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Introduction[5]

As rural Latin America continues to evolve in the post-adjustment environment of the early twenty-first century, a frequently neglected aspect of this ongoing transformation is the shifts in the gender composition of the rural population and workforce, and what implications these shifts may have for rural development policy. Demographic phenomena such as declining fertility rates, internal and international migration and rising rates of female household headship interact with prevailing rural economic trends - the crisis in subsistence agriculture, the widespread adoption of labour-intensive commercial and export crops and the increasing importance of non-farm sources of rural employment and income - to generate potentially significant changes in the roles of women and men in their households’ livelihood strategies and in the rural economy as a whole. At the same time, access to the key markets, services and factors of production that make rural livelihood possible continue to be differentiated by gender. In particular, property rights in land and rural employment opportunities are highly unequal for men and women in many Latin American countries.

This paper evaluates the changing economic roles of women in rural Latin America. It begins with an empirical assessment of the trends in the gender composition of the rural population, its economically active members and the agricultural workforce, with an eye towards evaluating intra-regional differences in the “feminization” of the rural economy. We then look at several of the likely major contributing factors to gender-specific changes in the rural economy: trends in education, fertility and household composition; internal and international migration; shifts in factor utilization in subsistence agriculture in the face of trade and price liberalization and the expansion of labour-intensive export crops. The analysis then turns to consideration of gender-specific constraints to access to land and non-farm rural employment. The chapter concludes by evaluating the significance of the changing gender composition of the rural economy and the role of public policy in meeting the needs of rural women and men and identifying productive avenues of future research.


[5] The author is Assistant Professor of Economics at Saint Mary's College of California. The author would like to thank Marcela Ballara and Velde Elliott for their generous assistance in obtaining materials, and Carmen Diana Deere, Benjamin Davis, Marcela Ballara, Sophie Robin, Maria Grazia Quieti and Florence Tartanac for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft. All opinions and errors are the author's own.

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