced into the analysis. It is agreed that Baack's analysis can be used to make the assumptions upon which the origibal note was based more precise as well as to add an additional source of gain not previously considered.     

Compensated optimal response under uncertainty in agricultural household models

This study derives the qualitative properties of a household's optimal consumption, family labour, hired labour and non-labour input choices under price and/or output risk through a Slutsky-type compensation without imposing any restriction on risk preference structure or production technology. These compensated responses provide the underpinning for welfare analysis in agricultural household models under risk. The framework for the evaluation of welfare effects of product and factor price interventions in a setting of output and price risk is developed. The paper also outlines an empirical model for estimation of the compensated demand and supply responses and for validation of the paper's analytical results.     

农业节水中妇女因素影响研究进展

[目的]农村劳动力性别结构发生变化,使妇女承担起了包括农业灌溉在内更多的农业生产劳动。妇女农业节水对水资源的高效利用具有重要的现实意义。[方法]文章基于文献梳理的视角,采用文献分析法和比较归纳法,类列出现有研究中妇女对农业节水影响的定性,界定妇女赋权的概念,提出利用微观调研数据定量分析不同因子对妇女农业节水的影响及其单个因子的贡献率。[结果]（1）农业女性化是工业与农业竞争发展博弈的结果,尽管该趋势延续与否、对农业生产发展利弊的判定尚不明确,但是农村劳动力性别结构发生变化确定无疑,妇女更深程度地参与了农业生产多个环节,农业劳动也相应更多地落在了妇女肩上。（2）妇女成为农业灌溉的主要力量,却因受限于教育程度相对偏低、劳动压力大、社会地位边缘化等原因影响了在农业节水中表现。（3）赋予妇女权能,使其能在承担了灌溉劳动的同时有机会参与水资源的管理,激发妇女在农业节水中的积极作用。[结论]妇女对农业节水影响的研究较少,已有文献多以定性研究为主,且对妇女农业节水与否说法不一。采用微观调研数据分析妇女年龄、健康状况、文化程度、节水意愿、地区经济发展水平、家庭总收入、政策扶持、技能培训、干旱情况、土壤...     

Labour Market Effects of a Female Stipend Programme in Bangladesh

Bangladesh's female secondary education stipend programme was one of the first conditional cash transfer programmes in the world. While numerous studies have investigated the impacts of such programmes on school enrolment, attendance and learning, less attention has been paid to their long-term labour market effects. This article extends the literature by studying the effects of Bangladesh's programme on earnings and the sector of employment, as well as on labour force participation and education outcomes, using repeated cross-sectional data in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that exposure to 5 years of the programme is be associated with a 1-year increase in education level completed and an increase in female labour force participation by six percentage points. However, we find that wages decrease by about 17% because the women have difficulties in finding a good job and end up in low productivity self-employment work.     

The Geography of Foreign Direct Investment in Poland's Food Industry

In this paper a gravity model is developed to analyse cumulative FDI inflows into Poland's food industry during the 1990s. The FDI data is related to characteristics of 28 countries of investor‐origin. The results confirmed earlier studies with respect to important links between FDI, trade, and labour costs, as well as the general appropriateness of the basic gravity model formulation. Geographical distance was found to be a significant determinant of FDI in staple food industries, but not in high value‐added, branded confectionery, beverage, and tobacco production, suggesting that different industry‐branches might be globalised to a differing extent.     

Bargaining and Efficiency in Sharecropping

In this paper the Nash bargaining solution is used to derive solutions for the rental share and labour input in sharecropping. The bargaining is modeled as a two‐stage process. First there is a bargain about the rental share, and then a bargain about labour input. The power of the landlord to ensure an outcome favourable to himself may differ in the two stages. By imposing particular assumptions about this bargaining power, some popular models of sharecropping, that have been treated as completely separate in the literature, can be derived as special cases in our model. However, we also generate a new class of models. It is also demonstrated that it is not the tenant's influence in the labour input decision per se which causes inefficiency in sharecropping, but differences in the tenant's influence over different issues in the contract. This is in contrast to the popular view which states that if the tenant controls the level of labour input, sharecropping will result in an inefficient resource allocation.     

Farming systems and Conservation Agriculture: Technology,structures and agency in Malawi

Conservation Agriculture (CA) is advocated as an agricultural innovation that will improve smallholder famer resilience to future climate change. Under the conditions presented by the El Niño event of 2015/16, the implementation of CA was examined in southern Malawi at household, district and national institutional levels. Agricultural system constraints experienced by farming households are identified, and in response the technologies, structures and agency associated with CA are evaluated. The most significant constraints were linked to household health, with associated labour and monetary impacts, in addition to the availability of external inputs of fertiliser and improved seed varieties. Our findings show that such constraints are not adequately addressed through current agricultural system support structures, with the institutions surrounding CA (in both Government extension services and NGO agricultural projects) focusing attention predominantly at field level practice, rather than on broader system constraints such as education and health support systems. Limited capacity within local institutions undermines long term efforts to implement new technologies such as CA. It is vitally important that the flexibility of farmers to adapt new technologies in a locally-appropriate manner is not closed down through national and institutional aims to build consensus around narrow technical definitions of a climate-smart technology such as CA. To enable farmers to fully utilise CA programmes, interventions must take a more holistic, cross-sectoral approach, understanding and adapting to address locally experienced constraints. Building capacity within households to adopt new agricultural practices is critical, and integrating healthcare support into agricultural policy is a vital step towards increasing smallholder resilience to future climate change.     

FARMERS‘ WIVES - THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO THE FARM BUSINESS

The contribution which farmers' wives make to the farm business is typically overlooked and under-valued, yet the farm could not function without it. The paper describes the nature of the work done by wives on farms in the UK and Ireland as revealed by two recent postal surveys. Using data from the Farm Business Survey for England and Wales, it attempts to quantify some aspects of the work. It is suggested that farm wives may contribute 5 per cent of the manual hours worked by the regular labour force and 9–10 per cent of the total regular labour input on main holdings. Further, as hired and family labour is shed and farmers seek additional employment, the wife's labour contribution is likely to become more significant. Continued neglect of women's involvement may jeopardise the future of the family farm. The paper suggests how data collection procedures might be improved to give a more realistic picture of the wife's contribution.     

Rural Youth and Circulating Labour in South India: The Tortuous Paths Towards Respect for Madigas

This paper explores how young male Dalit labourers negotiate the changes and continuities of labour relations in the construction industry, and power relations in rural Telangana in southern India. It looks at the fluidity between three segments of the classes of labour, namely debt‐bonded, unskilled/self‐employed and educated labourers. It examines how Dalit youths' experiences and representations of labour circulation and political clientelism shape and are shaped by the articulation between the construction industry and rural leaders, and by class, family, caste and generational relations in the village. Two points are made. First, circulation at the bottom of the labour hierarchy prevents labourers (even educated ones) to accumulate capital and participate in collective action: rather, the total lack of protection at work has brought about renewed and graded forms of dependence and political clientelism. Second, circulation serves as a locus that fosters and segments young male Dalit labourers' quests for respect, but hinders them from getting involved in political competition against rural leaders.     

Female Labour Supply and Intergenerational Preference Formation: Evidence for Mexico

Using a nationally representative sample for Mexico, we analyse the effect of a husband having a working mother on the probability that he has a working wife. Our results show that labour force participation by a husband's mother increases the probability of the labour force participation of his wife by 15 percentage points. The effect is mainly driven by males with less than high school education. One possible confounding factor is the effect of labour force participation of the wife's mother on the wife's labour participation decision. However, in a different sample, we do not find any effect of work force participation of wives' mothers on wives' decisions to join the labour force. Finally, we test the effect of work force participation by a husband's mother on the husband's preferences regarding child-rearing practices. We find that having a working mother strongly reduces the probability that daughters will be tasked to care for siblings and fosters preferences for a more egalitarian allocation of educational resources among children. Hence, promoting female labour force participation can have important dynamic implications, especially for developing countries.