This paper studies womens empowerment in northern Mozambique as it relates to agriculture, considering in particular the factors that lead to womens managing the plots that they nominally control. Women control about 30 percent of the plots in the data but manage only about 70 percent of those plots. Using a unique panel dataset, the study finds that women are more likely to manage plots when households have historically had access to off-farm labor, typically completed by men.
This study was undertaken to assess farmers preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for various climate-smart interventions in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The research outputs will be helpful in integrating farmers choices with government programs in the selected regions. The Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) was selected because it is highly vulnerable to climate change, which may adversely affect the sustainability of the rice-wheat production system and the food security of the region. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can mitigate the negative impacts of climate change and improve the efficiency of the rice-wheat-based production system. CSA requires a complete package of practices to achieve the desired objectives, but adoption is largely dependent on farmers preferences and their capacity and WTP. To assess farmers choices and their WTP for the potential climate-smart technologies and other interventions, we used scoring and bidding protocols implemented through focus group meetings in two distinct regions of Eastern and Western IGP. We find that laser land leveling (LLL), crop insurance, and weather advisory services were the preferred interventions in Eastern IGP. Farmers preferred LLL, direct seeding, zero tillage, irrigation scheduling, and crop insurance in Western IGP. Through the bidding approach, farmers implicitly express their WTP for new technologies that could transform current agricultural practices into relatively low-carbon and more productive farming methods. But actual large-scale adoption of the preferred climate-smart technologies and other interventions would require access to funding as well as capacity building among technology promoters and users.
This paper estimates the potential effects of achieving the agricultural goals set out in Iraqs National Development Plan (NDP) 20132017 using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. The findings suggest that raising agricultural productivity in accordance with the NDP may more than double average agricultural growth rates and add an average of 0.7 percent each year to economywide gross domestic product during the duration of the plan. As a consequence, the economy not only diversifies into agriculture, but agricultural growth also lifts growth in the food processing and service sectors. Achieving the yield targets for cereals (especially wheat) and for fruits and vegetables will have the largest impact on economic growth and household incomes. Household incomes will rise by an estimated 3.3 percent annually. This increase in household incomes will benefit the poorest households and female-headed urban households the most due to a combination of lower food prices and higher incomes from labor and land. Reaping these benefits from agricultural growth will critically depend on the implementation of policies and investments to ensure that additional agricultural produce can be marketed efficiently domestically and compete with imports.
Increasingly, womens property rights are seen as important for both equity and efficiency reasons. While there has been debate in the literature about women are better off with individual rights in contrast to rights jointly with their husband, little empirical work has analyzed this question. In this paper, the relationship of womens individual and joint property ownership and the level of womens input into household decisionmaking is explored with data from India, Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania. In the three African countries, women with individual landownership have greater input into household decisionmaking than women whose landownership is joint; both have more input than women who are not landowners. The relationship with other household decisions is more mixed, as is the relationship between housing and input into household decisionmaking. No similar relationship is found in Orissa, India.
At a time when donors and governments are increasing efforts to mainstream gender in agriculture, it is critical to revisit long-standing wisdom about gender inequalities in agriculture to be able to more efficiently design and evaluate policy interventions. Many stylized facts about women in agriculture have been repeated for decades. Did nothing really change? Is some of this conventional wisdom simply maintained over time, or has it always been inaccurate? We use longitudinal data from Ghana to assess some of the facts and to evaluate whether gender patterns have changed over time. We focus on five main themes: land, cropping patterns, market participation, agricultural inputs, and employment. We add to the literature by showing new facts and evidence from more than 20 years. Results are varied and highlight the difficulty of making general statements about gender in agriculture.
The challenge of addressing food security is not simply a matter of ensuring that all people have enough food—or energy (calories)—to live a healthy life. A much more daunting problem is to ensure that poor people have access to nutritious1 and high-quality diets. Typically, poor households subsist on monotonous staple-based diets; they lack access to nutritious foods, such as fruits, vegetables, animal source foods (fish, meat, eggs, and dairy products), or wild foods of high nutrient content. Lack of diversity in the diet is strongly associated with inadequate intake and risks of deficiencies of essential micronutrients (Ruel 2003; Leakey 1999; Arimond et al. 2010). The resulting deficiencies have farreaching health and nutrition consequences, both in the short and the long term. Economic constraints, lack of knowledge and information, and related lack of demand for nutritious foods are critical factors that limit poor populations’ access to such foods.
We examine the role of gender in adoption and diffusion of orange sweet potato, a biofortified staple food crop being promoted as a strategy to increase dietary intakes of vitamin A among young children and adult women in Uganda. As an agricultural intervention with nutrition objectives, intrahousehold gender dynamics regarding decisions about crop choice and child feeding practices may play a role in adoption decisions. Also, most households access sweet potato vines through informal exchange, suggesting again that gender dimensions of networks may be important to diffusion of the crop. We use data from an experimental impact evaluation of the introduction of OSP in Uganda to study how female bargaining power, measured by share of land and nonland assets controlled by women, affect adoption and diffusion decisions.
Evidence exists which shows growing disillusionment with and disinterest in agricultural-based livelihoods among the youth in Africa south of the Sahara. This disillusionment raises concerns for the future of agriculture for the developing world as it can lead to higher rural urban migration, unemployment and lowered agricultural productivity. The engagement of youth in agricultural policy formulation processes is seen as one avenue for motivating youth engagement in agriculture. This research seeks to develop a contextual understanding of the level of engagement of youth in agriculture thus providing evidence which can be used to stimulate youth involvement in the sector. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study analyzes the determinants of the engagement by southern African youth in agricultural policy processes using Malawi as a case study.
Almost two decades have passed since China first enacted legislation to protect farmland from conversion to nonagricultural use. Yet hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land are still developed to urban area each year, raising the question of whether the legislation is effective in preserving farmland from development. This paper examines the effectiveness of the Basic Farmland Protection Regulation in protecting high-quality farmland from urban development in China in the first decade after it came into effect (1995?2005). The theoretical basis for this study is a spatial urban development model with a splitting equation. The empirical evaluation is conducted with georeferenced, longitudinal data on more than 2,000 counties in the country. Results indicate that the Regulation was effective in preserving farmland with high productivity potential only during the period 1995?2000. There is no evidence of effectiveness of the Regulation in protecting lands with good irrigation conditions or lands more suitable for growing major food grains. Farmland development induces the conversion of non-farmland to crop production. This substitution effect declined from 1986 to 2005 and is therefore less likely to be exaggerated by the enforcement of the dynamic balance strategy.
The 'Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook' provides an up-to-date understanding of gender issues and a rich compilation of compelling evidence of good practices and lessons learned to guide practitioners in integrating gender dimensions into agricultural projects and programs. It is serves as a tool for: guidance; showcasing key principles in integrating gender into projects; stimulating the imagination of practitioners to apply lessons learned, experiences, and innovations to the design of future support and investment in the agriculture sector. The Sourcebook draws on a wide range of experience from World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and other donor agencies, governments, institutions, and groups active in agricultural development. The Sourcebook looks at: access to and control of assets; access to markets, information and organization; and capacity to manage risk and vulnerability through a gender lens. There are 16 modules covering themes of cross-cutting importance for agriculture with strong gender dimensions (Policy, Public Administration and Governance; Agricultural Innovation and Education; Food Security; Markets; Rural Finance; Rural Infrastructure; Water; Land; Labor; Natural Resource Management; and Disaster and Post-Conflict Management) and specific subsectors in agriculture (Crops, Livestock, Forestry, and Fisheries). A separate module on Monitoring and Evaluation is included, responding to the need to track implementation and development impact. Each module contains three different sub-units: (1) A Module Overview gives a broad introduction to the topic and provides a summary of major development issues in the sector and rationale of looking at gender dimension; (2) Thematic Notes provide a brief and technically sound guide in gender integration in selected themes with lessons learned, guidelines, checklists, organizing principles, key questions, and key performance indicators; and (3) Innovative Activity Profiles describe the design and innovative features of recent and exciting projects and activities that have been implemented or are ongoing.
