Productivity, Poverty, and Population Pressure: Female Labor Deployment in Rice Production in Java and Bangladesh

Abstract

In Java and Bangladesh, the two most densely settled agrarian economies on earth, rice is more than the chief source of food. Access to income for much of the rural population is governed by patterns of labor use in rice production. Even the largest farms in both countries are tiny by most standards, but a high proportion of the work force is hired. While agricultural wage laborers are not always the poorest of the poor, many are landless or near-landless. Despite these and other structural similarities, the performance of rice agriculture in the two countries has been very different. In comparison with that in Bangladesh, the Javanese rice sector has been a dazzling success. The main sources of growth have been fertilizer and irrigation expansion rather than the intensification of labor use per hectare. Indeed, it has long been maintained that the intensity of labor use in Javanese agriculture has been carried to extremes, although some claim that a reversal of this process is now underway (Collier). While there are wide regional differences in Bangladesh, rice production and productivity on average have tended to stagnate since the 1960s. In further contrast with Java, some maintain that the intensity of labor use in Bangladesh agriculture is much lower than it could be and that, while agriculture could not fully employ the labor force at its disposal, it could absorb more labor productively (Khan). A key difference between the two areas is that in Java women perform a high proportion of rice field operations, whereas in Bangladesh they do not. This paper seeks to show how the mobilization and deployment of female labor is crucial to understanding differences in the performance of the rice sector in the two countries and to assessing the distributional implications of changing patterns of rice production.