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Sona Mitra |
Increased commercialisation of agriculture has had manifold impacts on the women both directly and indirectly. While the process of commercialisation has helped generation of considerable female employment in the food-processing industry with its forward linkages, thereby helping to improve the livelihood conditions for women workers in the industry, the shift from traditonal food crops to commercial crops have aslo had certain adverse impacts. These are discernible in the long term problems of food security and water crisis that is currently being faced by most of the developing countries. Lot of studies have revealed that it is women who face the major brunt of food and water problems. Women are responsible for half of the world's food production and nearly 70-80 percent of food produced in developing countries. The proportion of economically active women population in the developing and transition economies has been between 60-70 percent in 2005. With a shift of the cultivation patterns, women are left behind in the task of skill development to produce commercial crops. In the process a lot of women workers are left jobless or marginalised. There's also the aspect of water crisis. Women are supposed to be the traditional conservers of water. they are believed to know the natural ways of conserving water. But with an increase in irrigation intensive agriculture in most developing countries, which is required by almost all commercial crops, there is an increased threat of water crisis all over the world. This affects the women directly as it burdens them with an addiotional task of fetching water from distant places. A recent UN survey of 177 countries pointed out that women spend about an estimated 40 billion hours in a year collecting water which has incapacitated women's efforts to engage in other productive and reproductive activities. |
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Parthapratim Pal |
This is a very interesting question. I am also interested in knowing how increased commercialization of agriculture is affecting women workers in developing countries. |
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Kevin Nellies |
The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) is a set of WTO rules, which governs global agricultural trade of WTO Member countries. AoA came into force on 1st January 1995. This agreement is the first serious attempt to discipline international agricultural trade in agricultural commodities. From the point of view of developing countries, the set of disciplinary measures introduced by the AoA was seen as one of the most promising deals of the WTO package. As a large number of developing countries depend on agriculture as their main source of export revenue, a less distorted and liberalized agricultural trade regime was expected to bring significant benefits to them. However, the implementation of the AoA has not played out as expected. The WTO is sets strict limits on the subsidies such as those on agricultural inputs (fertilizer, water, electricity) thereby pushing up production costs. Simultaneously, with the lower of the tariff barriers, cheap subsidized production of the developed countries threatens to displace millions of small and marginal farmers through imports. Even when there is no actual import, low world prices will drive domestic prices downwards so much so that despite cases of crop failures, domestic prices of that crop may not necessarily increase. Women constitute the majority of the poorest section of the rural population engaged in the agricultural sector. As a result, even if trade liberalization does indeed unlock export opportunities, there are apprehensions that farmers will have the ability to take advantage of such opportunities. The gender linkages of agricultural trade liberalization constitute an important area of research and further understanding. It would be interesting to have your views and comments on this subject of critical importance. This post was updated at Aug 1 2007 11:45AM by Kevin Nellies |