Working Time of Farm Women and Small-Scale Sustainable Farming in Austria

Abstract

Ester Boserup promoted a focus on women’s role in agriculture as a new perspective through which to understand the link among economic, technological and agricultural development. Her work has been considered a starting point in understanding the importance of women’s role in development globally.Her work remains important for analysing agricultural development and sustainability issues in Austria today. Time use is a crucial factor when making decisions on production strategies on Austrian farms. Currently, farmers aim to avoid having longer working hours and less income than employees from other sectors. Technological change can diminish the workload of farmers, but it does so mainly in regions that are favourable for large-scale industrialised agriculture. Sustainable agriculture with a focus on mixed production and the maintenance of cultural landscapes in a lively region must be attractive for young people, men and women alike, to keep them working on farms.The on-going structural change in agriculture, with its implications for ecology and society, is one of the well analysed and documented long-term socioecological changes in Austria. Building models is one way to use this scientific knowledge as well as experts’ and farmers’ expertise for developing future scenarios and regional strategies for sustainable development.This paper presents an agent-based model with single farm households as agents within the ecological and socio-economical setting of an Austrian region. The model assesses effects on land use patterns and socio-economic conditions induced by changes in the farms’ environment, such as changes in subsidies on the European and national level, changes in agricultural policy and changes in market prices of agricultural products. The decision-making process of each agent is simulated within a “sustainability triangle” of ecological, economic and social dimensions. Time-use data are used to integrate a gender perspective in the decision tree of farms, which was developed in a participatory process with agricultural experts and farm women of the region.Three scenarios were developed and analysed, as follows: a trend scenario, a globalisation scenario and a sustainability scenario. The current problems of decreasing farm activities and increasing forests could be reduced at a certain level with the measures assessed in the sustainability scenario. However, as the model results show, in the sustainability scenario the unequal distribution of workload on women farmers would increase. This result must be considered when thinking about ways to enhance the success of any effort towards sustainable development.