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| Women picking cotton in Sanghar Photo credit: Collective team |
Pakistan’s employment trends show a steady feminization of the agricultural sector. Almost three-fourths of the female labour force is employed in agriculture, and the proportion of women working in agriculture has increased more than 10 percent from 2001-02 to 2012-13. However, the agriculture sector is not very friendly to women, especially to pregnant and/or lactating mothers. The health status of mothers working as agricultural labour and their children is alarming. Women who work in agriculture are far more likely to be underweight and to have children who are wasted and stunted than women who do not work in agriculture. According to DHS 2012-13, out of all mothers who are working in the agriculture sector, 29 percent are underweight, 13 percent of their children are wasted and 52 percent are stunted.
With clear data on the impact of agricultural
work on women and their children, why hasn’t more been done to improve
outcomes?
In Pakistan, the Agriculture Extension and the
Livestock and Fisheries departments are managed as separate administrative
domains and provincial subjects, and are engaged in various development
projects with the help of domestic and foreign funding. However, most of these
projects seem to be focused more on improving yield and productivity rather
than the workers themselves. In Sindh, the Agriculture Extension department is
investing in farm-level irrigation management, and improving the quality
of seeds and land fertility. The Livestock department is working with foreign
funders on the maintenance of veterinary hospitals for animal healthcare,
breeding and maximizing milk produce.
In addition to this focus on productivity,
another issue arises from gender disparities in hiring at the departmental and
local field levels. Both the Agricultural Extension and the Livestock and
Fisheries departments are comprised of predominantly male officers and field
assistants at lower-level administrative units. In Sindh, these departments
often advertise field based jobs with no preference for women’s employment.
This results in agricultural policies and programmes that are often framed for
the benefit of male farmers, ignoring the conditions of the female agricultural
workers.
In Pakistan’s typical customary laws, land entitlements
mostly concern men, who are the authorities in handling agricultural business
such as water management, decisions on types of crop planted, purchasing inputs
and marketing. Women in sharecropping tenant families often do unpaid work on
farm land and in caring for livestock, and women in labourer families are
seldom paid directly for their paid work. It is a conspicuous fact that women
farmers/agricultural workers are not even modestly recognized as stakeholders
in the Agriculture Extension or Livestock and Fisheries policy realm.
I think it is time that the public
Agricultural Extension and Livestock and Fisheries departments, in their
advisory service capacity, engage with women farmers and workers as
key stakeholders so that their provincial services can be
progressively feminized. Explicit recognition of women farmers/agricultural
workers as stakeholders can lead to rapid changes in the status of women at the
community level, and this outcome can drive agricultural extension policy
paradigm to be more gender and nutrition-sensitive.
*This blog was first published on the Agrilinks website on 27th July 2017: https://agrilinks.org/post/recognizing-female-agricultural-workers-and-implications-extension-policy
