Volume 3, Number 1
June 1997

Prime-Age Mortality and Time Allocation of Labor

The findings of the article sparked a discussion about the importance of women in agriculture and the policy implications and strategies for gender-based inter-ventions. A number of issues and questions were raised: Does the disappearance of an adult female add greater labor and financial stress to the household than the disappearance of an adult male? If farmwork is pre-dominantly the responsibility of women in a household, then shouldn't this reality be central to our project designs and studies relating to household food security, and must not government policies clearly take into account the economic importance of women in agri-culture? Who should be involved in the planning of agricultural projects, given that participatory projects result in more valuable outcomes--local men or local women? Who should receive the profits from surplus agricultural produce as an incentive to do the extra work to produce that surplus--men or women? Shouldn't local extension services be staffed with women as well as men so the extension information actually reaches someone who will use it? How do gender-based patterns of farm labor in different regions of the world vary?

In response to some of these issues, a couple of subscribers noted that in some countries and cultures, the fact that women play an important role in agriculture is less important than who makes decisions or is perceived as making decisions about women's labor, the benefits of their labor, control over the benefits, and so on. For example, in agricultural extension, in cases where we can show that women perform the majority of agricultural labor and are responsible for most of the food production, it seldom follows that the majority of related agricultural extension services reach women.

While collecting data on women's contribution to agricultural production is indeed important, such data seem insufficient for altering perceptions about women's roles. Even in the United States, much women's work is often counted as "helping" in "men's work." Thus even surveys may be quite biased and underestimate women's labor in agriculture. Women, for example, often do marketing and close-to-home intensive gardening and processing, which are not counted as agricultural labor by some people. In the Middle East, time-allocation studies reveal a great deal of actual agricultural work by women not otherwise reported.

But women's work is not discounted in all countries and cultures. Afro-Caribbean and "indigenous" communities in Central America and the Caribbean often recognize women's work and women are more often seen (by insiders, not necessarily by outsiders) as doing primary agricultural work rather than just helping men, and women may have their own fields or crops, or their own skills-based and knowledge-based domains of authority. Some of the relevant literature includes Janet Townsend's work on women in rainforest areas; Lourdes Arizpe et al. on the Lacondon forests and women in agriculture in Mexico; and Rigoberta Menchu's descriptions of women's work in her mountain home community. But it should be remembered, as a sub-scriber pointed out, that gendered labor and authority vary tremendously even within groupings that may seem homogeneous from the outside (as shown by the work of Marilyn Waring, Hilary Feldstein, Susan Poats, Janice Jiggins, and others).

One contributor made the suggestion that perhaps the CGIAR Secretariat should be encouraged to post a bibliography to re-table some of the rich work done on the topic of gender and social authority over the last 20 years, so that it is available to a new wave of researchers entering from different disciplines and different questions. This could lead, perhaps, to a retrospective e-mail conference.

Returning to the question of what impact the documentation of women's roles in agriculture might have on altering dominant perceptions, a subscriber speculated about the differing effects of such work. For development professionals involved in the process of setting up new projects, such documentation could mean a slow increase in efforts to involve rural women in establishing project procedures and goals. For rural men, especially village leaders, no impact should be foreseen: these men won't ever see the documentation, although eventually there might be an indirect effect from the attitudes of outside experts. Extension personnel will hardly be affected, because they won't see the documentation or take it seriously until it trickles down through leaders in their national organizations who think rural agricultural development and rural women are important topics; generally, leaders in the national governments will be more concerned with staying in power than with what happens to rural women. (Another subscriber noted, however, that Louise Fortmann, Anita Spring, and others have written about and worked on the institutionalization of extension service attention to women; the Ugandan government's national environmental action plan, for example, has incorporated gender into every aspect of environmental policy.) The greatest effect of documentation might be felt by NGOs that support/develop small-to-medium projects, because such organizations are increasingly aware of this issue (the question of ensuring that the people actually doing agricultural work have a stake in the success of the project) and solid documentation will just make them more certain of its vital importance.

Regarding the question of how to get decisionmakers to acknowledge the substantial role of rural women in agriculture, one contributor noted the idea of targeting the more open-minded men to speak to others on this issue. A study in Brazil by Gary Barker that examined the patterns of sex-role learning in the favelas suggests that the role of the less-traditional males can be central in bringing attention to the role of rural women in agriculture, and the study recommends that strategies that strengthen the position of such men should be investigated. Another contributor brought personal, nonfield experience to the issue, noting that reaching older, more experienced, sympathetic men whom other people respected was a productive way of changing people's opinions on a range of issues.

Finally, Kathleen Beegle responded. She appreciated the comments she had received about her paper. Beegle added that this was a work in progress in two senses. First, the conclusions are tentative (Kathleen has some alternative specifications that she is currently investigating). Second, these tentative conclusions actually raise a new set of questions (such as the issue of hired labor and relatives moving into households after a death). Nevertheless, while these results leave some household-level outcomes tied to labor supply (such as farming output and income diversification) unresolved, Beegle believes the responses among surviving individuals are important.

In contrast to one subscriber's comment, Beegle is hesitant to conclude that the disappearance of an adult female (due to death) adds greater stress to the household relative to an adult male death. Beegle would argue instead that it adds a different kind of burden. Women are more likely to be farming (although participation among men is not trivial), while the vast majority of wage earners and nonfarm self-employed labor are men. Female deaths are a shock to farm labor so it is not a big surprise that we see some adjustment in hours among (some types of) survivors. (One side note is that the increase in farm hours among men after a female death coincides with a decrease in wage-employment among men.) On the other hand, male deaths are associated with increased wage-employment among men. This result does emphasize the importance of women in agriculture but it does not necessarily indicate that male on-farm labor is not important. Male labor, as opposed to female labor in this particular setting, has alternative uses (wage employment, nonfarm self-employment, and farming), and after the death of an adult male, households may be emphasizing the relative

importance of those alternatives (for example, the need to sustain a source of cash income versus adjustments to the loss in farm labor). This is why the issue of hired labor or new household members is important. We may not observe a response in farming among survivors after a male death but we can't infer what that means about the importance of prime-age male labor on farms. Households may compensate for the loss in prime-age male labor differently than for adult female labor.

As part of the discussion growing out of Kathleen Beegle's findings, Diane Russell recounted some of her efforts to bring attention to and improve the place of women in agriculture. Women predominateinsmallholder farming in Zaire and this fact was known, but, according to Russell, large-scale projects were still targeting men. There were many reasons for this bias but perhaps the most important ones were (1) all of the key decision-makers were men; (2) working with women was seen to be too complicated and time consuming; (3) the goals of the projects were feeding the cities, not household food security, therefore the kinds of crops, varieties, and interventions lent themselves to commercialized agriculture--a sphere dominated by men; (4) previous efforts to work with women in the North Shaba project yielded poor results (as did the project as a whole) because the "women's component" was separate from the project's main goals.

Russell said that the successes and failures in her work in Zaire pointed to the complexities of reorienting agricultural projects. She succeeded in getting her recommendations accepted for the Shaba project, including the hiring of women extension agents. Follow-up visits, however, found that some women were cultivating hybrid corn for men and neglecting their second-season food fields, to the possible detriment of household nutrition and their own income streams. (The project ended up producing a lot of corn that could not be sold because the railroads were not functioning and road maintenance ground to a halt due to lack of funds.)

In Bandundu, colleagues Lisa McGowan (then at the International Center for Research on Women), Catherine Reid, Carol Felkel of USAID/Kinshasa, and Russell designed a project specifically targeted to women farmers, working with their crops and their techniques. Russell dropped out of the project when she got pregnant in 1990 but Lisa and Catherine continued, documenting their results in a film that was finished just before they were airlifted out of Zaire by paratroopers in 1991. This project was considered one of USAID's most successful agricultural development efforts in Zaire, but it was extremely small-scale.

Russell and her colleagues did work through sym-pathetic men in the Mission's Agriculture and Rural Development Office. These men allowed a "space" for working with women. There was also one woman in the office (Carol) who promoted and supported the Bandundu project. Even hostile men were won over. A couple of years ago Russell heard one of the most skeptical say that he had learned in Zaire the importance of working with women farmers.