ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study that investigates the demographic, sociocultural, and agronomic aspects of agricultural development under conditions of planned agricultural change. It seeks to answer questions about the nature of food security among smallholder agriculturalists in Africa and about what happens at the household level in terms of male and female participation in farming. Because of increasing male mobility, the basic smallholder farm unit in Malawi is the woman and children. In order to disentangle the factors that contribute to the African food crisis or to food self-sufficiency, a focus on the household level of production is beginning to come to the fore. The invisibility of women farmers noted by Boserup has been corrected, and extension services and planned agricultural change still frequently show a male bias. Most households have the husband for most of the year and as a result have increased land, labor, access to resources, and extension services compared with households without adult males.
