(Taken from Ester Boserup’s groundbreaking work, Woman’s Role in Economic Development, chapters 1 (‘male and female farming systems’) and  2 (‘the economics of polygamy’).

Why are we emphasizing farm work? Because in the non-industrial world, that’s the work in which most adults, and many children, are engaged, mostly growing their own food.

World staple crops:

• Asia (rice);
• Africa (millet, sorghum, yams, cassava, rice);
• Latin America (maize, beans)

Boserup classifies different farming systems based on sexual division of labor. Here are three general types:

1. almost exclusively done by women (characteristic of many African systems)
2. predominantly by women (mixed)
3. predominantly by men (where commercial, mechanized farming prevails)

When it comes to modern farm technology making its way to non-industrial societies, men were often targeted for adoption of farming innovations (things like plows, high-yield seeds and chemicals), and their greater receptivity and productivity became in a sense self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, they were seen as the more productive farmers largely because they were targeted with more productive farm technologies. The reasons are complex–women’s time poverty, patriarchal culture, predominantly male extension agents more comfortable working with men, biases of the change agents (the development agencies, so to speak), etc.

Agricultural systems

Shifting cultivation versus intensive cropping (e.g., rice paddy production)–Are these different systems practiced in different geographic areas? How does women’s access to land, labor differ?

Is the idea of fallow clear? In general, when a farmer uses a plot of land, the value of that land is in the soil, and plants’ abilities to pull nutrients out of the soil for use by humans as sources of energy. Over time if crops are cultivated each year, the soil’s nutrients become depleted–taken up by plants, or leached through beyond a depth where plant roots can use them (trees may retain them, though). So the farmer has choices–farm a field until nutrients decline, which s/he can observe through declining crop yields, etc. Or add nutrients in the form of fertilizers, organic (manure, mostly) or inorganic (fertilizers), to keep nutrient levels high and allow the fields to be farmed permanently, or at least for a longer period of time.

In resource-poor agrarian societies, people generally fallow–that is, they farm an area until yields decline, leave it to recover (in fallow) for biomass to accumulate and nutrients to be restored–to regenerate the soil’s fertility, in other words–and then at some point, maybe 5, 10, 20 years down the road, when the land is supporting a variety of vegetation and woody plants, they’ll return to it, clear it, burn the cleared vegetation on site, use the ash as fertilizer, and re-cultivate for another cycle.

Thus fields are always cycling from cultivated to some stage of fallow recovery. This is called shifting cultivation. When population densities increase and there isn’t enough land for a fallowing system, people often take advantage of the labor to intensify the production on the land–in other words, find ways to make it more productive from year to year, so they can continue to farm the same piece of land, by applying manure, adding nitrogen-fixing crops, mixing in different crop species for green manure, etc. This takes more labor–lots during the dry season to prepare fiels for the next rains–but labor is what they’ve got (high density populations, remember). In Asia we see this–higher-intensity farming systems, where land, rather than labor (as is the case in Africa) is scarce. In some cases where rains are reliable, people can get multiple crops within the same year, but such systems of production are very labor-intensive. Boserup suggests that population density and the scarcity of land versus labor help explain the division of labor between the genders, the value of women’s reproductive role vis a vis their roles in food production, and we may even be able to see this for instance through differences in brideprice–in Asian culture dowries are often paid to the groom’s family, while in African cultures where women do more agricultural work, bridewealth compensates the bride’s family for the loss of labor.

Agricultural tasks to consider when analyzing division of labor include:

• preparation–tasks: clearing, tree felling, burning, tilling; technology: usually iron axe;
• cultivation–tasks: planting, weeding, fertilizing, pest control; technology: digging sticks, hoes, draft animals;
• harvest–tasks: harvesting (grain, corn, cotton, peanuts, tubers, etc.–the task varies by crop), threshing, gathering, hauling; technology: low-energy, manual
• processing–tasks: de-hulling (pounding), winnowing, shelling, grinding, cooking (fuelwood, water fetching, smokey kitchens, etc.); technology: mortar and pestle for pounding grain, simple fire under iron pot to cook, mostly manual technologies

Role of colonialism in division of labor by gender

Commercial crop campaigns–It was often assumed by the colonists that men would be responsible for these tasks, which for many cultures changed the balance of resource allocation, labor conscription of men. Commercial or cash crops were ways the population could pay taxes–either through giving a percentage of crop to colonial governments, or selling enough to pay taxes ‘owed.’ This was also a way to force farmers to grow the crops the colonial governments sought as raw materials for their own industries back home.

Polygamy (polygyny)

• What are potential benefits, costs to men, women?
• Is there a connection between the type of farming being done and the presence of polygynous households (if so, what)?
• What is the difference between bridewealth and dowry? Is there a connection between the presence of bridewealth or dowry and women’s perceived productive and reproductive value to the (patriarchal) household?

Some questions to ponder

1. When it comes to access to factors of production (which are . . . ), why do women lag behind, and how?
2. Why is women’s farm work statistically invisible?
3. Do women benefit from the presence of landless laborers? Where is one likely to find a class of landless laborers?
4. How has a change from shifting cultivation to plow cultivation led to changes in gender household division of labor?
5. How might the following factors influence the type of farming system:
   1. population differences (e.g., density, land scarcity)
   2. technology differences (e.g., plow)
   3. cultural differences (e.g., polygamy)
   4. economic differences (e.g., commercialization)

Ester Boserup. 1970. Woman’s role in economic development. London: Earthscan Publications.