ABSTRACT
Enormous efforts are made by development researchers, and considerable sums of money spent, to discover exactly how much time is spent in field work: preparing the ground, sowing, weeding, pest control, transplanting, harvesting and associated operations. The focus of attention here is, of course, the men, consistent with the persistent bias in data collection observed in Chapter 4. Women are relegated to the unpaid ‘family labour’ category which is itself very inadequately measured, if at all. ‘Nonfarm’ activities are given virtually no attention, and this is consistent with the observation, often made, that men in rural areas do remarkably little productive work other than field work, and that the non-farm work they do can easily be put aside, if necessary, since it is not essential to daily subsistence. This approach is singularly inappropriate to women. If there is one broad generalization that one can make about rural women, it is that their ‘non-farm’ work is strenuous, takes enormous amounts of time, and is absolutely essential to the survival of the family concerned. The division between farm and non-farm activities is a very unhelpful one in terms of measuring the contribution to subsistence made by women and men respectively, particularly with regard to the most basic need of all: food production.
