Rural women

Feb 04, 2013 Editorial

In the euphoria of the announcements about the record rice production of 2012 and record foreign revenues hauled in for the country, it was significant that the role of rural women in this accomplishment went unremarked.
And this in the face that the priority theme of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) during its fifty-sixth session in 2012 was, “the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.”
Rural women (who are still mainly engaged in agriculture) account for more than a quarter of the total world population and 43% of agricultural workers. They produce, on an average, more than half of all the food that is grown: up to 80 per cent in Africa, 60 per cent in Asia, between 30 and 40 per cent in Latin America and Northern countries.
Yet, they are hardly ever recognised as farmers in their own right, and are not provided any of the associated rights. So, globally, it is estimated that they own only two per cent of the land and receive only one per cent of all agricultural credit. Only five per cent of all agricultural extension resources are directed to women.
Apart from direct involvement in agriculture, women are crucial to rural off-farm income-generating activities, and of course, to all the household-based tasks associated with social reproduction, including care of the young, the sick and the old. They typically bear the responsibility for family nutrition and household provisioning, all of which are part of the unpaid work they routinely perform.
In Guyana, the situation is no different from this global pattern, and may even be somewhat worse because of the continuing agrarian crisis in large parts of the country.
Yes, sugar is in crisis but no one says it is actually the sugar workers’ wives (and female sugar workers) who are in crisis: they still have to keep the household going by any means necessary. Most of the women employed in Guyana are engaged in agriculture, whether as workers in household farms owned or rented by their families, or as wage workers – especially by GUYSUCO.
Yet, it is precisely livelihood in agriculture that has tended to become more volatile and insecure in recent years. And women cultivators have actually been worse hit because they already were insecure in terms of lack of land titles as well as access to credit and output markets. All this has other consequences, in terms of raising the costs of cultivation for women farmers.
Because they do not have titles to land, they do not have the collateral that would enable them to access bank or institutional loans. Because they are not recognised as farmers, they do not get the benefit of agricultural extension services, or subsidised inputs, or other publicly provided services for farmers.
These existing disadvantages have been compounded by trends in Guyanese agriculture, which have moved much more cultivation, especially on the Coast, away from subsistence farming or cultivation of traditional crops that required little in the way of monetised inputs to cash crops that rely heavily on purchased inputs and assured water supply.
Farmers, whether male or female, are now forced to enter markets for inputs, output, credit, and water. And all of these markets have operated in ways that have reduced the viability of cultivation in the past decades.
At a fundamental level, of course, the problems of farming are evident, ranging from floods, droughts and soil degeneration to the lack of institutional credit and insurance, leading to excessive reliance on private funds; from the difficulty in accessing reliable and reasonably priced inputs to the problems of marketing and the high volatility of crop prices.
But the crisis is also reflected in other features of the rural economy, such as the decline in agricultural employment and stagnation of other employment. Since women are involved as agricultural wage workers, this necessarily affects them negatively as well.
Let us give some consideration to what we can do in Guyana to improve the conditions of life and work of rural women.

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Rural women

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