Abstract
This paper explores changing production relations in agriculture in context of increasingly widespread and longer-duration male outmigration, as against previous, short-duration and seasonal migration. It investigates how de facto women-heads of households (WHHs) are changing a resilient crop-sharing system in absence of adequate access to productive assets, formal training or experience in farming, and while contributing labour to farming and coping with gendered demands on their time. Based on qualitative inquiry in one of the poorest parts of South Asia, the Eastern Gangetic Plains, the paper shows that a section of WHHs are replacing sharecropping arrangements with fixed-value rental arrangements that resemble commercial contracts. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications of this emerging development.
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Notes
I am using the term ‘women’ whilst being mindful of the class, caste and ethnic diversities within this category in India.
Census of India. See http://censusindia.gov.in/ accessed on 8th July, 2015.
‘Bhagchash’ is sharecropping, bhagchashi is the sharecropper in Bangla and Maithili languages used in the region.
Sharecropping in this part of India has been an extremely contentious socio-political issue, giving rise to left-supported political movements and the renowned ‘Operation Barga’ in West Bengal, in which sharecroppers were registered. This paper does not delve into that literature.
The survey was sponsored by the Australian Council for International Agricultural Development (ACIAR) and managed by CIMMYT’s South Asia office in Kathmandu. The Indian Council Agricultural research (ICAR) Patna office, faculty members of Rajendra Agricultural University and Bihar Agricultural University in Bihar, and Uttarbanga Krishi Viswabidyalaya in West Bengal, and three non-governmental organisations: Sakhi in Madhubani district of Bihar, Anwesha in Cooch Behar and the Institute of Development Effectiveness in Nepal were involved in assisting me to administer the survey instrument within their respective regions. The full technical report is available on the ACIAR website as: Lahiri-Dutt (2014). Experiencing and coping with change: Women-headed households in the Eastern Gangetic Plains. ACIAR Technical Reports No. 83. Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research: Canberra.
This study exclusively concerns women heads of households rather than the effects of agricultural commercialisation on men in comparison to women generally.
ACIAR Scoping Study Team. 2011. Economic, Social and Agricultural Conditions of Eastern Gangetic Plains, Internal Document, New Delhi and Canberra: ACIAR, 3.
Survey data from these districts were not considered in data analysis.
When a survey enumerator asks rural women about their daily activities, many are likely to reply that working at ‘the home’ is their primary responsibility, creating the potential for underestimation in assessing numbers.
Experts also recommend comprehensive ‘time-use surveys’ to obtain a more complete picture of how women and men spend their time in rural areas. It must be borne in mind that the data generated from such surveys are specific to a context reflecting the varying nature of farm duties in different agricultural systems, and are not comparable across those countries. Generally, it is believed that over 75 per cent of the daily time of a rural woman is spent on farming-related activities, including caring for livestock and collecting water.
Official data in India such as the Census made it difficult to identify women-headed households until recently; it is only in the latest census that such households have come to closer attention (see for example, reports highlighting the findings of 2011 Census data by Chandramouli 2011).
A related question that is often asked is: ‘How much of the global agricultural produce comes from women?’ A conservative estimate by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2010 suggests that in the present day, female farmers produce 50 per cent of all food crops. Again, this information has turned into what Cheryl Doss on her (2010) report for FAO call a ‘stylized fact’, in the nature of a metaphor that ‘women hold up half the sky’. She shows that the origin of the claim, that women produce 60–80 per cent of the food in developing countries, is shrouded in myth and overlooks the complementary and overlapping roles that women and men play in agriculture.
This category includes those who provide their land on informal share-cropping arrangements. Note that there are major overlaps within these categories for the nature of WHHs’ complex involvements in farming, their poor self-identification as farmers and the attendant difficulties in running a multi-district, large sample survey of this nature.
In EGP, women earn ~INR100/- per day, with men earning 150 to 160/- (even 200/- if the individual is young and strong). The cash received is in addition to breakfast and lunch.
One maund is roughly 40 kilograms. Maund is a traditional measure often used in rural areas in EGP.
All names have been changed.
One katha is one-twentieth of a bigha. The exact size of a bigha varies through the EGP region.
Abbreviations
- ACIAR:
-
Australian Council for International Agricultural Development
- EGP:
-
Eastern Gangetic Plains
- FAO:
-
Food and Agriculture Organisation
- FGD:
-
Focus group discussions
- ILO:
-
International Labour Organisation
- VDC:
-
Village Development Council
- WHH:
-
Women heads of households
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Acknowledgments
This paper forms one part of the first author’s ongoing research into the implications of feminisation of agriculture in South Asia through the Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project 140101682: Farmers of the Future: Challenges of feminised agriculture in India. She thanks the ARC for this funding. She also thanks the two anonymous reviewers, Dr Zakaria Siddiqui for his assistance with the data, and Mr Mohanraj Adhikari for his assistance in the field.
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Lahiri-Dutt, K., Adhikari, M. From sharecropping to crop-rent: women farmers changing agricultural production relations in rural South Asia. Agric Hum Values 33, 997–1010 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9666-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9666-z