NEXUS BETWEEN AGRICULTURAL TRANSITION, FEMINIZATION OF AGRICULTURE, AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN NEPAL

Abstract

Examining the nature of the feminization of agriculture, and factors influencing the phenomenon in citrus producing pocket areas of Sindhuli district in Central Nepal, the study unravels gender based social norms and practices prevalent in the contemporary agrarian society. Given the debates and arguments presented by feminization and women’s empowerment scholars, the study has been embedded within a broader agricultural background by contextualizing agriculture in a multi-functional transition model. The multi-functional agrarian transition has however been limited in its scope within four dominant agricultural production domain, namely cereal, citrus, livestock and vegetables. The overall research design used to understand social change, mainly changes brought about in gender relations as a result of citrus plantation, uses a transformatory research design with mixed-method approach. The micro-level case analysis includes of an in-depth study of the three phenomenon, namely agricultural transition, feminization of agriculture, and women’s empowerment in agriculture. Using ethnography as a research approach, this study has applied different tools including of participant observation, key informant interviews, narrative interviews, and questionnaire survey to collect data from the field. With multiple periods of ethnographic fieldwork, different data collection tools have been used concurrently. Questionnaire survey has been used to collect data on the labour force participation by sex to gather numerical and measurable accounts of women’s involvement in agriculture. Decision-making as a proxy for women’s empowerment also includes of survey data. A total of 140 households were purposively selected using cluster-sampling technique. In order to gather more detailed qualitative information on feminization of agriculture and women’s empowerment that supports meaning making of the survey data, twenty biographic narrative interviews were conducted with women farmers using heterogeneous sampling technique. Secondary source of information on membership detail of women and men in citrus cooperative has also been used. Feminization of agriculture has been explored by analyzing labour force participation rate of male and female, task-based division of labour, and how different tasks under each production domain have become gendered. Presenting the intra household division of work in agriculture three categories of households based on labour arrangement in rural farms were identified. Unlike few strictly defined work for man and woman in cereal crop production, other agricultural work are culturally gender neutral. It is within this flexibility of work, that this study has portrayed how varied degrees of market orientation in a mixed-farming system changes household labour, exchange labour and wage labour relationship. Labour as a resource presents a gendered pattern of the value of labour, with men’s contribution of labour being valued differently than that of women’s in each production domain of agriculture. Gender based-inequalities in labour use can be interpreted as having the power to reinforce and intensify the existing gender roles, with women being encouraged to participate in traditional work, while mostly men being integrated into the new works in the labour market created by citrus. In order to understand feminization beyond the rationale of male outmigration and male non-agricultural employment, the study portrays different categories of feminization based on women’s labour concentration in cash crop vis-à-vis other types of agricultural crop/livestock with varying degree of market-orientation. The study shows multitude conditions of feminization in one hand, and on the other presents situation whereby feminization of one category may not necessarily result in feminization of another category of agricultural production. It also highlights task-based feminization of work; especially those considered as an extension of traditional agricultural work that did not need much supervision nor did it require substantial instruction. Emerging themes from narratives of women farmers’ lived-experiences has been used to examine women’s empowerment in agriculture. First, the intra-household decision-making regarding each production domain has been comprehended by considering the value of each crop/livestock within a broader agricultural space in the study site. Thus, gender hierarchy in decision-making of four domains of agricultural production is further analyzed to understand women’s subordination in the citrus domain although women mostly held decision-making positions in other domains of production. Female to male ratio of decision-making provides a glimpse on how women are positioned within the decision-making of cereal, vegetable, citrus and livestock production. Finally, the study analyses other resources such as land, labour, income, social networks and human mobility that are linked with production of these four domains in a mixed-farming system. Each resource has been assessed to understand how women have or have not been able to use or have control over these resources by challenging the existing gender norms that subordinate women over men. Household members’ everyday lifestyles regarding the changing opportunities in agriculture and non-agriculture have been presented as influencing the current social arrangement that shape men and women’s lives differently. Both feminization and empowerment is understood as a social process, which is constantly in flux.