RAJEEV BHATT

Women cultivators are not recognised as farmers and they do not get the benefit of agricultural extension services or subsidised inputs or other publicly provided services for farmers. Here, a file picture of a woman at work on a potato field at Dohri village near Hapur in Uttar Pradesh.

LAST Monday – October 15 – a friend of mine sent me a message, reminding me that it was World Rural Women’s Day. I was intrigued, because I had not actually forgotten – I did not know about it to begin with. Yet, it is indeed an obvious need and an eminently sensible idea – to have a designated day to bring the productive contributions of rural women out of obscurity in public perception at least once a year.

A quick look at some websites provided some facts that confirmed what I had guessed all along: that rural women play a major role in agriculture and ensuring food security and stability all over the world, yet this role is barely recognised and hardly ever rewarded. It has also become more difficult and demanding in recent times.

According to one of the organisations that promotes Rural Women’s Day, rural women(who are still mainly engaged in agriculture) number at least 1.6 billion, and account for more than a quarter of the total world population. They produce, on an average, more than half of all the food that is grown: up to 80 per cent in Africa, 60 per cent in Asia, between 30 and 40 per cent in Latin America and Northern countries.

Yet, they are hardly ever recognised as farmers in their own right, and are not provided any of the associated rights. So, globally it is estimated that they own only 2 per cent of the land and receive only 1per cent of all agricultural credit. Only 5 per cent of all agricultural extension resources are directed to women.

Apart from direct involvement in agriculture, women are crucial to rural off-farm income-generating activities, and of course to all the household-based tasks associated with social reproduction, including care of the young, the sick and the old. They typically bear the responsibility for family nutrition and household provisioning, all of which is part of the unpaid work they routinely perform.

But the gender gaps remain strikingly more than in unpaid labour: two-thirds of all illiterate people are female. And, apparently, the absolute number of rural women living in poverty has doubled since 1970.

In India, the situation is no different from this global pattern, and may even be somewhat worse because of the continuing agrarian crisis in large parts of the country. Most of the women employed in India are engaged in agriculture, whether as workers in household farms owned or tenanted by their families, or as wage workers. In fact, agriculture continues to account for nearly two-thirds of the working population in the rural areas and 70 per cent of rural women’s employment.

Yet, it is precisely livelihood in agriculture that has tended to become more volatile and insecure in recent years. And women cultivators have actually been worse hit because they already were insecure in terms of lack of land titles as well as access to credit and output markets. The lack of land titles for women is so well known that it scarcely requires to be repeated. Despite much activism by women’s groups and others around the demand for giving women equal rights to the land and many pious declarations by governments, the situation is still extremely unequal and women farmers are regularly denied their rights to land.

Women cultivators are also rarely recognised as tenant farmers, even when they are the main farmers in the household. All this has other consequences, in terms of raising the costs of cultivation for women farmers. Because they do not have titles to land, they do not have the collateral that would enable them to access institutional loans or join credit cooperatives. Because they are not recognised as farmers, they do not get the benefit of agricultural extension services, or subsidised inputs, or other publicly provided services for farmers.

Women cultivators typically also have much worse access to crop markets, so they can end up getting a worse price for their output. Some surveys suggest that they also find it more difficult to hire labour in peak seasons.

These existing disadvantages have been compounded by trends in Indian agriculture since the early 1990s, which have moved much more cultivation, especially in the rain-fed regions, away from subsistence farming or cultivation of traditional staples that required little in the way of monetised inputs to cash crops that rely heavily on purchased inputs and assured water supply.

Farmers, whether male or female, are now forced to enter markets for inputs, output, credit, water. And all of these markets have operated in ways that have reduced the viability of cultivation in the past decade and a half.

At a fundamental level, of course, the problems of farming are evident, ranging from frequent droughts and soil degeneration to the lack of institutional credit and insurance leading to excessive reliance on private moneylenders; from the difficulty in accessing reliable and reasonably priced inputs to the problems of marketing and the high volatility of crop prices.

But the crisis is also reflected in other features of the rural economy, such as the decline in agricultural employment and stagnation of other employment. Since women are heavily involved as agricultural wage workers, this necessarily affects them negatively as well.

All this has been associated with not just growing evidence of distress migration of workers, but also declines in food consumption.

The various rounds of the National Sample Survey show declines in per capita calorie consumption even among the poor, while the latest National Family Health Survey shows the persistence of undernutrition among women and children below three years in particular.

Despite the explicitly stated aims of the government of reviving and regenerating agriculture, thus far the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre has not been able to address – and indeed may have worsened – the two most important issues: that of providing food security to the population as a whole, and that of providing livelihood security to cultivators.

This is not because there are no apparent solutions. The Farmers’ Commission has provided a detailed plan of action in most areas, and farmers’ organisations have also been raising valid demands. Women’s organisations have, similarly, demanded expansion, restructuring and strengthening of the reform of the procurement and distribution system for foodgrains.

If the government is still not moving sufficiently on these crucial issues, it may be because there is still not enough social and political pressure to ensure that it does. On a day when we applaud the contributions of women farmers, it is also worth considering what we can do in India to improve their conditions of life and work.•