Editors Introduction

vii
Editorial

Agrarian South: Journal of

Gender Relations Political Economy
5(1) viixii
and the Changing 2016 Centre for Agrarian Research
and Education for South (CARES)
Agrarian Political SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
Economies in the DOI: 10.1177/2277976016668460
http://ags.sagepub.com
South

Renewed concern about agrarian stagnation, poverty and massive land

dispossessions of small peasants produced an upsurge of research and
literature on the new scramble for land in the global South. This left some
of the enduring questions of the agrarian political economy unattended.
There have been recent calls for a new generation of studies which focus
more broadly on the changes in agrarian production systems, transfor-
mations within the peasantry, agrarian labour and land markets, and the
social relations underpinning them and the future of the agrarian political
economy.
While new studies can provide important insights, they are likely to
ignore the gendered character of agrarian change, the importance of
family labour and the vital role of social reproduction in creating value.
And yet, many of the social categories and processes in the agrarian
political economy which are recognized as varied and complicated in
class terms are also gendered. This problem in agrarian studies has per-
sisted, in spite of a respectable body of work which has drawn attention
to the gendered nature of agrarian change in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA),
South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. These
studies have paid particular attention to gendered livelihood outcomes as
a result of gender inequalities in the control of the means of production,
the segmentation of agricultural labour and the burden of reproductive
or care activities on women.
Gender is by no means the only determinant of differences in liveli-
hood outcomes. Relations between households, between employers and
employees, and between households and wider kinship groups are also
critical. However, they cannot be fully understood without attention to
the mutual interaction of class, gender, kinship and other social relations
which produce differences between women and men, and also among
women. Paying attention to gender relations requires the examination of
institutions such as marriage and kinship which regulate social relations
and sanction violations through
and various means,
Environment Urbanization Asia, including
1, 1 (2010):social
viixii
viii Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 5(1)

disapproval, fines, violence and divorce. The conjugal contract, inter-

household labour relations, employment contracts and local labour coop-
eration arrangements within communities are all critical arrangements
within the agrarian economy, as are land, agriculture, labour and social
policy-making institutions.
Several elements of agrarian change are policy driven. There are a
plethora of economic, sectoral and social policies, and programmes at
the global, regional, sub-regional and national levels emanating from
multilateral institutions, donors and governments which have direct and
indirect implications for the agrarian political economy. In particular,
agricultural and land policies and programmes, macro-economic poli-
cies and social policies, programmes and measures need critical review
from a gender equity perspective.
Studies have drawn attention to the blurring of lines between rural-
and urban-based livelihood activities owing to secular migration, strad-
dling strategies and rural unemployment. More recent studies have also
observed the continued importance of family labour in commercial agri-
culture, as well as the increasing involvement of women in hitherto
male-dominated commercial agricultural labour, as farm labourers in
horticulture, contract farmers and commercial farmers in their own right.
These developments have implications for the gender division of pro-
ductive and reproductive labour and gender relations within households
and the wider political economy.

Overview of Special Issue

This special issue on Gender Relations and the Changing Agrarian
Political Economies in the South presents five articles which contri-
bute to ongoing efforts by feminist intellectuals to draw attention to the
gendered nature of the agrarian political economies of the global South.
The five articles contribute to the consideration of a critical question:
what are the agrarian questions of today when examined from a gender
perspective? While three of the articles are on India and the other two
on Ghana and SSA, and are not comparative, the themes they cover and
the theoretical analysis they undertake are relevant for thinking about
agrarian political economies across the global South.
In her article Gender, Land Tenure and Agrarian Production Systems
in Sub-Saharan Africa, Dzodzi Tsikata provides a historical overview of
the gender problem in the agrarian change literature and policies, arguing
that gender inequalities in land tenure systems have shaped, and been
Editorial ix

shaped, by gendered agrarian production and reproduction systems which

have evolved within agrarian political economies since the colonial
period. The article draws attention to the silences in the mainstream
agrarian studies literature, arguing that both the literature and policies
ignore the complexities of womens positions and contributions to agrar-
ian production and reproduction and the gendered nature of capital
accumulation and the proletarianization of rural life. The article illus-
trates the gendered nature of land tenure systems and agrarian production
and reproduction systems and their interlinkages through an examination
of two current land tenure issues within the agrarian political economy:
land tenure reforms since the 1980s and the current scramble for land in
Africa.
Several of the issues raised in the above overview are examined in
fine detail in the other four articles, which either engage with some of
the current debates in the mainstream literature on agrarian issues, or
critique some of the assumptions and conceptualizations of this litera-
ture, or speak to debates within the gender analysis literature on concepts
and policy actions.
Archana Prasads article Adivasi Women, Agrarian Change and
Forms of Labour in Neo-liberal India is a ground-breaking examination
of the gendered nature of semi-proletarianization and proletarianization,
two processes receiving much attention in the agrarian change literature.
In doing this, she takes on a second major discussion in the literature,
that is, the role of communitarian structures and the subsistence economy
in the sexual division of labour within Adivasi communities. In addition
to drawing attention to the larger influence of economic liberalization
and macro-economic processes and the blurred boundaries between
subsistence and commercial activities, she argues that markets neutralize
the influence of communitarian production and distribution systems.
Prasads position sets up a productive debate between those who take a
positive view of communitarian systems of production and distribution,
considering them as protective of the interests of Adivasi women against
the ravages of labour markets, and those more critical of their role and
influence. This debate also has wide resonance in Africa where the
debates have either emphasized the continuing salience of communitar-
ian practices within production systems dominated by informal land
and labour markets, or drawn attention to the ways in which land and
agrarian commercialization has eroded communitarian principles in
production systems.
Gender studies of agrarian change have straddled these positions,
which have been extended to questions such as the value of customary
x Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 5(1)

law in legal pluralist systems. The articles most significant contribution,

however, is its insistence on situating the social relations which structure
the sexual division of labour within the wider agrarian political economy.
As the article argues, these social relations lay the foundations for the
adverse integration of women into labour markets and underline the dif-
ferent degrees of proletarianization and semi-proletarianization. The
insistence on examining the linkages between these two levels is impor-
tant for the African literature as well, because studies have traditionally
focused on one or the other. It also enables a joining of discussions of
proletarianization with some of the observed changes in the agrarian
political economy, such as the feminization of agricultural labour,
observed first in SSA, which has become an important factor in parts of
Asia and Latin America as well.
In discussions of gender relations in agrarian political economies, the
centrality of social reproduction for the capitalist enterprise, as it extracts
super profits from the exploitation of unpaid reproductive work usually
done by women, is highlighted here in different degrees of detail. The five
articles in this special issue all raise this issue. However, the article by
Sirisha C. Naidu and Lyn Ossome, Social Reproduction and the Agrarian
Question of Womens Labour in India, which focuses largely on an expo-
sition of this most central issue of gender analysis, is valuable in this
regard. Using a social reproduction framework, they explore how the
reproduction of rural working class households is rearticulated to capital-
ist production in India. They argue that social reproduction in contempo-
rary capitalist economics depends on the interplay of three fundamental
institutions, households, markets and the state, which act both in concert
and contradiction, and produce an articulation of non-capitalist and capi-
talist forms of production. They show how subsistence production, care
work and other forms of non-capitalist production, mostly performed by
women, support the reproduction of the working classes, thereby subsi-
dizing capitalist production. As these activities are dependent on private
and common lands, land remains a significant factor, albeit one that has
proved insufficient for reproducing the working classes, reducing poverty
and achieving gender equity in the agrarian political economy. At
the same time, the significance of land in capitalist economic growth
is evident in the massive transfer of land from agriculture to mining,
industry, real estate, tourism and infrastructure with gendered impli-
cations for livelihoods. Thus, the agrarian questions of labour and land
are gendered, and need to be so acknowledged in research and policy.
In their article Farm to Factory Gendered Employment: The Case of
Blue Skies Outgrower Scheme in Ghana, Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey,
Editorial xi

Joseph Awetori Yaro and Joseph Kofi Teye contribute to a growing body
of literature on the gender segmentation of production within the differ-
ent models of agricultural commercialization: peasant or smallholder,
contract farming/outgrower and plantation. Their study also speaks to
the gendered character of proletarianization and semi-proletarianization
within the context of an outgrower scheme to produce, process and
package fruit for supermarket chains abroad. Using a value chain analy-
sis, they found that while men dominated the higher earning segments of
production as outgrowers and permanent staff in the processing plant,
women were largely casual labourers of outgrowers and the processing
plant, and family members of outgrowers. The authors, therefore, con-
clude in concert with the recent literature that neo-liberal agricultural
commercialization policies ignore and thus exacerbate pre-existing gender
inequalities. Their findings support the view that outgrower schemes,
which are presented as a solution to the extensive dispossession of small-
holders by large-scale land acquisitions and plantation agriculture,
ignore the near absence of women as outgrowers, which contrasts with
their ubiquity as family members whose labour contributions, though
critical to outgrower schemes, are not recognized.
The nature of the agential power of women of different social groups
and agrarian systems, the role of womens self-organization in bolstering
this power, and state policy responses to the demands of womens organ-
izations constitute a set of critical issues raised in the feminist literature
on womens responses to their subordination and exploitation. Govind
Kelkar and Santosh Kumar Jha take up these issues in their article
Womens Agential Power in the Political Economy of Agricultural
Land. They examine how rural women, as farmers and activists, mobi-
lize themselves to assert their rights to land and related assets, and how
state interventions respond to these demands through legislation and
policy making. Related to this, the article explores the effects of state
responses on womens control of assets and their decision-making roles
within their families. The articles singular contribution is to open up a
critical discussion of various gender equity instruments deployed by
some states in India in response to the demands of organized women in
the agrarian political economy. Furthermore, it enables a critical exami-
nation of the nature and quality of womens agency as a countervailing
force in challenging patriarchal power in a context of limited efforts by
state and social institutions.
These are issues of relevance beyond India in spite of the specificities
of class, caste and gender inequalities in India, and, in particular,
xii Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 5(1)

discussions about the impacts of land titling and registration for women
as individuals or jointly with their husbands. One of the observations
made in the article is the tendency of women who have acquired land to
pass on such land to male heirs. This particular exercise of agency draws
attention to the complexity of policy responses to gender inequalities.
The study concludes that in spite of state policy responses, men are still
largely regarded as heads of households and, therefore, the controllers of
land and assets. This is in addition to low levels of awareness by women
about laws which favour them, their reluctance to claim their inheritance
and ownership rights for the sake of harmonious social relations, and the
lack of economic power, all of which silence women and renders them
without bargaining power. At the same time, there are potential opportu-
nities for policy change which include official acknowledgements of
womens work in agriculture, demands for womens unmediated rights
to land and other assets, increased dissemination of knowledge about
rural womens involvement in agriculture and policy recognition of this
work. This view of the policy context and its opportunities is critiqued by
Naidu and Ossome in their discussion about the limits of policies grant-
ing land to women. There is need to deepen these debates about policy
options in ways that take into account the wider processes of the agrarian
political economy that limit the effectiveness of access to land in address-
ing the agrarian questions of labour and land.
It is our hope that these articles will generate deep and wide debates
in future issues of Agrarian South and other journals that influence the
theorization of agrarian change.

Editors