Abstract
This paper studies the relationship between the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and market orientation of farm production in India. This is the first time that the WEAI has been used in an Indian agricultural context and the first time that it is being associated with market orientation. We used data on 1920 adults from 960 households in the Chandrapur District of Maharashtra and classified the households into three groups—(1) landless, (2) food-cropping, and (3) cash-cropping—that reflect increasing degrees of market orientation. We foind that women are disempowered in two major domains of agriculture—resources (access and decision-making) and leadership (group membership). A multivariate regression analysis shows that empowerment levels were significantly higher for women belonging to cash-cropping households, followed by food-cropping and landless households. Other significant determinants of empowerment scores are women’s age, education level, and household-level characteristics such as ownership of livestock, irrigation, electricity, and amount of land owned. As a secondary objective of this paper, we find that women’s empowerment in agriculture was also significantly associated with their decision-making in non-agricultural domains. The strong relationship between market orientation and empowerment levels suggests that linking women to markets can be a pathway to enhancing their empowerment in agricultural domains. Ensuring their ability to make decisions related to the cultivation of crops and their participation in the sale of those crops, with associated income, can be some areas for which relevant policies can be designed, tried, and studied.
Highlights
IntroductionWomen account for 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries and slightly more than 30% in South Asia and India (FAO 2011)
Across the three different farming systems, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is lowest in the landless group (0.7) and highest in the cash-cropping group (0.8)
The log odds of a woman having autonomy in decisions related to minor household expenditures, family planning, seeking healthcare, child feeding, and visiting their maternal homes are higher when the woman is empowered in agriculture, relative to the log odds of a woman being able to make decisions in these domains
Summary
Women account for 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries and slightly more than 30% in South Asia and India (FAO 2011) Their access to productive resources (such as land and livestock), inputs (fertilizers and improved seeds), and services (credit, extension) for agriculture reflects a Bgender gap^ that most often is rooted in social norms specific to a given geography and culture. It is in the same context that women carry out many responsibilities within households, in addition to agricultural labor (e.g., caregiving of children and the elderly, fetching water and fuel, and tending to domestic chores) (FAO 2011) This disparity in access to productive resources, inputs, and services may result in women’s lower agricultural productivity and less control of household income and decisions, as well as barriers to adoption of new technologies or practices. Very little research has systematically examined the connection between farming systems and the status of women, that is, their level of empowerment relative to men, in the domain of agriculture
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