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Desertification and gender

Desertification is bound to affect men and women differently, because they have different productive roles defined by gender. Gender is not simply a birth characteristic, as is sex. One is born as either a male or a female - but the term "gender" has broadened to encompass the differentiated, but generally complementary, roles that society has evolved for men and women.

While is it not useful to try to identify each of the ways in which desertification may affect men and women in the abstract, it is important to be sharply aware of the impacts it has on individuals -both as individuals and in terms of their roles in family or production groups.

Since stress is a key factor in considering the impacts of desertification, it is easy to see that resources closest to the households or community groups/settlements are the first to be degraded and to become less productive.

Because women generally have the "family" role and therefore need to remain near to their households, they are usually the first to face hardships related to desertification. Women may have gardens, assist in work in the fields, raise small animals or collect feed for milking animals, process tree products for sale, collect fuel and water and process and cook food while they care for their children. In the context of these responsibilities, it is clear that, as land closest to the households becomes less productive, the roles of women are directly threatened.

In households dependent on animal production, the men might face hardship if they are forced to herd animals at increasing distances from the home. The women of their group, with responsibility for children and household activities, are tied to fixed radius, within which both activities can be handled well. If they are forced to travel greater distances to perform other tasks, they will either give up some of their productive activities, on their home-based activities will directly suffer. Income-earning activities are commonly sacrificed, resulting in women having a lesser role in directly providing for themselves and their families.

Another scenario deals with a second phase in desertification. When productive resources become degraded, the family can no longer survive using its traditional production strategy often resulting in seasonal and/or permanent migration by a. least part of the family. This has a counter-productive effect, because in desertification, increased labour is needed, but less output results as the carrying capacity of the soil declines. Any migration in this case may put a sharp strain on those left to manage the production.

This situation is handled differently in various cultures. In some cases the young people will leave to search for work outside the area; in many cases the men leave and women take over the roles traditionally handled by men, while maintaining their own existing roles. In such cases, investment in the productive resource must necessarily suffer.

In pastoral societies, when the cattle die, men leave or take up new activities. Women in these groups are often considered strong and independent and may leave the community, as a group of women and children, to hunt famine foods, as well as pods and other tree products for tannin or medicines to sell in distant markets.

Thus, as tasks increase and the labour force decreases, gender roles change. It may be that control over the productive resources changes, or that women become increasingly responsible for decision-making.

In most societies there are traditions and rules of behaviour which protect women and their access to resources. But, as resources become increasingly scarce, the politeness which allows such things as gleaning for the poor are the first to be discarded.

Particularly in areas where governments are giving, or have given, land titles to "heads of households", declining resources can cause complications for women. -since the term is usually defined de jure as the man, whether he is present or not. For example, if the man is no longer living in the community, he may be tempted to sell the title of his land and, in times of declining resources, the community may be less able to act as a safety net for the family.

In light of such considerations, it is important to be aware of the difference in the ideal and the real roles of men and women and of the variance in hardships individuals face as access to, or quality of productive resources changes. Only when the planning is done by local people, with the support of outside technical and political entities, can the subtleties of the various stresses and changes be fully understood and taken into consideration.

Participatory planning - planning done jointly by insiders and (gender sensitive) outsiders where the goals of the insiders are considered paramount, will help to enable women to contribute productively to the maintenance of their families in situations of stress caused by desertification and other resource degradation.

Within FAO there are two activities which deal directly with gender issues. The first is a series of guidelines and policy papers which identifies issues of special relevance to gender and to planning, implementing and monitoring gender sensitive issues. A second programme involves training in gender sensitivity. Through a series of case studies and frameworks for analysis, technicians through policy makers can consider local issues with new sensitivity to people's priorities and concerns disaggregated by gender.

Mai 1993

During recent years, many African states, including Burundi, Congo, the Comoros Djibouti, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Rwanda and Togo, have amended their rural land legislation with technical support from FAO. Though these countries differ socially and economically, and have their own particular juridical institutional structures, the reform processes have shared a number of instructive characteristics:

- all reform must be effective - changing the law does not equate to changing society. If it is to be implemented, new legislation has to correspond to society's expectations and reflect the active will of policy-makers. If law is to transform society, it must in a sense obey it. This does not imply (far from it) resigned acceptance of existing social conditions, but rather a realistic search for changes that are acceptable to society;

- all reform must take into account the pluralistic nature of land legislation which, in Africa in particular, is the synthesis of different legal systems, notably traditional land rights and modern agrarian law. This acknowledgement of juridical pluralism should and the tendency to systematically place modern la`` above customary rights, which arc treated as archaic and obsolete,

- though written law is generally considered to be juridically superior, on the sociological level, rural land ownership and use are usually governed by customary rights. This situation is likely to continue for a long time, and uncontested possession of agricultural land remains closely tied to the observance of tradition. Customary land rights are not, however, without their drawbacks, particularly when they preserve peasant-farmer dependence on traditional chiefs or when they exacerbate ecological imbalances. These rights, therefore, need to be protected, but without accentuating inequalities within traditional communities and without sanctioning environmentally harmful behaviour;

- land legislation now seeks to strike a balance between public and private ownership. Where individuals only enjoyed insecure user rights, legislators are increasingly recognizing their right to full land ownership. States, nevertheless, reserve the legitimate right to arbitrate in cases of land dispute, to contest expropriation of the rural population for land speculation and to adopt measures to protect the environment. In doing so, they are concentrating essentially on orientation, promotion and regulation in key areas, while seeking to avoid the bureaucratization of government intervention;

- land legislation must, on all accounts, consider the aspirations, values and practices of the rural population. No significant change can be introduced without the support of the peasant farmers, given that they are to be the leading players in the process of change. In this connection, any agrarian strategy must be based on participation, with discussion and negotiation between individuals or their associations and the public bodies;

- land legislation must adopt a global vision of natural resource management. This supposes the flexible and gradual introduction of legal instruments that can coordinate and blend sectoral legislations (water, forests, wildlife, etc.) and reconcile and balance the interests of the country at large with those of the direct users, thus ensuring the long-term co-existence of rural development and environmental protection.

May 1993

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