Ensuring a Square Meal

Women and Food Security in Southeast Asia

Theresa W Devasahayam

• Éditeur: WSPC
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813231917
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Genderforschung

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Research on women and food security in Southeast Asia has been limited. The collection of chapters in Ensuring a Square Meal: Women and Food Security in Southeast Asia is one of the first attempts at providing a lens into the linkages between women and food security at the household, community, national and transnational levels. More broadly, the chapters examine women's contribution to the food security of households, resource distribution to produce food, and the purchasing power to buy food. In analysing the various facets to food security in relation to gender, the analyses focus on women and food security within the meanings of "private" and "public", and the extent to which the effects of the two spheres spill over into each other. Given women's critical role in food and agricultural production and provision, Ensuring a Square Meal: Women and Food Security in Southeast Asia assesses the structural forces that enable women to access productive resources and, in turn, ensure sustainable strategies for food security at the household level.

--> Sample Chapter(s)
Chapter 1: Key Issues in Gender and Food Security --> Contents:

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Key issues in Gender and Food Security (Theresa W Devasahayam)
• Food Security in Rural Areas: Alternate Definitions, Measurement, and Gender Issues (Richard Barichello and Rupananda Widanage)
• Indonesian Women and Food Security: Evidence from the RASKIN Programme (Aekapol Chongvilaivan and Thanut Tritasavit)
• The Food Security Programme in the Food-Vulnerable Communities of Java, Indonesia: The Need for a Gender Lens (Titik Sumarti)
• Women's Critical Role in Ensuring Food Security in Southern Vietnam (Truong Thi Ngoc Chi and Thelma R Paris)
• "We Women Know More About the Seeds": Ethnic Minority Food Security and the Gendered Implications of Hybrid Rice in Upland Northern Vietnam (Sarah Turner and Christine Bonnin)
• What Roles Do Women's Status and Household Food Security Play in Relation to Child Nutrition in Vietnam? (Phuong Hong Nguyen, Disha Ali, David B Duong, Nemat Hajeebhoy, Rahul Rawat, and Purnima Menon)
• Property Rights, Food Security, and Gender: The Impact of the Expansion of Palm Oil Plantations on Native Communities in Sarawak, Malaysia (Lee Poh Onn)
• Farming and Food Security: The Role of Remittances among Indonesian Women Migrants (Theresa W Devasahayam)
• What One Hand Gives, the Other Takes Away: Migration, Food Insecurity, and Women in the Philippines (Jorge V Tigno)

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--> Readership: Students and professionals interested in gender studies, Southeast Asian studies and food security studies. -->
Women's Studies;Gender Studies;Food Security;Food Sovereignty;Southeast Asia;Vietnam;Indonesia;Malaysia;The Philippines;Migration Studies;Ethnic Studies;Remittance;Child Nutrition;Food Security Programmes;Rural Areas0 Key Features:

• One of the first attempts at providing a lens into the links between women and food security, both at the household, community, national, and transnational levels
• Aims to highlight the complex linkages between a woman's role in food security in the household, and factors and conditions outside the household context and, in turn, demonstrate that the interconnectedness between the private and public realms
• Fills a gap in the literature on food security in Southeast Asia, aside from numerous reports produced by multilateral organisations and NGOs

Chapter 1

Key Issues in Gender and Food Security

Theresa W. Devasahayam

Gender and Food Security: What Do We Know So Far?

The year 2008 marked a pivotal era in terms of food security. It was in that year that the World Food Programme raised the spectre of a “silent tsunami” of hunger, as people took to the streets to demonstrate and riot in more than 50 countries around the world (World Food Programme, 2008; as cited in Himmelgreen and Romero-Daza, 2009: 2). As in other parts of the world, Southeast Asia has not been sheltered from the trend of escalating food prices, leading to a widespread fear of food shortages at every level of society and, in particular, the household. Since then, policymakers in some countries in the region have been even more attentive to the plight of especially poorer households, by ensuring that relevant mechanisms and policies are put in place to ensure food security and sustainable agriculture. While there might have been a dip in prices of food, oil, and some commodities in the years following 2008–2009, leading many to assume that the food crisis may be over, the stark reality is that the underlying causes of the food crisis, linked mostly to global economic uncertainties, have not been fully solved, as evidenced in yet another food price spike in mid-2012 (Asian Development Bank, 2013). Moreover, while Asia as a whole has experienced rapid economic growth and a general decline in poverty and hunger in recent decades, there have been some countries in the region that have failed to translate positive economic performance into actual poverty reduction, because of various capacity constraints such as inadequate physical and institutional infrastructure, and poor governance. Therefore, it is highly likely that economic uncertainties that lie ahead will further spawn a repeat of the events linked to the earlier food crisis of 2008 and later in 2012, making efforts in improving the levels of food security in the region to be ever more urgent.

Certain groups have been more vulnerable than others in times of a food crisis. Research on food security has focused mainly on how households experience problems with food access and the strategies they use to cope when found in situations marked by food insecurity (Coates et al., 2007; as cited in Himmelgreen and Romero-Daza, 2009; Radimer et al., 1990). In particular, women and children have been the focal point of these studies since they are considered to be the most vulnerable to systemic changes in the social and economic environment compared with men (Himmelgreen et al., 2006; Radimer et al., 1992). In the case of women, poverty compounds their situation as they experience the greatest marginalisation and are prone to employment losses. It is also the households of poor women that tend to be most vulnerable to food insecurity because these women are not able to secure employment elsewhere (Devasahayam, 2010), reiterating a point made by Dreze and Sen (1995; as cited in Rao, 2005: 2,514) that “under-nutrition is related not just to food intake, but also to access to education and health care, employment opportunities and the provision of social security”. The case of India fits this scenario. In India, it was found that while men were able to find non-farm work, leaving agricultural production to women, this in fact did not enhance women’s status or decision-making power in the household but rather increased their work burdens (Rao, 2006). Thus, engaging in agricultural production need not be an empowering experience for women. In fact, a paradox lies here: while many women might play a crucial role in food production in their communities, the likelihood of them and their children being food insecure is much higher than that for men, a point that will be taken up in this discussion later on.

Despite this paradox, statistics from across the world have highlighted how women have made significant contributions to household food security, in addition to economic and agricultural development. It is estimated that worldwide about 43 per cent of the agricultural labour force comprises women (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2011). In East Asia and Southeast Asia, for example, women account for approximately 50 per cent of food production, and overall, make up a substantial proportion of the agricultural labour force: 35 per cent for Malaysia, 47 per cent for the Philippines, 54 per cent for Indonesia, and more than 60 per cent for Thailand, respectively. Women’s responsibilities in agricultural work run a gamut from “producing agricultural crops, tending animals, processing and preparing food, working for wages in agricultural or other rural enterprises, collecting fuel and water, engaging in trade and marketing, caring for family members and maintaining their homes” (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2011: 2). However, it must be noted that the actual contribution of women to agricultural labour may be much higher since women are often regarded as unpaid workers or “household members who [assist] with farm labour” (Blackwood, 2008: 22) and, therefore, are not accounted for in national statistics. In fact, developmental feminists have long criticised official statistics for underestimating the number of women who are economically active. Mies (1982; as cited in Custers, 1997: 215), for instance, slams Indian census data for overlooking the role of rural women who are forced to work and yet “transformed into non-earning housewives” as a result of the commercialisation of agriculture. A similar point on the Indian case was raised elsewhere; it was found that women’s work was documented as “subsidiary work”, in spite of the fact that women took on a full load in farming (Krishnaraj, 2006–2007: 5,385). In that case, the lack of titles to land resulted in the fact that they were not listed as cultivators. That women lack land rights has led to several difficulties for them in accessing resources such as credit and extension services (Rao, 2005), aside from the fact that food insecurity was most felt among the landless or near-landless, and heightened among women (Quisumbing et al., 1995).

In spite of the complex nature of women’s experiences in accessing culturally appropriate and nutritious foods because of food shortages, poverty or lack of purchasing power, or limited access to arable land, the gender dimension in agricultural development strategies that effectively tackle food insecurity among women has not been sufficiently dealt with. In many developing countries, while access to adequate resources is a problem faced both by male and female farmers, women’s access is further compromised because of structural, political, cultural, and social factors. For example, it has been found that development planners, by and large, have favoured male farmers over female farmers (Madeley, 2002; Sachs, 1996), by assuming that men are the farmers and not women since the former are the heads of household, even though they may be working alongside their wives or working for their mothers (Blackwood, 2008). It is difficult, however, to blame development planners for this oversight since domestic responsibilities restrict the mobility of women, making it more difficult for them to attend meetings and training courses (Quisumbing et al., 1995). In the same vein, development planners often assume that men are the ‘store houses’ of agricultural knowledge and that female farmers, if married, relied on their husbands’ guidance, although evidence has shown to be otherwise. Among the Ifugao people of Northern Luzon in the Philippines, for example, because women were tasked with selecting rice, they were also found to be more knowledgeable in this regard than their male counterparts (Sachs, 1996). In fact, in Southeast Asia, rice in particular is symbolically associated with women, although both women and men are involved in rice cultivation. However, when it comes to the religious and ritual aspects of rice growing, women are almost always the main decision-makers (Janowski and Kerlogue, 2007). The case of the Kelabit is distinctive. They say that “women are able to grow rice without men, while men cannot easily grow rice without a woman” (Janowski and Kerlogue, 2007: 10). Moreover, these false assumptions of men’s and women’s roles in farming held by development planners have led to other forms of gender discrimination in farming communities. When new agricultural technologies such as new crop varieties, fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides were introduced to a community, often men and never women become the beneficiaries of such knowledge. Here, the possibility that women might be de jure recognised heads of household (such as widows or divorcees), de facto heads of household (among women whose husbands may have migrated for waged work for extended periods of time), or informal heads (such that they take charge of resources in the household as well as make the decisions within a household) is completely overlooked (Paris and Luis, 1991).

Owing to these misunderstandings of women’s role as independent farmers, women’s participation in agricultural production has by and large been limited to small-scale, informal farming. Among these women are the poor and landless who are also highly dependent on others for work, especially the wealthier farmers on whose farms these poor women would sell their labour. These women would never complain about their work conditions for fear of not antagonising those with whom they were dependent upon for waged work (Blackwood, 2008). Owing to the challenges female farmers faced, in Luzon in the Philippines, poor women were found joining labour groups because this enabled them to work under a pre-negotiated contract (Garcia-Dungo, 2007). Particularly among poor women farmers, the Green Revolution technologies posed as an obstacle to their households’ survival. As these new technologies and new crop varieties were expensive, women from households with small plots of land could not afford to adopt them to increase the yield of their crops (Sachs, 1996). Moreover, because the production of crops such as rice is labour-intensive (Hossain, 1998) and as women face more difficulties to access the new varieties, they tend to struggle to raise their yields and, in turn, their households have a limited capacity to break out of poverty.

That women’s engagement in agricultural production goes beyond the subsistence plane has been a point asserted by some scholars, one of whom is Anita Spring (2000). In fact, she says: “food security at the household level [is] not achieved by subsistence production alone; rather it [is] enhanced by commercial sales that [generate] income to purchase food and a wide range of commodities and services” (Spring, 2000: xi). In other words, the income received through the sale of food commodities enables them to make decisions at the household and farm levels as well as educate children, buy houses and appliances, and engage in enterprise-related networks and organisations. In fact, citing the work of Agarwal (1994), Spring (2000) argues that when men are involved in the commercial production of food, the income they receive goes into non-household expenditures unlike women who tend to direct their incomes into the well-being of family members. Based on a study conducted in Java, it was found that while men had a clear idea about costs and income related to agriculture, women had the added knowledge of domestic consumption (Axelsson, 2008). In another study of Indonesian rural households, Sayogyo (1983) discovered a similar pattern in that women’s labour was a vital source of income for the entire household. Concurring with other studies, it was found that women’s income had a greater effect on household food security and children’s nutrition compared with men’s income, suggesting that men and women spend income differently. The differences may arise because, as Quisumbing et al., (1995: 10) have suggested, “societal and cultural norms may assign women the role of ‘gatekeepers’, in which they ensure that household members, especially children, receive an adequate share of available food”. In other words, women’s contribution to farm work as subsistence farmers is crucial beyond ensuring the crop (Hovorka, de Zeeuw and Njenga, 2009), since their identity within the household is bound up with their food provisionary role (Devasahayam, 2001; McCarney, 1991; Quisumbing et al., 1995; Ibnouf, 2009). In this case, “women are pivots of household food security…[as] they play a crucial role in all the four pillars of food security, viz, availability, accessibility, utilisation and stability of access” (Choudhary and Parthasarathy, 2007: 531).

Invariably, a decrease in household income for women would translate into vulnerability to food shortages, as found in Vietnam (Paris and Chi, 2005). Particularly among poorer households, members would have little choice but to turn to money-lenders in such a dire situation. Thus, raising food production among poorer households would be tantamount to reducing poverty. Particularly in the context of Asia, rice should be at the core of policy attention for food security and poverty reduction, since this grain is the staple of the poor and a source of income for the region’s poorest and most vulnerable farmers (Asia Society and International Rice Research Institute, 2010).

It has also been found that women’s vulnerability to food insecurity has been linked to structural adjustments, goading farmers to move away from subsistence production towards market orientation, where the growth is generally more favourable to males than females, in part, owing to micro-level interventions such as credit delivery programmes. While the positive effects of the diversification in livelihoods on households cannot be denied, the negative effects in the way of a loss of subsistence production depriving the poor of a buffer against periodic shocks to food security, however, has been less understood.

This Book

Bridging the gender gap offers a panacea for solving in part the food security crisis. Focusing the analytical lens on Southeast Asia is significant because research on the links between women and food security in this region has been limited. Moreover, according to the Asia Development Bank (Asian Development Bank, 2012), the Asian region, together with Southeast Asia, has been battered by food security problems in the last few decades in spite of the declines in poverty. In recent decades, many countries in the region have experienced recurrent food price spikes, spurring the resurgence of food shortages. Such a situation in Southeast Asia jeopardises the economic growth of countries, thereby making it increasingly difficult for the region to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, more specifically, the goal to “end hunger, achieve food security and [improve] nutrition…” (Asian Development Bank, 2013; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2016). To date, Southeast Asia is hard-pressed to meet food security demands as a result of unsustainable agricultural reforms, market orientation of agricultural production, environmental degradation, and unsound trade policies, among others.

The collection of essays in this volume assesses women’s food security not only in relation to access to and availability of food, but also in terms of resource distribution to produce food and purchasing power to buy food where it is not produced because of women’s critical role in food production and provision at the household level. In other words, strategies for sustainable food security for households, including those headed by women, should address the structural forces that enable women to access productive resources. Much of the existing literature on food insecurity among women remains focused on women’s work as small-scale farmers, on the one hand, and gatekeepers in their households as they look out for the nutritional status of their family members, on the other (Spring, 2000; Lemke et al., 2003). Some questions with regards to women’s role in food production and provision addressed in the ensuing chapters include: (a) how women’s role in food security has played out at the family/household, farm, state, and regional levels, and how this role has evolved in the last few decades; (b) whether women have equal opportunities compared with men to land ownership since landlessness among women is a specific factor for vulnerability to food security; (c) the factors impeding women’s access to agricultural resources and services; (d) how women have been encouraged or discouraged from producing food crops; (e) the opportunities afforded to women to adopt appropriate inputs and technologies to free up time for income-producing activities; (f) the impacts of food security on the nutritional status of women and children; (g) how female farmers benefit from (in)formal social organisations and agricultural programmes; and (h) how government policies should be reviewed to ensure that the problems that constrain the role of women in food security are addressed.

In analysing these various facets to food security in relation to women, this book aims to open a new vista into the discussion by examining the topic within the meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’. The assumption is that the two spheres of public and private can never be separate and distinct since there are spillover effects from one sphere into the other (Tabrea, 2010), reinforcing the asymmetric “patriarchal dichotomies of man/ woman and public/private” embedded in Western development theory (Wright, 1995: 122). In essence, the chapters in this book seek to investigate “the extent to which the private is operative in the public sphere and, vice versa, the public is operative in the private sphere” (Klaus 2001, translated by Mueller, as cited in Wischermann, 2004: 194) and how these cross-directional spillover effects mediate women’s role in food security. Here, the public/private dichotomy serves as an analytical tool to understand the social world of women and, for that matter, men as discreet groups with differential experiences and concerns in everyday life (Gal, 2002). What the authors found in fact are ‘complex combinations’ of the spillover effects of the public on the private and the private on the public in the context of food security in the household. In this sense, as Susan Gal (2002: 79), quoting Joan Landes (1998), argues: the “line between public and private is constantly being renegotiated” — a phenomena which shores up in all social arenas as well as in the context of food security.

Overview of the Book

That poverty exacerbates food insecurity has been widely recognised by both scholars and policymakers. The corollary of this is that the poor are more likely to face food insecurity than the non-poor (Wight et al., 2014; Oldewage-Theron et al., 2006). Given the strong correlati...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Key Issues in Gender and Food Security
• Chapter 2: Food Security in Rural Areas: Alternate Definitions, Measurement, and Gender Issues
• Chapter 3: Indonesian Women and Food Security: Evidence from the RASKIN Programme
• Chapter 4: The Food Security Programme in the Food-Vulnerable Communities of Java, Indonesia: The Need for a Gender Lens
• Chapter 5: Women’s Critical Roles in Ensuring Food Security in Southern Vietnam
• Chapter 6: “We Women Know More About the Seeds”: Ethnic Minority Food Security and the Gendered Implications of Hybrid Rice in Upland Northern Vietnam
• Chapter 7: What Roles Do Women’s Status and Household Food Security Play in Relation to Child Nutrition in Vietnam?
• Chapter 8: Property Rights, Food Security, and Gender: The Impact of the Expansion of Palm Oil Plantations on Native Communities in Sarawak, Malaysia
• Chapter 9: Farming and Food Security: The Role of Remittances among Indonesian Women Migrants
• Chapter 10: What One Hand Gives, the Other Takes Away: Migration, Food Insecurity, and Women in the Philippines
• About the Contributors
• About the Editor
• Index