Large-scale land deals,global capital and the politics of livelihoods: Experiences of women small-holder farmers in Chisumbanje,Zimbabwe

Abstract

Large scale land acquisitions by foreign conglomerates in Zimbabwe have been a recurrent phenomenon within the last five years. This has led to land deals being negotiated with state, individual and nongovernmental actors, leading to the production of agro fuels. This article investigates how the large scale commercial land deals have affected the livelihoods of women small holder farmers, the role of global capital in entrenching discrimination of women and how the politics of resource use and distribution has become a central force in shaping livelihoods in Zimbabwe's communal areas. The article is based on field work that was conducted in Ndowoyo communal area, in Chisumbanje village, from July 2011 until April 2012. The methods used for collecting data were in-depth interviews with the women, interviews with officials from the Platform for Youth Development, a nongovernmental organisation, Macdom Pvt Ltd and Ratings Investments, focus group discussions and personal observations that involved interactions with the women. In 2011, Macdom Pvt Ltd and Ratings Investments, both bio fuels companies owned by Billy Rautenbach started green fuel production operations in Chisumbanje and this has led to the altering of the livelihoods systems of women smallholder farmers. The argument seeks, first, to demonstrate how the company‘s green fuel production systems have led to the loss of land for women and the redefinition of tenure in a communal area. Secondly it explores how the company has been involved in political issues that have undermined the role of development for the women and, thirdly, the article investigates how the women have created livelihood alternatives in an area which has been transformed from a communal rural area into almost an urban area. It concludes by suggesting the need to give primacy to women centred notions of agency in coping with the negative implications of commercial land deals on women‘s livelihoods.     

Precarity and Vulnerability: Rubber Plantations in Northern Laos and Northern Shan State,Myanmar

ABSTRACT

In northern Laos and Northern Shan State in Myanmar, there has occurred a rapid expansion of rubber plantations, both by large economic concessions and by smallholder farmers. The impact of the introduction of rubber differs by place. This article analyses the impact of the introduction of rubber in two villages in Northern Shan State and two in Luang Namtha Province, Lao PDR. We differentiate vulnerability and precarity while assessing the changes that women and men have experienced, which allows us to problematise the long-term vulnerability of seemingly well-adapted farming households. We argue that the strategies that farmers have chosen to improve their situation today will lead to unsustainable livelihoods in the long term. We also link the analysis of vulnerability and precarity to changes in household gender relations. Notwithstanding increased precarity, rising household cash incomes and external support have improved women’s position in some places while hardly affecting gender relations in others.     

Temporeras and Household Relations: Seasonal Employment in Chile's Agro-Export Sector

Abstract — This paper considers how the growth in non-traditional fruit and vegetable exports has affected female employment patterns and the consequences this may have for household and gender relations. Within export agriculture, there has emerged a demand for specifically female labour, providing rural women with employment opportunities that had not previously existed. The majority of the female workers have only seasonal work and this has led to their designation as temporeras. Through a variety of interview material drawn from the experiences of women living and working in Region IV and VI, the paper seeks to reveal the complexities involved in attempting to conceptualise women's involvement in this emergent labour market. The composition of the household and the level of household income are important factors in determining women's labour force participation. The case studies appear to show that in spite of the hard work and unprotected conditions, working as a temporera is a desirable employment for women. The paper argues that the sweeping changes in the agricultural sector, in which women had previously been marginalised as'unpaid family labour', have created opportunities for them to rework household relations.     

Motherhood and Extradomestic Work in Urban Mexico

Abstract— This article analyses the meanings attributed by Mexican women of different social classes to motherhood and extradomestic work, as well as life experiences of family planning and child care. Information for the study was provided by 79 in-depth interviews with women who were either married or living with a partner who contributed regularly to the family income. The findings suggest that cultural norms regarding motherhood change far more slowly in urban Mexico than child-rearing or fertility control practices. Many women from different social classes still consider motherhood as their main source of identity and only a very educated and privileged group speaks with ambivalence regarding their mother's role. In contrast, more women are ready to accept child-care substitutes, especially if they find satisfaction in extradomestic activities, or carry them out because of personal or family necessities. Finally, the analysis points out that most urban women in Mexico, particularly the younger and more educated cohorts, are very much aware of the costs involved in children's education and rearing, and have acted accordingly, using contraceptives and limiting their family sizes. 0 1997 Society for Latin American Studies     

La mujer en México: inequidad,pobreza y violencia

This article explores the main problems that Mexican women endure, especially those which arise from the inequality that they face in numerous social milieus. Despite the undeniable progress that has been made with respect to women's rights and equal opportunities, full gender equality still seems like a distant ideal for Mexico. There have even been important setbacks, such as access to healthcare, legislation that has been enacted that does not respect women's decisions over their bodies, or in the persistence of various forms of violence that they bear. This article will begin by exploring the advancement in rights which women have achieved, in order to later describe the problems that Mexican women still face in terms of work, health, social security, education, poverty, politics, and the violence which they still encounter.     

Collectivism or Isolation? Gender Relations in Urban La Paz,Bolivia

Latin American women's extensive collective action outside and inside the household has been paid much attention in the literature over the years. Only a handful of studies have challenged the arguments that Latin American women generally organise together and show solidarity with one another. This paper argues that women's collective action in contemporary urban Bolivia is relatively weak, both outside and within the household. The consequence is that women are isolated to a degree not hitherto recognised, an isolation women cope with in different ways.     

The Gender Deficit: Everyday Practices of Differentiation in the Chilean Labour Market

We focus on the reproduction of gender inequality in the labour market, analysing everyday practices of social boundary demarcation that exclude women from accessing resources at work. We argue that women's diminished position in the labour market – or gender deficit – is a result of taken‐for‐granted, day‐to‐day practices, conditioning the distribution of resources. Taking Chilean professional women as a case study, we focus on labour market practices that uphold gendered evaluation criteria, reproduce social classifications, and engender exclusion through social boundary work that limits women's access to labour market benefits and rewards.     

Migration and the reconfiguration of Malaysia

This article examines the social impact of the 1997 financial crisis in South Korea. Although the crisis was short-lived, it has created major ripples all across the country, profoundly affecting the Koreans' lifestyle and family life as well as their values and worldview. In spite of the magnitude of the financial crisis and its social impact, scant scholarly attention has been paid to the issue, although the causes and economic impact of the crisis have been amply discussed. In view of this, the article examines major social changes brought upon by the financial crisis. The article probes, for example, how employment patterns have been deeply affected, whereby a majority of workers are now irregular workers or are underemployed. The article also demonstrates how the people's perception of work has changed and how the income gap between the rich and the poor has widened. Also discussed are, among others, the continuing discrimination against women in the workplace, rising divorce rate, increase in immigration and value conflicts over the relevance of Confucianism in contemporary Korea. In addition, the article examines the agency of the Korean people in reacting to or coping with the changing circumstances.     

How the Global Pandemic Intensifies Vulnerabilities for Colombia's Women Social Leaders

Women social leaders in Colombia say that the biggest danger posed by the global pandemic comes not from contracting the virus, but rather from non-state armed groups taking advantage of the quarantine to violently pursue social and territorial control. This article details three phenomena that highlight how existing vulnerabilities for women social leaders have been sharpened by the global pandemic: (a) women's community work increases while state and institutional support decrease; (b) armed groups' ability to target violence increases while women's ability to self-protect decreased; and (c) armed groups' ability to act with impunity is increasing as access to justice is limited.     

Die Geschlechtersegregation beim Berufseinstieg – Berufswerte und ihr Erklärungsbeitrag für die geschlechtstypische Berufswahl

In the German labour market, occupational sex segregation remains very stable, especially for persons with vocational education at career entry. The present study examines the explanatory power of work values for gender typical occupational choices of those persons, using data of the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP). Human capital theory postulates that women prefer jobs that can be combined with family responsibilities, whereas men have higher preferences for jobs offering extrinsic resources. Furthermore, from socialization theory it is assumed that women value social aspects of work as more important than men. Those supply side theories expect that the described preferences are associated with working in gender typical occupations. Analyses however show that only social work values have effects that are in line with the theoretical arguments. Therefore, socialization theory seems to explain occupational sex segregation among persons at career entry better than human capital theory; an assumption that is underlined by an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. Furthermore, especially for women gender typical occupational choice is affected by a traditional parental gender role behavior, for example a traditional division of domestic labor between parents (intergenerational transmission).     

Paid work and socio-political consciousness of garment workers in Bangladesh

During the era of globalization, while international capital and world market factories are shaping the course of industrialization and “development” in many countries, it remains to be seen how far such “development” is conducive to increasing and improving women's paid work specifically, and labour rights, and empowerment in general. Using my research in Bangladesh, I juxtapose garment workers' experience to assess the implications of world market factories on women workers, their wages, work conditions, skill development, organizational links, and empowerment. In this article, I argue that women's multiple responsibilities and specific social locations as women and paid workers create distinctive form of activism and political consciousness. In addition, I suggest that the intersections of women's lives in the family and the workplace and their networks with other women create what Morgan and Bookman (1988) call “double consciousness” as women and as workers. This double consciousness generates multiple forms of resistance and social movements against the nexus between the state, multinational and local entrepreneurs.     

Centralized planning and economic reforms in a mountainous region of Vietnam

This study contributes to an understanding of the diversity of agrarian systems in the mountainous regions of northern Vietnam. By examining over 100 small family farms, we identified the major changes in production systems that have occurred over the last 50 years. Access to land, population migration, and individual initiative were the three major factors driving household differentiation. State policies had substantial impacts on all three factors, making the State the key driving force of differentiation. After years of central planning, farmers are now free to make their own choices as they interact with their new environment: the market economy.

Effective farmers' organizations need to be established to provide farmers with the information and decision-making tools they need to adjust their production to fit the market. Somewhere between State control and total independence, community-based natural resource management schemes are needed to ensure that small family farms in the isolated mountainous areas are sustainable in the face of ineluctable macroeconomic changes.     

How Elites Can Maintain their Power in the Middle East: The Junblat Family as a Case Study

Elites are more than the producers of wealth and power; elites reproduce themselves and control the masses by means of norms and values. For many years, the Junblat family of Lebanon has based its leading role on the idea of protecting the Druze community's interests and rejuvenating Druze glory. Despite the enormous political, economic and social transformations the area has witnessed, the Junblat family has succeeded in maintaining a continuous tradition of leadership and power from the early seventeenth century to the present. This article will argue that the explanation behind the durability of this political power lies in what might be called the ‘ideology of adjustment’ on one hand and preserving organic communication with the masses on the other. Many conclusions can be drawn from the case of the Lebanese Junblat family regarding behavioural patterns and structures of traditional elites in the Arab Middle East. The most important is that traditional elites have no commitment to ideology other than to the degree that it allows them to adjust, serves their self-preservation and helps them to gain as much power as they can.     

Gender inequality in Russia's rural formal economy

Gender inequality in Russia's rural formal economy is examined using quantitative and qualitative data. Rural women continue to be underrepresented in farm managerial positions, and gendered income differences remain the norm. Rural women are underrepresented because they continue to have responsibility for most of the housework and child care. The traditional division of labor inside the household continues to dominate, thereby affecting women's career trajectories and earning potential. Value change about gendered roles in the formal economy has been minimal.     

CITY OF GHOSTS

This article links motorbike use with the work and living conditions of young migrant women in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) to highlight an example of the social and economic consequences of migration-assisted economic development in Southeast Asia. It traces a woman's life from her teenage years in the market of a small seaside town in Vietnam to her purchase of a motorbike, migration to HCMC, move into a rooming house, and work in a major department store as a cosmetics saleswoman. The reflections on urban life by the woman and her roommates lead the author to consider the notion that the condition of the unregistered and temporary migrant is like that of the unrequited wandering ghosts (co hon), which are said to invisibly roam the city's streets. While the author details the political economy of marginalization that situates the migrant saleswoman, he also shows how she struggles within it to constitute herself over time rather than in the present and to free herself from abstraction-producing social categories, both old and new.     

STILL PLAYING WITH FIRE

This coauthored article is part of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan's (SKMS) efforts to participate in the coproduction of dialogical/dialectical relationships between theory and practice, the lettered and the unlettered, academia and activism, and the fields inhabited by members of SKMS, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and academic scholars.We narrate two intertwined tales based on dialogues among four members of SKMS in the context of producing the first four issues of SKMS's community newspaper, Hamara Safar. The first tale focuses on the political transformation of Sangtin, an organization that was conceptualized in 1998 as an NGO for rural women's empowerment based on the mainstream donor-based model of social change. A three-year–long process of critical reflection and writing by nine women on the politics of caste, class, religion, and gender in the context of rural development and women's empowerment programs — as well as on the global politics of knowledge production — paved the way for the emergence of SKMS, an organization that today consists of over five thousand poor farmers, manual laborers, and their families, most of them dalit. SKMS believes that definitions and processes of empowerment must evolve from rural people's struggles and active participation, instead of emerging from donor institutions, NGO headquarters, university-based experts, or think tanks—and then being applied to the rural people. The second story focuses on some of the hurdles in the path of SKMS as it remains grounded in feminist principles, but refuses to work exclusively with women. Together, the two intertwined stories map the archaeology of the shift from Sangtin to SKMS and some of the larger questions pertaining to “women's issues,” “feminist politics,” and “transnational collaborations” that this shift has opened up.     

The hidden battle: HIV/AIDS in the household and community

The AIDS epidemic will cause significant increases in illness and death in prime‐age adults, which will manifest itself through negative social, economic and developmental impacts. The epidemics economic impacts at the household level are decreased income, increased health‐care costs, decreased productive capacity and changing expenditure patterns. Three coping strategies are observed: altering household composition; withdrawing savings or selling assets; and receiving assistance from other households. Following death, the impacts break out of the family into the community, primarily through orphaning. In the near future, the sheer number of orphans may overwhelm the capacity of existing community resources to cope. The distribution of the impacts of the AIDS epidemic falls unevenly among the genders. In Africa, women have higher infection rates and bear a disproportionate burden of the care of HIV‐positive people. Orphaned girls are more vulnerable to exploitation.     

DEMANDING DAUGHTER DUTY

The transnationalization of rural villages in the northeast region of Thailand through women's transnational marriages is reconfiguring gendered familial obligations in the form of “daughter duty.” This article shows how economic and social remittances from dutiful village daughters who are married to foreign husbands connect local villages and communities to the global, bypassing Thai nation-state institutions and agencies that have inadequately addressed the disadvantageous position of Thailand's Isan region. This transnational process depends on daughters' (and mothers') commitment to their care work and to their role as nurturers of the family, kin, schools, temples, and community—the community being seen as a familial extension in this matrilocal society. Women's upward economic mobility and their adherence to valued filial roles contribute to the community's increased favorable acceptance of women with foreign partners, leading to a greater number of transnational marriages. This article offers a nuanced reading of the so-called phua farang phenomenon (transnational marriages) based on an analysis of transformations brought about by daughter duty and the agrarian changes taking place in villages in Thailand's Isan region as the result of the rapid growth of transnational marriages.     

Social cohesion for the unfinished business of land reform in South Africa

Abstract

This article aims to discuss social cohesion as an alternative instrument to address the ever dragging land question in South Africa. Although there are various activities that have been undertaken and policy programmes that have been proposed, all those initiatives have not been able to completely translate land reform policy into practice as intended. Other than recognising the ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ policy which appears not to have been internalised by the stakeholders concerned, this article also presents a transformative approach for both white land owners and black emerging farmers to work together in a tolerant and amicable manner. The most critical step that is required for land reform in the whole country is a public consultation process for government to be able to engage with all parties and to put a list of informed alternatives on the table for discussion. Obviously, that includes the willing seller willing buyer policy. Based on the outcomes of such discussions, the government has to play a mediation role to heal the racial division caused by the Natives Land Act of 1913. In short, this discussion presents social cohesion to heal the past without land owners perceiving transformation policies as apartheid in reverse.     

Globalisation and the changing management of migrating service workers in the Asia pacific

The advance of globalisation depends in fundamental ways on the continued flows of transnational labour it has stimulated. For semi-skilled and unskilled service workers these flows are managed through numerous controls imposed by states, employers, labour brokers and even by the expectations of their families and communities of origin. This article concentrates on female service labour originating in Indonesia and the Philippines, destined for Hong Kong and Taiwan. It emphasises the collective (family and community-based) nature of the worker's entry into this type of work. It looks at multiple intersecting discourses that shape, construct and attempt to manage the worker's behaviour at different stages of the migration cycle. It gives particular attention to the receiving workplace: the household, and in some instances, the household-based enterprise. The article shows that workers placed in these households are simultaneously governed by contractual relationships and by historically and culturally derived rules reflecting the household's functions as a property-holding, administrative and patriarchal kinship unit. Globalisation has brought far-reaching changes to patterns of labour migration, but the household as a workplace retains important vestiges of these older patriarchal discourses, and ambiguities remain about the emergence of free labour in domestic work.