Abstract
Renewed concern about agrarian stagnation, poverty and massive land dispossessions of small peasants produced an upsurge of research and literature on the new scramble for land in the global South. This left some of the enduring questions of the agrarian political economy unattended. There have been recent calls for a new generation of studies which focus more broadly on the changes in agrarian production systems, transformations within the peasantry, agrarian labour and land markets, and the social relations underpinning them and the future of the agrarian political economy.
While new studies can provide important insights, they are likely to ignore the gendered character of agrarian change, the importance of family labour and the vital role of social reproduction in creating value. And yet, many of the social categories and processes in the agrarian political economy which are recognized as varied and complicated in class terms are also gendered. This problem in agrarian studies has persisted, in spite of a respectable body of work which has drawn attention to the gendered nature of agrarian change in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. These studies have paid particular attention to gendered livelihood outcomes as a result of gender inequalities in the control of the means of production, the segmentation of agricultural labour and the burden of reproductive or care activities on women.
Gender is by no means the only determinant of differences in livelihood outcomes. Relations between households, between employers and employees, and between households and wider kinship groups are also critical. However, they cannot be fully understood without attention to the mutual interaction of class, gender, kinship and other social relations which produce differences between women and men, and also among women. Paying attention to gender relations requires the examination of institutions such as marriage and kinship which regulate social relations and sanction violations through various means, including social disapproval, fines, violence and divorce. The conjugal contract, inter-household labour relations, employment contracts and local labour cooperation arrangements within communities are all critical arrangements within the agrarian economy, as are land, agriculture, labour and social policy-making institutions.
Several elements of agrarian change are policy driven. There are a plethora of economic, sectoral and social policies, and programmes at the global, regional, sub-regional and national levels emanating from multilateral institutions, donors and governments which have direct and indirect implications for the agrarian political economy. In particular, agricultural and land policies and programmes, macro-economic policies and social policies, programmes and measures need critical review from a gender equity perspective.
Studies have drawn attention to the blurring of lines between rural- and urban-based livelihood activities owing to secular migration, straddling strategies and rural unemployment. More recent studies have also observed the continued importance of family labour in commercial agriculture, as well as the increasing involvement of women in hitherto male-dominated commercial agricultural labour, as farm labourers in horticulture, contract farmers and commercial farmers in their own right. These developments have implications for the gender division of productive and reproductive labour and gender relations within households and the wider political economy.
Overview of Special Issue
This special issue on ‘Gender Relations and the Changing Agrarian Political Economies in the South’ presents five articles which contribute to ongoing efforts by feminist intellectuals to draw attention to the gendered nature of the agrarian political economies of the global South. The five articles contribute to the consideration of a critical question: what are the agrarian questions of today when examined from a gender perspective? While three of the articles are on India and the other two on Ghana and SSA, and are not comparative, the themes they cover and the theoretical analysis they undertake are relevant for thinking about agrarian political economies across the global South.
In her article ‘Gender, Land Tenure and Agrarian Production Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Dzodzi Tsikata provides a historical overview of the gender problem in the agrarian change literature and policies, arguing that gender inequalities in land tenure systems have shaped, and been shaped, by gendered agrarian production and reproduction systems which have evolved within agrarian political economies since the colonial period. The article draws attention to the silences in the mainstream agrarian studies literature, arguing that both the literature and policies ignore the complexities of women’s positions and contributions to agrarian production and reproduction and the gendered nature of capital accumulation and the proletarianization of rural life. The article illustrates the gendered nature of land tenure systems and agrarian production and reproduction systems and their interlinkages through an examination of two current land tenure issues within the agrarian political economy: land tenure reforms since the 1980s and the current scramble for land in Africa.
Several of the issues raised in the above overview are examined in fine detail in the other four articles, which either engage with some of the current debates in the mainstream literature on agrarian issues, or critique some of the assumptions and conceptualizations of this literature, or speak to debates within the gender analysis literature on concepts and policy actions.
Archana Prasad’s article ‘Adivasi Women, Agrarian Change and Forms of Labour in Neo-liberal India’ is a ground-breaking examination of the gendered nature of semi-proletarianization and proletarianization, two processes receiving much attention in the agrarian change literature. In doing this, she takes on a second major discussion in the literature, that is, the role of communitarian structures and the subsistence economy in the sexual division of labour within Adivasi communities. In addition to drawing attention to the larger influence of economic liberalization and macro-economic processes and the blurred boundaries between subsistence and commercial activities, she argues that markets neutralize the influence of communitarian production and distribution systems. Prasad’s position sets up a productive debate between those who take a positive view of communitarian systems of production and distribution, considering them as protective of the interests of Adivasi women against the ravages of labour markets, and those more critical of their role and influence. This debate also has wide resonance in Africa where the debates have either emphasized the continuing salience of communitarian practices within production systems dominated by informal land and labour markets, or drawn attention to the ways in which land and agrarian commercialization has eroded communitarian principles in production systems.
Gender studies of agrarian change have straddled these positions, which have been extended to questions such as the value of customary law in legal pluralist systems. The article’s most significant contribution, however, is its insistence on situating the social relations which structure the sexual division of labour within the wider agrarian political economy. As the article argues, these social relations lay the foundations for the adverse integration of women into labour markets and underline the different degrees of proletarianization and semi-proletarianization. The insistence on examining the linkages between these two levels is important for the African literature as well, because studies have traditionally focused on one or the other. It also enables a joining of discussions of proletarianization with some of the observed changes in the agrarian political economy, such as the feminization of agricultural labour, observed first in SSA, which has become an important factor in parts of Asia and Latin America as well.
In discussions of gender relations in agrarian political economies, the centrality of social reproduction for the capitalist enterprise, as it extracts super profits from the exploitation of unpaid reproductive work usually done by women, is highlighted here in different degrees of detail. The five articles in this special issue all raise this issue. However, the article by Sirisha C. Naidu and Lyn Ossome, ‘Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question of Women’s Labour in India’, which focuses largely on an exposition of this most central issue of gender analysis, is valuable in this regard. Using a social reproduction framework, they explore how the reproduction of rural working class households is rearticulated to capitalist production in India. They argue that social reproduction in contemporary capitalist economics depends on the interplay of three fundamental institutions, households, markets and the state, which act both in concert and contradiction, and produce an articulation of non-capitalist and capitalist forms of production. They show how subsistence production, care work and other forms of non-capitalist production, mostly performed by women, support the reproduction of the working classes, thereby subsidizing capitalist production. As these activities are dependent on private and common lands, land remains a significant factor, albeit one that has proved insufficient for reproducing the working classes, reducing poverty and achieving gender equity in the agrarian political economy. At the same time, the significance of land in capitalist economic growth is evident in the massive transfer of land from agriculture to mining, industry, real estate, tourism and infrastructure with gendered implications for livelihoods. Thus, the agrarian questions of labour and land are gendered, and need to be so acknowledged in research and policy.
In their article ‘Farm to Factory Gendered Employment: The Case of Blue Skies Outgrower Scheme in Ghana’, Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey, Joseph Awetori Yaro and Joseph Kofi Teye contribute to a growing body of literature on the gender segmentation of production within the different models of agricultural commercialization: peasant or smallholder, contract farming/outgrower and plantation. Their study also speaks to the gendered character of proletarianization and semi-proletarianization within the context of an outgrower scheme to produce, process and package fruit for supermarket chains abroad. Using a value chain analysis, they found that while men dominated the higher earning segments of production as outgrowers and permanent staff in the processing plant, women were largely casual labourers of outgrowers and the processing plant, and family members of outgrowers. The authors, therefore, conclude in concert with the recent literature that neo-liberal agricultural commercialization policies ignore and thus exacerbate pre-existing gender inequalities. Their findings support the view that outgrower schemes, which are presented as a solution to the extensive dispossession of smallholders by large-scale land acquisitions and plantation agriculture, ignore the near absence of women as outgrowers, which contrasts with their ubiquity as family members whose labour contributions, though critical to outgrower schemes, are not recognized.
The nature of the agential power of women of different social groups and agrarian systems, the role of women’s self-organization in bolstering this power, and state policy responses to the demands of women’s organizations constitute a set of critical issues raised in the feminist literature on women’s responses to their subordination and exploitation. Govind Kelkar and Santosh Kumar Jha take up these issues in their article ‘Women’s Agential Power in the Political Economy of Agricultural Land’. They examine how rural women, as farmers and activists, mobilize themselves to assert their rights to land and related assets, and how state interventions respond to these demands through legislation and policy making. Related to this, the article explores the effects of state responses on women’s control of assets and their decision-making roles within their families. The article’s singular contribution is to open up a critical discussion of various gender equity instruments deployed by some states in India in response to the demands of organized women in the agrarian political economy. Furthermore, it enables a critical examination of the nature and quality of women’s agency as a countervailing force in challenging patriarchal power in a context of limited efforts by state and social institutions.
These are issues of relevance beyond India in spite of the specificities of class, caste and gender inequalities in India, and, in particular, discussions about the impacts of land titling and registration for women as individuals or jointly with their husbands. One of the observations made in the article is the tendency of women who have acquired land to pass on such land to male heirs. This particular exercise of agency draws attention to the complexity of policy responses to gender inequalities. The study concludes that in spite of state policy responses, men are still largely regarded as heads of households and, therefore, the controllers of land and assets. This is in addition to low levels of awareness by women about laws which favour them, their reluctance to claim their inheritance and ownership rights for the sake of harmonious social relations, and the lack of economic power, all of which silence women and renders them without bargaining power. At the same time, there are potential opportunities for policy change which include official acknowledgements of women’s work in agriculture, demands for women’s unmediated rights to land and other assets, increased dissemination of knowledge about rural women’s involvement in agriculture and policy recognition of this work. This view of the policy context and its opportunities is critiqued by Naidu and Ossome in their discussion about the limits of policies granting land to women. There is need to deepen these debates about policy options in ways that take into account the wider processes of the agrarian political economy that limit the effectiveness of access to land in addressing the agrarian questions of labour and land.
It is our hope that these articles will generate deep and wide debates in future issues of Agrarian South and other journals that influence the theorization of agrarian change.