‘Protecting women farmers’

This is apropos a Business Recorder editorial “Protecting women farmers” carried by the newspaper recently. It is true that Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) latest report titled “Protection issues faced by women farmers in Pakistan” is a situationer that has proven to be extremely enlightening.

But the report was found wanting in relation to certain areas of women’s participation in agriculture. For example, the report has stated, among other things, that approximately 74 percent of women and girls engaged in Pakistan’s labour force work in the agriculture sector, which generates 40 percent of household income. “Yet protection issues faced by women farmers in Pakistan remain little known and poorly documented.”

The newspaper has rightly highlighted the issue in relation to land ownership by women by saying that “the importance of land ownership here cannot be downplayed and the government would do well to allot unused state-owned land to women farmers and then provide them with the resources, education and training to support their success.”

The FAO report, however, doesn’t provide any insights into this very critical aspect insofar as the involvement of women in farming or agriculture is concerned as we do not have statistics or data to know how many or what percentage of the women farmers do own farm land in Pakistan. According to the report, “despite the important and varied roles that women play in agriculture, most women farmers do not own the land they work on”.

But FAO just cannot generalize about such a formidable challenge facing women farmers in Pakistan. It ought to have come up with some estimates, however modest, about land owning by women. Consider the following:

In rural India where an identical percentage of women work in agriculture over 12 percent of women farmers own land. In my view, owning land is critical to ensuring emancipation of women farmers, which would certainly end their exploitation to a certain extent. It is true that in Pakistani society agriculture is considered the business of men.

Given the increased participation in farming, they need the recognition and status that they actually deserve. Unfortunately, however, the discussion and conclusions on this subject appear to be trapped within the limits of a mindset that derives its absolute power from a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women, including those in the agriculture sector.

Shehnaz Rafiq Dhillon (Lahore)

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024