Part 4 - The negative effects of gender insensitivity in rural development
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself (sic) and of his family, including,, food clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
Article 25(1)
The following three accounts illustrate the negative effects of gender insensitivity:
ACCOUNT I
In Lampang, northern Thailand, in a Thai Dairy Association project for small dairy farmers, agricultural extension agents provided information only to male farmers. The job of taking care of the cows, however, usually falls on women. As training in dairy cow-keeping was given only to the male farmers, the women who actually do the raising and milking of the cows did not get any direct information. Instead, the women were supposed to rely on learning indirectly from the men, a highly irregular mode of learning.
In 1988, FAO started working with the Department of Agricultural Extension, the Dairy Association of Thailand and the Lampang Agricultural Research and Training Centre of the Rajamangala Institute of Technology. Direct training was then provided for both men and women farmers. The result was much more productive cows, and more and better milk production with a lower bacterial count.
ACCOUNT 2
In the Philippines, new agricultural technologies, introduced without consideration of their gender impact, have led to the economic displacement of women. A clear example is direct seeding with the introduction of short-maturing crops. While motivated by the good intention of maximising land use through cropping intensity to benefit the farmers who own the land, the impact on women was not homogeneous. With direct seeding, transplanting - traditionally done by women - is no longer necessary. Direct seeding also produces an extra crop or two, rather than just one, per year. Women who own land do profit from crop intensification. Others, however, are landless and they are now displaced as transplanters. Some of these women may be re-employed as harvesters of the extra crop.
The women are not usually paid in cash but in kind - i.e.. a share of the paddy - which becomes food for their families. While some payment in kind may be derived from harvesting, on the whole female landless labourers suffer a reduction in employment due to the lack of transplanting work. The result is migration to other villages. The social and economic consequences are neglected children, higher school drop-out rates, and increased child labour, now an important labour resource. The landless women farm workers now have less money for food. Most of them have been transplanting since they were 16-years-old. Now in their forties, they have few prospects of upward social mobility.
For the land-owning female farmer, the increased net profits go into the family income. This often deprives her, however, of her independent income from transplanting work. Ironically, she now has more profit yet less income. Moreover, she has to pay more for fertilisers and herbicides, previously unneeded. The existence of a costly irrigation structure is also crucial for the two crops. Crop intensification is uncertain, totally dependent on infrastructural investment. The loss of the woman farmer's independent income may even be linked to maternal mortality.
In the absence of a safety net, women devise alternative family strategies for generating income. One such is rural-urban migration for family members who remit earnings back to the village. This, however, makes the village family dependent on remittances from abroad. In this situation, the re-institution of a sustainable livelihood for the rural poor, especially women farmers, is crucial.
ACCOUNT 3
In most developing countries, poor rural women are the victims of the increasing costs of pesticides and fertilisers, the depletion of natural resources, loss of soil fertility, diminishing water supplies and increasing hazards to human health. Women farmers in Malaysia, like their sisters elsewhere, do 60 percent of all agricultural work. In addition, they prepare food and must ensure that water and fuel are always available, as these tasks are held to be women's responsibility.
In Malaysia's plantations, women perform most of the chemical-related work, such as spraying and the application of pesticides and fertilisers. This exposes them to serious health hazards. Documented case studies show that women pesticide sprayers suffer from dermatitis and other ills, including nails dropping off, dizziness, vomiting and nose bleeds. Despite these health hazards, women continue to spray unprotected with little, if any, monitoring of their health. The long-term and chronic health effects on women pesticide workers, such as the effects on women's reproductive abilities, have received small attention from researchers.
Apart from some minor medical attention, women pesticide workers do not receive compensation for pesticide-related injuries. Ministries of Agriculture now moving to more humane forms of agriculture should make it mandatory for workers in the agricultural sector to be trained in minimising the risks from pesticides. The women should also be provided with suitable protective wear, have their health conditions monitored regularly, and they should receive adequate medical care and monetary compensation when they suffer injuries (Tenaguita, 1992, and Women and Health in the Plantations, 1985).
