ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the diversity of women's activities and their knowledge of different crops by discussing their involvement with three specific crops—corn, rice, and coffee. It discusses their work in gardens and with wild plants. The chapter addresses coffee production, a nonfood crop raised primarily in Latin America and Africa. Development planners concerned with women debate whether green-revolution technologies increase or decrease the demand for women's labor and whether the new technologies raise or lower women's incomes. As with maize, new rice varieties are introduced to farmers as part of a package of green-revolution technologies, including seeds, fertilizer, insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides. In the case of maize, the three-sisters method of agriculture has been and continues to be replaced by monoculture, by high-input use, and by large-scale corn production systems. Women's labor forms a central component of rice production in all regions of the world, although the particular forms of gender division of labor vary by region.
