From the Centre to the Margins and Back Again: Women in Agriculture at the ILO

Abstract

Women in agriculture play a particularly important role in the economy. But their work—as peasants and as agricultural wage earners—their knowledge, their place in agricultural systems of production and their contribution to global prosperity have only been recognised in recent years, or still lack significant recognition. With changes in systems of production that are related to globalisation, the marginalisation and the workload of women in agriculture has often increased due to the perpetuation of an unequal sexual division of work in agriculture, and due to unequal access to the workforce and to agricultural inputs, technologies, credit schemes and land. One of the main constraints faced by female peasants and agricultural wage earners is the continuous and increasing reproductive work, which rests disproportionately on the most excluded women. Feminist studies have theorised and underlined the centrality of social reproduction, deconstructing what women’s work is and contesting the binary distinction between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. They have, further, shown how the prosperity of the global economy benefits from women’s work, including subsistence production where women play a major role. The focus on women in agriculture has been a starting point for gender and development studies. The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) programmes on women in rural areas have included groundbreaking research, the recognition of women’s unpaid and paid work, and support for women’s empowerment in grass-roots organisations. After having disappeared to the margins, rural women are back at the centre of the ILO’s discussion on rural economies in recent years. The approach is now guided by the Decent Work agenda, which prevails globally in the ILO. We will explore how the ILO’s programmes on rural economies and gender have evolved since the Organization’s inception. We will also consider how the ILO’s analysis and programmes directed at the work of the most excluded women in agriculture could contribute to informing the Decent Work Agenda and changing the organisation of social reproduction and livelihoods.