Farm Women, an Unsung World Treasure

In the midst of a global food crisis, advocates are trying to convince the world that women farmers are an essential part of the solution. Women are responsible for over half of the world’s food production. Yet, says Jeanette Gurung, a key organizer of a new network of agricultural women leaders, the international sector concerned with climate change and food policy is so “heavily male dominated in its very core” that women, often isolated on small holdings in the developing world, are ignored.

That collaboration was launched at last month’s 16th Commission on Sustainable Development (on agriculture, rural development, drought and Africa) in New York at the UN.  The Network of Women Agriculture Ministers and Leaders came together—urged on by the South Africans’ playful slogan, “Women of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your aprons”— to exchange ideas, work on policies, and unite in actions that will benefit women as farmers and caretakers of other natural resources.

Women constitute the majority of those producing food on home farms, as wage earners in commercial agriculture and as subsistence farmers. Their output is most important in developing countries where women produce 60 to 80 percent of food. And they happen to be the main providers of the world’s staples—corn, rice and wheat—according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Within the network, Gurung represents WOCAN, Woman Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resources Management, an association she founded. An American in her early 50s, she is a veteran forestry and natural resources expert who specializes in gender issues and has spent 22 years in Nepal, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bhutan, and India, among other South Asian countries.

During the course of the meetings in New York, Gurung described to me the hard life of women farmers in the Himalayas and elsewhere in Asia and Africa who typically work 14 to 16 hour days, and then go out on a half hour trek to attend literacy classes at night because they are determined to learn to read and write. She added that their husbands are either in the tea shops smoking cigarettes, talking politics, and playing games or have left to find work in cities, sometimes far away in the Middle East or the Philippines. Women bear responsibility for the land, crops, and animals, and care of the family, but too often must acquiesce to their spouses when a decision needs to be made—like buying a goat.

Women’s needs are simply not a priority, said Gurung, pointing to farm extension services, where the officers are typically male. “If you’re an extension officer, you work from 9 to 5. You won’t find women coming to trainings or even available. They’re long gone, out in the forests and the fields. You would have to say ‘I recognize that my main clients are female and I will have to adjust my schedule to their schedules.’” But more commonly the officers train men, assuming that the husbands will pass the information along to their wives, something that rarely happens. Gender training is a very difficult and slow process, she acknowledged.

Gurung and an Indian gender and natural resources consultant Meena Bilgi both cited similar revealing studies, one in Pakistan and the other in India. Married couples were tracked around the clock to examine their respective work and leisure times and patterns. Some of the men were surprised at how much work their wives were doing and even offered to help. Many of the women themselves even expressed amazement at how much they were doing. They had taken it for granted.

But Gurung wasn’t trying to repaint the tired picture of woman as victim. She was explaining the strength, skills, and desire of these women to learn and to bring themselves and their families out of severe poverty.

Labeling the situation “very serious,” she stressed, “at the UN and elsewhere we really have to focus on women as major farmers, major producers, major managers of the environment.” As it is now, she said, in anything related to food, water, livestock, forests, “the organizations that are implementing the policies are themselves infused with a masculinity or a taken-for-granted male view of the world.” The perspective needs to change, she said. “If we took as the reality that women are at the center of agriculture and the environment and then created institutions, policies, programs, extension services around that reality we would have a very different system.” That’s why Gurung has what she refers to as a “passion for organizational change.”

Something is happening because leaders like Gurung see the need to empower women in agriculture and natural resource management. For the first time in the history of the annual CSD meetings, next year’s chair is a woman, Gerda Verburg, minister of agriculture of the Netherlands, already a participant in the new network. Women get it, and their new organization stands next to a complementary network of women ministers and other leaders in the environment.

They have their work cut out for them. The WOCAN website is reporting news from the recent FAO Summit in Rome, which the international group ActionAid condemns for ignoring women’s potential “to be a rural engine for growth.” Claiming that women receive only 1 percent of resources allocated to agricultural enterprise, ActionAid food policy analyst Magdelena Kropiwnicka said, “A sustainable response can only take place if women are put at the center of strategies to solve the food crisis. Without women, failure is inevitable.”

It will take the sustained efforts of these women’s networks to finally make a reality of another South African farmers’ slogan, “Nothing about us without us.”