Nourishing the nexus between gender, agriculture & nutrition

Excited to share our latest published study in The European Journal of Development Research. Access here: https://lnkd.in/g9YrYB6E

We investigate how agri-food & nutrition policy & practice address gender inequality with examples from Haiti, Benin, Ghana & Tanzania.

We find that the widespread emphasis on gender equality in policy and practice generally ascribes to a gender narrative that includes stereotypes of static, homogenized conceptualizations of food provisioning and marketing.

These narratives tend to translate to interventions that use and objectify women’s labor by funding their income generating activities and care responsibilities for other benefits like household food and nutrition security without addressing underlying causes of their vulnerability, making them worse not better.

We argue that policy and interventions must prioritize locally contextualized social norms and environmental conditions, and consider further the way wider policies and development assistance shape social dynamics to address the structural causes of intersecting inequalities.

A feminist political ecology of farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana

This article is published in Gender Place and Culture [link here] where I find that intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities in land access (based on ethnicity, place, age, and class) are due to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming, acutely erratic rainfall and aridity, as much as social norms.

For those who may not have access but are interested in reading the full article, the first 50 downloads are freely available [link here]. Or you can just contact me for further detail.

With the unprecedented feminization of agriculture globally, literature has emerged over the past decade suggesting that gender equality in agriculture could be advanced if gaps in access to farm resources between women and men are reduced. This paper examines gendered farm resource entitlements in northern Ghana. Based mainly on six months of immersive qualitative research, this case study draws from and contributes to feminist political ecology scholarship (FPE) on smallholder farming and agricultural development. The analysis describes some of the intensifying gender and intersecting inequalities (e.g., gender and ethnicity) of land access related to development interventions aimed at commercializing farming. Gender disparities in access to agricultural extension, chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, high yielding seed varieties, tractor services, credit packages and marketing contracts supported by the state, donors and NGOs are also found. FPE is useful for revealing how these gendered resource disparities are related to agricultural commercialization and increasingly erratic rainfall and aridity, making smallholders more vulnerable to land dispossession. Women’s dependence on men to farm while operating under these changing economic and environmental conditions, coupled with their weaker entitlement rights to resources, threatens to push many, particularly ethnic minority women, out of farming altogether. The ways that intersecting identities shape access to land also complicates understandings of the role of community outsiders who are both the dispossessors of land and those who are intensely vulnerable to dispossession. While rural development studies generally consider women’s farm resources compared to men’s, this does little to explain the intensifying intersectional vulnerabilities.