Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture (Routledge Handbooks) 2020020062, 2020020063, 9780367190019, 9780429199752

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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF GENDER AND AGRICULTURE

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture covers major theoretical issues as well as critical empirical shifts in gender and agriculture. Gender relations in agriculture are shifting in most regions of the world with changes in the structure of agriculture, the organization of production, international restructuring of value chains, climate change, the global pandemic, and national and multinational policy changes.This book provides a cutting-edge assessment of the feld of gender and agriculture, with contributions from both leading scholars and up-and-coming academics as well as policymakers and practitioners. The handbook is organized into four parts: part 1, institutions, markets, and policies; part 2, land, labor, and agrarian transformations; part 3, knowledge, methods, and access to information; and part 4, farming people and identities. The last chapter is an epilogue from many of the contributors focusing on gender, agriculture, and shifting food systems during the coronavirus pandemic. The chapters address both historical subjects as well as ground-breaking work on gender and agriculture, which will help to chart the future of the feld.The handbook has an international focus with contributions examining issues at both the global and local levels with contributors from across the world. With contributions from leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners, and with a global outlook, the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Agriculture is an essential reference volume for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in gender and agriculture. Carolyn E. Sachs is Professor Emerita of Rural Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Leif Jensen is Distinguished Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at Pennsylvania State University. Paige Castellanos is currently an Assistant Research Professor at Pennsylvania State University in the College of Agricultural Sciences’ International Programs and Rural Sociology. Kathleen Sexsmith is Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF GENDER AND AGRICULTURE

Edited by Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, and Kathleen Sexsmith

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, and Kathleen Sexsmith; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, and Kathleen Sexsmith to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 13, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 13 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual productpage at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sachs, Carolyn E., 1950- editor. | Jensen, Leif, editor. | Castellanos, Paige, editor. Title: Routledge handbook of gender and agriculture/edited by Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos and Kathleen Sexsmith. Identifiers: LCCN 2020020062 (print) | LCCN 2020020063 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367190019 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429199752 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Agriculture–Economic aspects–Case studies. | Land use–Planning–Case studies. | Women in agriculture–Case studies. Classification: LCC HD1415 .R68 2020 (print) | LCC HD1415 (ebook) | DDC 338.1082–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020062 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020063 ISBN: 978-0-367-19001-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19975-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishign Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgments

ix xvii

Introduction Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, and Kathleen Sexsmith

1

PART 1

Institutions, markets, and policies for gender and agriculture 1 Gender mainstreaming in agricultural and forestry institutions Seema Arora-Jonsson and Stephanie Leder 2 Gender dynamics in agricultural value chain development: foundations and gaps Rhiannon Pyburn and Froukje Kruijssen

13 15

32

3 Gender inequalities in food standards Carmen Bain

46

4 Food sovereignty and gender equity Anne Portman

57

5 Gender integration in international agricultural research for development Margreet van der Burg

69

6 Gender, nutrition, and food system approaches: what can be learned from the past? Julie Newton v

85

Contents PART 2

Land, labor, and agrarian transformation

101

7 Women’s rights to their land: when property does not equal power Peggy Petrzelka

103

8 Gender and land grabbing Youjin B. Chung

114

9 Gender and livestock production Elizabeth Ransom and Forrest Stagner

126

10 Gendered vulnerabilities and adaptation to climate change Margaret Alston

137

11 Gender and sustainable intensifcation Cornelia Flora

149

12 The role of mobile phones in empowering women in agriculture Surabhi Mittal

160

13 Gender and the political economy of fsh agri-food systems in the global South Surendran Rajaratnam, Molly Ahern, and Cynthia McDougall

170

14 Gender, race, and transgenic crops Amanda Shaw

185

15 Gender dimensions in climate-smart agricultural technology uptake Mamta Mehar

200

16 Gender and urban agriculture Hannah Whitley

212

PART 3

Knowledge, methods, and access to information

223

17 Gender and agricultural extension Mary Barbercheck

225

18 Feminist methods and methodology in agricultural research Ann R.Tickamyer

239

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Contents

19 Empowering women through farmer feld schools Afrina Choudhury and Paige Castellanos

251

20 Gender violence and food-service workers: bending toward justice Patricia Allen and Whitney Shervey

263

21 Women’s farm organizations in the United States: protecting and transforming agricultural power Angie Carter

275

22 Gendered farming organizations: the value of North/South comparisons Sally Shortall and Margaret Adesugba

287

23 The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index Elena M. Martinez, Emily C. Myers, and Audrey Pereira

298

PART 4

Farming people and identities

313

24 Farm household livelihood strategies Margaret Adesugba, Elizabeth Oughton, and Sally Shortall

315

25 Gender and precarious work in agriculture Kathleen Sexsmith and Megan A. M. Griffn

326

26 Indigenous women in agriculture: focus on Latin America Diana Gabriela Lope-Alzina

336

27 Queer farmers: Sexuality on the farm Michaela Hoffelmeyer

348

28 Women farmers and women farmer’s identities Hannah Whitley and Kathryn Brasier

360

29 Health and farm households Nari Senanayake and Celia Ritter

370

30 Embodied work in agriculture Berit Brandth

383

31 Men’s and women’s migration in relation to agriculture Emily M.L. Southard and Leif Jensen

394

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Contents

32 Rematriating to the wombs of the world: toward Black feminist agrarian ideologies Shakara Tyler 33 Farming, gender, and mental health Lia Bryant

410 421

Epilogue: gender, agriculture, and shifting food systems under coronavirus global pandemic Index

435 453

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CONTRIBUTORS

Margaret Adesugba is a Commonwealth Scholar and Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Rural Economy, Newcastle University. She also holds an MSc. in Agricultural Development Economics with distinction from the University of Reading, UK, as a Diageo Foundation Scholar and a BSc. (Agriculture) with frst-class honors from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. Her research focuses on gender and agriculture in the Global South and North, specifcally, gender inequality, agricultural and rural development policies and programs, sustainable livelihoods in rural geographies, rural institutions, and institutional arrangements, the infuence of community-based cooperatives, collective action, vulnerabilities, and resilience. Molly Ahern is a Food Security and Nutrition Consultant with experience working with WorldFish and Bioversity International, where she worked on nutrition-sensitive value chains for fsh, dietary assessments, and participatory rural appraisal of food system methodologies in Africa. Currently, she is a Food Security and Nutrition Consultant in the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Patricia Allen is the founder of the Master of Science program in Food Systems and Society at Oregon Health & Science University. She directed the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she created a research and education program on social justice in food systems and wrote Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. Her academic commitments are motivated by her experiences of race, class, and gender working in farm labor, food service, food processing, and academia. Margaret Alston is Professor of Social Work at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she heads up the Gender, Leadership, and Social Sustainability (GLASS) research unit. She has published widely in the feld of gender, climate changes, and environmental disasters. Seema Arora-Jonsson is Professor and Chair for Rural Development at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Communication, Culture, and Society at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland.

ix

Contributors

Carmen Bain is a Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on the governance of agricultural and food systems; gender, agriculture, and international development; and the social dimensions of agricultural biotechnologies. Her research has examined development efforts aimed at empowering women smallholder dairy farmers in Uganda and its effect on gender relations and food security. Her work has been published in Agriculture and Human Values, Food Policy, Gender & Society, Journal of Rural Studies, Rural Sociology, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Mary Barbercheck is a Professor and Extension Specialist of Sustainable Agriculture in the Department of Entomology at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research program focuses on soil entomology and ecology, the effects of agricultural production practices on soil-dwelling insect pathogens, soil arthropod diversity, and soil function as related to system sustainability. She also has research and extension interests in the area of organic agriculture and women and gender in agriculture, science, and technology. Her extension programs focus on the soil food web, soil health, and integrated pest management in organic production systems. She is a founding member and steering committee member of the Pennsylvania Women’s Agricultural Network (PA-WAgN). Since 2003, PA-WAgN has encouraged and supported women in agriculture, provided educational and mentoring opportunities, raised community awareness of agriculturerelated issues and concerns, and sustained farming livelihoods for women in agriculture. Berit Brandth is Professor Emerita at the Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. A long-lasting research interest has been gender and work-family issues, including gender and rurality, where publications focus on masculinities and femininities in agriculture-related areas such as technology, organization, family, commercial homes, farm tourism, and embodiment. Publications include Feminisms and Ruralities, co-edited with Barbara Pini and Jo Little (2015) and “Fathers framing fatherhood” (Agriculture and Human Values, 2019). Kathryn Brasier is Professor of Rural Sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching programs focus generally on environment-society interactions, stakeholder engagement processes, collective action related to agricultural and environmental issues, and gender and agriculture. She previously was part of Penn State Extension Economic and Community Development and Marcellus Education Teams, and currently teaches in the Community, Environment, and Development major and Rural Sociology graduate program. Dr. Brasier received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2002. Lia Bryant is a Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia and was on sabbatical when writing this chapter as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Durham, United Kingdom. She has published extensively on gender and rural society and her books include Gender and Rurality (2011, Routledge); Sexuality, Rurality, and Geography (2013); Women Supervising and Writing Doctoral Theses:Walking on the Grass (2015); Critical and Creative Research Methodologies in Social Work (2015, Routledge), and Water and Rural Communities, Local Meanings, Politics and Place (2016, Routledge). Margreet van der Burg is senior university lecturer and researcher gender studies, focusing on food, agricultural and rural research and development,Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Angie Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI. Her work focuses on agriculture, social justice, and social change. x

Contributors

Paige Castellanos is currently an Assistant Research Professor at Penn State in the College of Agricultural Sciences’ International Programs. She received her Ph.D. in Rural Sociology and International Agriculture and Development from Penn State. She is currently the program manager for the Penn State’s Gender Equity through Agricultural Research and Education (GEARE) Initiative. Castellanos focuses her research on gender and social inequities, primarily in Latin America. Afrina Choudhury is Research Fellow (Senior Gender Specialist) for WorldFish, Bangladesh, where she is responsible for the design and implementation of pro-poor gender-responsive strategies. Working in the feld of aquatic agriculture, her research has revolved around the integration of gender into technical interventions in ways that are sustainable and transformative. In particular, she has been focusing on building the evidence for gender transformative approaches as a way to break systemic inequalities in enhancing equitable development efforts. She also co-created and chairs the Bangladesh National Gender Working Group, which brings together gender and equity work in Bangladesh. She holds a Masters’ degree in Development Studies from BRAC University and is currently pursuing a sandwich Ph.D. between WorldFish and Wageningen University with a focus on inclusive business development and women’s entrepreneurship in aquaculture. Youjin Chung is Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Equity at the University of California, Berkeley with a joint appointment in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Her research draws from the political economy of development, historical and feminist political ecology, critical agrarian and food studies, and African studies to examine the relationship between gender, intersectionality, development, and socio-ecological change in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Tanzania. Cornelia Flora has worked in integrating women into development projects since 1967, frst in the US and Latin America and then in Asia, Africa, and Europe. She received her BA in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and her MS and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She was Director of the Population Research Laboratory at Kansas State University, organizer of the annual international Farming Systems Research and Extension Conference held at Kansas State University, Program Offcer for Agriculture and Rural Development for the Andean Region and Southern Cone of Latin America for the Ford Foundation, Head of the Department of Sociology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development at Iowa State University, and is now the Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Sociology Emerita. She has served a number of professional societies as president and in other roles and is the recipient of a number of awards for teaching, leadership, and research. Megan A.M. Griffn is an MS/Ph.D. student in Rural Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her work pulls from critical development studies, feminist critiques of science and technology, food and seed sovereignty, and decoloniality in an effort to re-articulate the epistemological engagements that agricultural research and extension projects have with other(ed) communities and other(ed) ways of knowing, and to co-construct transformative food imaginaries. Michaela Hoffelmeyer is a Ph.D. student in Rural Sociology at Pennsylvania State University. Her masters’ thesis involved a qualitative study of queer sustainable farmers in the northeastern US. xi

Contributors

Leif Jensen is a Distinguished Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University. His research is found within social stratifcation, demography, and the sociology of economic change, all with an emphasis on rural people and places. Froukje Kruijssen is a Senior Advisor on Sustainable Economic Development at KIT Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam. She holds an MSc degree in Agricultural Development Economics from Wageningen University and has over 15 years of work experience in applied research on agro-food value chains, international trade, food and nutrition security, sustainable development, and gender. Stephanie Leder is a Researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala and currently a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK. Prior to this, she held a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Nepal within the Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) Research Program, “Water, Land, and Ecosystems.” She holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Cologne, Germany. Diana Gabriela Lope-Alzina is a Research Professor at Tecnológico Nacional de México, an Honorary Research Fellow for “Gender, Youth, and Agrobiodiversity” at the Alliance Bioversity–CIAT and the Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research (PAR), and an international consultant for the UN system. She has been involved in inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary research concerning gender analysis and management of agrobiodiversity for more than 20 years, with a special interest in traditional agricultural systems in Latin America. In 2020, she was appointed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to be part of the group of experts to carry out the thematic assessment on “the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, determinants of transformative change and options for achieving the 2050 vision for biodiversity.” Elena Martinez is a doctoral student at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Her research focuses on connections between agriculture, nutrition, and gender. Prior to studying at Tufts, she was a research analyst in the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and a senior research analyst at the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP). She hold a Master of Science in nutrition from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and a Master of Public Health in epidemiology and biostatistics from the Tufts University School of Medicine. Cynthia McDougall is the Gender Research Leader for WorldFish and the CGIAR Research Program on Fish Agrifood Systems (FISH). She is an interdisciplinary social scientist with over 20 years of experience in food security, gender and social equity, and natural resource governance. In her current role, she leads gender strategic research as well as the integration of gender in aquaculture, fsheries, and nutrition research in Asia,Africa, and the Pacifc. Mamta Mehar has gained expertise in clientele-responsive agriculture and aquaculture innovative technologies, seed systems, digital agriculture, and gender and climate change themes, interdisciplinary approaches, innovative methods, and tools to analyze and interpret data. In the past ten years, she has worked with different CGIAR organizations and hence different food crops and programs.Within these roles, and others, she has explored solutions for the inequalities embedded within gender roles and norms that often result in the inequitable distribution xii

Contributors

of resources and hinders sustainable farm intensifcation. In 2017, she was awarded a Borlaug Fellowship by the US Department of Agriculture. She has also undergone extensive training sessions on Gender and Research Integrated Training (GRIT) organized by Pennsylvania State University (2017 and 2018), US. Surabhi Mittal is an independent consultant on agricultural economics. At present, she is working with the Population Council on monitoring and process evaluation of a project related to women’s empowerment and livestock. Dr. Mittal was the Senior Economist and Coordinator of the Centre of Excellence based in New Delhi. Prior to joining the TARINA leadership team, she worked for six years as the Senior Agricultural Economist with the socioeconomics program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT-CGIAR). She has also worked at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), the Economics Division at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), and the National Center for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NCAP) of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). She is the joint secretary of the Agriculture Economics Research Association (India) and is a core member of the organizing team of the International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE) 2021. Emily Myers is a research analyst in the Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Since joining IFPRI three years ago, she has worked on qualitative studies across sub-Saharan Africa and in Bangladesh. She uses qualitative methods to examine gender, women’s empowerment, and participation in agricultural value chains. She also facilitates IFPRI’s Gender Task Force, a cross-institutional group that supports researchers incorporating gender into their work and disseminates IFPRI’s gender research. She earned a Master in Public Health from Emory University in 2017. Julie Newton is a senior social development and gender equity advisor at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam and has worked in development research, policy and practice for 15 years, specialising in food and nutrition security, social protection, child rights, women’s labour rights, wellbeing and sustainable livelihoods. Prior to this she has worked in Bangladesh on women’s rights in the shrimp sector and child rights in food and nutrition security programming. Before this she worked in various research and government positions exploring sustainable communities and the links to wellbeing and how you measure it. As KIT gender advisor she works at the boundary of research, practice and policy to support gender integration with different stakeholders including international and bilateral development organizations, government institutions, NGOs, research organizations as well as private sector. Her PhD thesis is entitled “Gender responsive approaches to natural resource management in Namibia” (2004). Julie’s research interests focus on feminist approaches to monitoring evaluation and learning in the sectors of food and nutrition security, labour rights, child rights and social protection. Elizabeth Oughton is a Principal Research Associate at the Centre for Rural Economy, Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests focus upon the relationships within rural households and the ways in which these relate to the creation of livelihoods. Audrey Pereira is a senior research analyst in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Her work focuses on understanding socio-economic pathways to improve gender and health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Prior to joining IFPRI, she worked at the UNICEF Offce of Research – Innocenti, the World Bank, and Jhpiego. She has a Master of Science in Public Health, concentrating in health systems and economics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. xiii

Contributors

Peggy Petrzelka is a Professor of Sociology at Utah State University. Her research interests focus on the interrelationships between the physical and social environment in a number of settings—from rural Utah communities experiencing fghts over public land use, to Midwestern farm communities experiencing power struggles over agricultural land, to rural migrant communities in Spain and Morocco experiencing agricultural worker tensions. She focuses, in particular, on groups in the above settings who are being marginalized and deemed invisible by policymakers and researchers. Anne Portman is currently an independent scholar who writes, mothers, gardens, and eats in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Georgia in 2016. Her work is situated at the intersection of feminist politics, environmental ethics, and food studies. Rhiannon Pyburn is a Senior Advisor on Gender and Agriculture at KIT Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, and a Senior Expert in the CGIAR-NL Partnership for the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) supported through a grant from the Dutch government. Rhiannon has over 20 years of work experience in social learning, innovation systems, and gender research in agriculture and natural resource management, including agricultural value chains, standards, and certifcation. Surendran Rajaratnam is a Senior Gender Research Analyst at WorldFish, where he conducts and contributes to a range of gender strategic studies in Asia and Africa.Among these, Surendran has examined constraining and enabling gender norms and their infuence on innovation processes in Bangladesh and the Philippines and is currently working on integrating gender into technical aquaculture and fsheries work with the Government of Assam, India, as part of the Assam Agribusiness and Rural Transformation (APART) Project. Elizabeth Ransom is an Associate Professor of International Affairs in the School of International Affairs and a Senior Research Associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Pennsylvania State University. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology and has conducted research for the past 20 years in Southern and Eastern Africa on livestock, international and regional trade, gender empowerment, and changing environmental contexts. Celia Ritter is a student who is currently completing a Master’s of Public Health. She holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Environmental and Sustainability Studies and Biology from the University of Kentucky. Carolyn E. Sachs is Emerita Professor of Rural Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her research focuses on gender and agriculture and gender and environment. Her most recent book is Gender, Agriculture, and Agrarian Transformations: Changing Relations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia (2019). Her other books include The Rise of Women Farmers in Sustainable Agriculture (2016, co-authored), Gendered Fields: Women, Agriculture, Environment (1991), and Invisible Farmers:Women in Agriculture (1983). Nari Senanayake is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research bridges geographic work on health/disease, agrarian environments, and scholarship on the politics of knowledge, science, and expertise. In particular, her current research project focuses on everyday encounters with a severe and mysterious form of chronic kidney disease (CKDu) in Sri Lanka’s dry zone. Kathleen Sexsmith is Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her research interests include migrant farmworkxiv

Contributors

ers in North American agriculture and the gendered impacts of sustainability standards in the Global South. She holds a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University, an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from the University of Manitoba. Amanda Shaw is lecturer and researcher on the gendered politics of food, agriculture and international development. She has written on the gendered dimensions of anti-GMO activism and the intersections of racial capitalism and contemporary philanthropic programs in agriculture. Her research interests include analyses of settler colonialism and feminist political economy. As a researcher and advocate, Amanda has worked on resourcing feminist movements and in bringing gender and social perspectives to the felds of economic development, trade and agriculture. Amanda was raised and lives on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi and traces her family origins back to the UK and Europe via Appalachia and the Ozark mountains. She currently teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Whitney Shervey is a professional cook from Portland, OR where she has worked in food work for 20 years. She is a queer culinary educator who has a passion for building power within her community through food from seed to plate.After years of working in the restaurant industry, she is committed to using labor organizing to transform the food industry to be more equitable. Sally Shortall is the Duke of Northumberland Professor of Rural Economy, Newcastle University in the UK. She is interested in the role of women in agriculture and has carried out research on this topic for the European Parliament, the European Commission, the FAO, and the Scottish Government. Emily M.L. Southard is an MS/Ph.D. student in Rural Sociology and International Agriculture and Development at Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in women’s empowerment in agriculture, climate change and gender in agriculture, and gender and migration. Her current work focuses on Cambodia. Forrest Stagner is a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in Rural Sociology and International Agriculture and Development at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a BA in Political Science and a Master of International Studies from North Carolina State University. He completed a 27-month Peace Corps service in rural Zambia, then later went on to complete an 11-month service with Peace Corps Response at the University of Makeni in Sierra Leone. His research interests are in the areas of smallholder agriculture and climate change resiliency with a special emphasis on livestock as a climate change adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ann R. Tickamyer is Professor Emerita of Rural Sociology and Demography with affliations in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. She specializes in gender and development, rural poverty and livelihoods, and gender, disaster, and climate change. Shakara Tyler is received her doctorate from Michigan State University (MSU) studying Black agrarianism and agroeoclogical education in the Department of Community Sustainability. She has served as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the MSU Department of Philosophy exploring the histories and contemporary formations of Afro-Indigenous Ecologies. She currently explores participatory and decolonial research methodologies and community-centered pedagogies in the food justice and food sovereignty movements. xv

Contributors

Hannah Whitley (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at Penn State. Her Master’s work explores how socially constructed identities complicate barriers and opportunities for agriculturalists and connect to broader institutional inequities that perpetuate these problems. To learn more about Hannah’s thesis, visit www.thefemalefarmerphotovoiceproject.org.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Deanna Behring,Assistant Dean and Director of International Programs at Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. She and her offce staff have provided tremendous support for this project, with a special acknowledgment to Ty Butler and his work in organizing the workshop for the book.We would also like to thank CGIAR for their support of the Gender Research Intensive Training for gender post-doctoral scholars at Penn State and their support for the workshop for the book. Jacqueline Ashby spawned the original idea for this training, which has enabled us to bring together a dynamic group of interdisciplinary scholars at Penn State. Since that time, we have formed Gender Equity in Agricultural Research and Education (GEARE).This dynamic and growing network supports new research on innovative and sustainable gender-integrated development practices and works to build gender-focused capacity among scholars, practitioners, and producers.We also acknowledge the support of the Strategic Networks and Initiatives Program and Gary Thompson in the Offce of Research and Graduate Education at Penn State’s College of Agriculture. We would also like to deeply thank all of the women and men (or people) across the world who work hard, often under trying circumstances, to produce food for us all.

xvii

INTRODUCTION Carolyn E. Sachs, Leif Jensen, Paige Castellanos, and Kathleen Sexsmith

Academics and development practitioners are increasingly recognizing the importance of gender issues in agriculture and food security. Beginning with Ester Boserup’s formative work on women in agricultural development in 1970, the feld of gender and agriculture has grown over the past several decades with important studies and insights from across the world. Gender relations in agriculture are shifting globally along with changes in production practices in agriculture, the organization of production, the structure of value chains, climate, the global pandemic, and national and multinational policy. In some regions, this has compounded the ongoing feminization of agriculture, as women assume more of the labor on family farms and in corporate agriculture. Nevertheless, women, compared to men, often experience limited access to land, labor, capital, credit, and extension services in agriculture (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2011). Women also often fll precarious wage employment positions in agriculture in which they are vulnerable to harsh labor practices and inequitable compensation. Moreover, the increasing control of the corporate sector in agriculture in both the North and South creates new stresses and pressures on men and their ability to fulfll masculinity norms in agricultural communities. Many scholars in the US and Europe focus on changing gender relations on family farms, including shifts in who identifes as a “farmer,” changing gender divisions of labor, and the connection between gender and sustainable and organic agriculture. At the global level, priorities as refected in the United Nations’ sustainable and millennium development goals (SDGs and MDGs, respectively) emphasize the importance of gender equity and women’s empowerment in obtaining food security and ending hunger.As a result, research and development policies and practices have been implemented to understand gender inequities in agriculture and to increase women’s empowerment on farms and in agricultural value chains. Some emerging, innovative research and policies look at transformations of gender identities and efforts to achieve more equitable and satisfying agricultural livelihoods for both women and men. Data collection methods emphasize the importance of collecting sex-disaggregated data, ethnographic insights, and developing more nuanced tools to better understand women’s position and role in agriculture and inform more equitable policies.

1

Introduction

Organization and topics This handbook on gender and agriculture provides a useful reference for both scholars and practitioners interested in the feld. The volume also helps to chart the future of the feld by providing the latest theoretical and empirical innovations by leading and upcoming scholars. Chapters cover major theoretical issues as well as critical empirical shifts in gender and agriculture.We selected topics of both historical and emerging importance to capture groundbreaking work on gender and agriculture by scholars and policymakers. We attempted to cover issues of gender and agriculture in most regions of the world and to recruit contributors from those regions as well. Most of the chapters provide an overview of the topic on a global scale, and some chapters focus on the particular region where the author works. The book is organized into four parts that represent issues at different scales, from the global to the levels of the community and individual identities. Part 1,“Institutions, markets, and policies for gender and agriculture,” covers the gender dimensions of agricultural policies, the organization of agriculture, and different trade regimes. Part 2,“Land, labor, and agrarian transformations,” deals with gendered access to land, labor, and technology. In addition, the part covers how agricultural transformations, such as climate change and sustainability, impact gender relations. Part 3,“Knowledge, methods, and access to information,” addresses gendered access to critical agricultural knowledge and technical information as well as advances in gender research methods. Part 4,“Farming people and identities,” concerns issues of farmer identities, femininity, and sexuality, as well as farmworkers and farm families. The parts are inclusive of diverse regions, topics, and approaches in order to cover the breadth of each thematic area. There are other emerging topics, such as gender and agrobiodiversity, men and masculinities, and women’s leadership, that we were not able to include in this volume as separate chapters, but many of these issues are addressed in other chapters.

Refection on the process The institutional and intellectual context within which this volume emerged has shaped its form and approach.We describe that context here and refect on the process followed to produce this handbook to provide readers with a fuller understanding of the collaborative effort involved. This work is rooted in the Gender Equity through Agricultural Research and Education (GEARE) initiative of the College of Agricultural Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, USA. GEARE consists of a highly interdisciplinary cluster of faculty and graduate students who seek to initiate and respond to new opportunities for research, instruction, and evidence-based outreach that address the intersections of gender with agricultural and environmental sciences. Broadly, this dynamic and growing network supports new research on innovative and sustainable gender-integrated development practices and works to help build gender-focused capacity among scholars, practitioners, and producers. On the research side, GEARE has been anchored around a suite of projects that have brought social and natural scientists together to study gender and agriculture in Honduras, Cambodia, Ghana, the United States, and elsewhere.With respect to capacity building, GEARE’s efforts have been rooted in intensive training in gender-attentive social science research methods designed for agricultural scientists from all disciplines. Known as the Gender Research and Integrated Training (GRIT) program, made possible with generous funding from the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), our team has been able to reach successive cohorts of CGIAR gender scholars who work in over 20 different countries with our intensive training. Several co-authors in this volume were involved in the GRIT program as instructors or participants. 2

Introduction

GEARE and GRIT provided the substantive foundation, intellectual motivation, and core network of scholars that served as the point of departure for this volume.This and other professional networks provided an important basis to recruit scholars from around the world.The editors, in consultation with other GEARE colleagues, inventoried critical topics within gender and agriculture. For each topic, we sought leading scholars from within the GEARE and GRIT networks and beyond to craft the chapters of this handbook. Once authors were identifed and had written their initial drafts, Penn State hosted and CGIAR supported a workshop in June 2019 at which many of the chapters were thoroughly vetted and discussed. It is noteworthy that presentations of the chapters were not given by the authors themselves, but by primary and secondary reviewers who had read the papers in advance.The authors were then given a chance to respond.This proved to be a highly effective mechanism to build a collaborative spirit among all authors who attended and to identify emergent themes and commonalities across chapters. We discussed the challenges of bridging and encompassing a global perspective on a topic, how much of the author’s voice and identity to include, and how to adequately cover large topics in short chapters. As a group, we developed and discussed these challenges, refecting on the process of putting together a chapter of this nature, and hopefully strengthening the fnal products. Ample time was set aside at the conference for authors to rework their chapters. Finally, the workshop also featured panel discussions on gender and agriculture research that focused on bridging North–South intellectual divides and on emerging research topics.These panel discussions generated ideas that appear throughout this volume.

Part 1: Institutions, markets, and policies for gender and agriculture At the structural level, institutions at the global, national, and local levels impact gender and agriculture, including who has access to land, resources, and knowledge. National governments, markets, and women’s farm organizations institute various policies and strategies to address issues of gender in agriculture and food security. This part begins with a chapter by AroraJonsson and Leder exploring gender mainstreaming in agricultural organizations. They use examples from the North and South to illustrate themes in the literature on gender mainstreaming, including the focus on entrepreneurship, lack of acknowledgment of women’s unpaid work, the gap between policy rhetoric and practice, the lack of women in decision-making, as well as the sometimes problematic championing of men as leaders in gender mainstreaming. A major critique of the gender mainstreaming efforts in agriculture is the failure to confront structural inequities, such as land ownership. Pyburn and Kruijssen’s chapter addresses gender and agricultural value chains.They explain that the bulk of studies on women, gender, and value chains show how agricultural value chains can be particularly exploitative of women. Efforts to enhance women’s participation in value chains focus on multiple and sometimes conficting goals of achieving gender equality and enhancing value chain performance. While recognizing the conundrum of trying to improve gender relations within a neoliberal market system, they argue that transforming gender relations within these structures is important at this time. Bain looks specifcally at how private voluntary food standards (PVS) that address gender equity can improve working conditions for women. Wage employment in agriculture is low paid, insecure, part-time, and has few benefts for both men and women, but gender discrimination is rampant with women often working in the lowest-paid and most precarious positions. Nevertheless, many companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are attempting to establish standards that enhance the position of women and move toward more gender equity. Research does show that in some instances, PVS can improve women’s working conditions 3

Introduction

in agriculture in terms of wages, work hours, and health and safety. Bain asserts that women’s primary responsibility for reproductive and household labor is never addressed by private frms which they see as outside their purview. Portman focuses on gender and food sovereignty.The concept of food sovereignty emerged largely through the work of La Vía Campesina as a critique of the corporate food system and FAO’s defnition of food security. She argues that gender equity and women’s empowerment were part of the food sovereignty movement’s agenda from the beginning. However, she worries that the other goals of the food sovereignty movement may confict with gender equity and that certain solutions, such as honoring the family farm or maintaining cultural traditions, may reproduce gender inequity. Van der Burg presents the most recent advancements of gender integration in international agricultural research and also research that is in development. She argues that institutions, in promoting their work on agriculture-related sciences as “science for impacts”, implicitly acknowledge their societal contexts, but in-depth cooperation of life and social scientists has proven to be diffcult. She shows how fve distinct research orientations largely overlap and can be linked in their common societal context.With recent examples she highlights how this has led to fruitful ways to further explore the integration of a gender dimension as intersecting with other social dimensions while aiming at improving both gender equality as well as agricultural livelihoods. Finally, Newton’s chapter focuses on the gender, agriculture, and nutrition nexus. She argues that many previous approaches to studying gender and nutrition focused on women as household providers of food and caregivers and therefore places the responsibility of ensuring household nutrition on women without understanding the gender and power relations in the household. She suggests using a food systems model and incorporating an intersectional perspective and new measures of empowerment to understand and deliver appropriate gender, agriculture, and nutrition efforts.

Further research questions and approaches The fndings from the chapters in part 1 point to the following list of questions and possible approaches to future research: •

•

• •

Intersectional approaches ensure that the different social categories studied (age, ethnicity, sex, race, socioeconomic standing, citizenship, etc.) are the “right” ones to meet the intervention or study objectives. Such an approach would include disaggregated analysis of different types of food system outcomes compared across different groups and multiple intersections of marginalization. Examine institutions rather than focusing solely on women’s capacities and gender norms. What structural and institutional elements support women’s empowerment and create space for the transformation of gender dynamics? Such an approach will help alleviate the pressure for transformation that is placed on women when they become the sole objective of study and development programming. Analyze gender differences in food system outcomes across different food system typologies to understand the consequences of food system archetypes on different types of women and men. Studies of gender and agriculture should look beyond production to processing, marketing, and post-harvest activities, in which women are more likely to be involved. Studying gender and agriculture requires consideration of the societal context of agriculture widely;

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Introduction

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both how gender in agriculture is impacted in sector-specifc ways but also how alternatives can contribute to the common society beyond food supply. Include analyses of sexual harassment and gender-based violence. Sexual harassment is pervasive in many agricultural work contexts, and gender-based violence is widespread in the household, community, and workplace. However, these topics are under-studied, perhaps because they relate to the reproductive sphere rather than agricultural production itself, and deserve more attention.

Policy and implementation Part 1 also points toward the following set of possible policy and programming actions: • • • • • •

Be careful of solutions that reinscribe women’s traditional and undervalued roles in agriculture, food systems, and nutrition. Efforts to enhance women’s participation in the formal market and value chains must also address domestic labor. The state could play a greater role in support of women’s unpaid care labor. More women, and particularly minority women, should be sitting at the decision-making tables of agricultural institutions, such as national research institutions, policymaking agencies, and international research centers. Policy needs to address the gap between rhetoric and practice in gender mainstreaming within institutions. Further change of agricultural organizations is needed as they reimagine agriculture to be inclusive of not only women, but all genders, sexualities, and expressions of gender, and of the heterogeneities existing among women and among men. Remember that gender is about women and men and how they relate. While some projects come a long way in reframing initiatives using a gender lens, this remains a challenge. Much work still focuses mostly on women and reaching women rather than transforming gender relations.

Part 2: Land, labor, and agrarian transformations This part addresses gendered access to land and other agricultural and natural resources in the context of agrarian transformation. Petrzelka focuses on women farmland owners, particularly in the Midwest of the United States, who do not operate their farms. She fnds that women often do not exercise decision-making power on how their land is farmed and managed, even when they own the land. Moreover, women often cede power over their land because they are viewed as placeholders between farming generations, they might not have experience farming, and they are involved in complex social and community relations with the person renting and farming their land. She gives examples of positive experiences for women who join groups that have encouraged them to participate in farming decisions. Chung’s chapter on gender and land-grabbing demonstrates how gender is central but often neglected in the land-grab debate. She focuses on fve areas where gender is essential in understanding land-grabbing, including 1) consultation and negotiation, 2) access to land and livelihoods, 3) compensation and resettlement, 4) labor relations, and 5) political reactions from below and above. She argues that land-grabbing involves processes of displacement, dispossession, and exploitation that are deeply gendered.

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Introduction

In their chapter, Ransom and Stagner provide evidence that women and men beneft differentially from different animals and animal products.They discuss how two livestock systems have evolved, including the industrial livestock system typical of the Global North and the smallholder livestock system that characterizes animal production in the Global South. They focus on gender and livestock production in Sub-Saharan Africa, where many smallholder households depend on animal products for their incomes, savings, and consumption.They identify three gendered aspects of livestock, including 1) income and markets, 2) health and nutrition, and 3) r