AGROFUELS EVEN WORSE FOR WOMEN

There was a popular television show in the 1960s called The Big Valley in which Barbara Stanwyck ran a huge cattle ranch and bossed a whole bunch of cowboys around. That’s not what this is about.

In the third world, there are millions of householders, often women, for whom subsistence farming really means “subsistence” as in “survival or not survival.” The boom in agrofuels - biofuels cultivated by big agro - are threatening to put them out of “business” as agribusiness moves in.

Agrofuels development is rapidly becoming controversial as more and more drawbacks to its production, from rising food prices to deforestation, result from it.

In the service of profitable but inefficient agrofuels production for energy-hungry economies, big plantations take over the land, cut down the rainforests, use up the resources and pollute with fertilizers and pesticides. At the same time. as emphasis shifts away from food production to the growing of fuels crops, competition for food commodities drives food prices up.

As usual, the little guy suffers most. And in the case of agrofuels, the little guy is often female.

Andrea Rossi and Yianna Lambrou, co-authors, Gender and Equity Issues in Liquid Biofuels Production; Minimizing the Risks to Maximize the Opportunities: “Large-scale plantations for the production of liquid biofuels require an intensive use of resources and inputs to which smallholder farmers (particularly female farmers) traditionally have limited access.”

Like the marketplace forces driving agrofuels developers toward devastating deforestation, these normal economic forces appear to require policy checks.

Rossi and Lambrou: “The potential depletion (or degradation) of natural resources associated with biofuels production may place an additional burden on rural farmers’ work and health, in particular on female farmers. In a study of three Sub-Saharan African countries…women spend, on average, more time than men on water provision: 700 hours a year in Ghana, 500 hours in Tanzania, and 200 hours in Zambia; women also tend to collect higher volumes of water compared to men…women spend, on average, more than 800 hours a year in Zambia and about 300 hours a year in Gambia and Tanzania collecting firewood. If biofuels production competes, either directly or indirectly, for water and firewood supplies, it could make such resources less readily available for household use…[forcing] women, who are traditionally responsible, in most developing countries, for collecting water and firewood, to travel longer distances…”

And they won’t be riding fine mounts like the one Barbara Stanwyck rode.

We're not in The Big Valley anymore. (click to enlarge)

‘Biofuel production can marginalize women’
April 24, 2008 (Press Trust of India)

WHO
United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO); study authors Andrea Rossi and Yianna Lambrou

No Barbara Stanwyck but a lot of women and children. (click to enlarge)

WHAT
Gender and Equity Issues in Liquid Biofuels Production; Minimizing the Risks to Maximize the Opportunities

WHEN
2008 publication.

Fully 2/3 of the harm is from Big Business - and it is expanding. (click to enlarge)

WHERE
- The study focuses on impacts of increased agrofuels production in developing countries.
- Many examples are drawn from studies of women in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- On big agrofuels plantations, women are generally in even more subjugated and disadvantaged roles than the men who work the fields.

WHY
- Big agrofuels operations are absorbing much of the available land and resources in developing nations. They are also increasing the levels of detrimental fertilizers and pesticides.
- Political policies that incentivize agrofuels development may be equally detrimental to the people presently surviving on the land.
- The study authors contend that policies need to be put in place to protect householder farmers (who are often women).

This scene has no gender bias. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
From the study introduction: “The production of liquid biofuels is rapidly increasing in developing countries, due mainly to the establishment of large-scale biofuel feedstock plantations1. This results in potential socio-economic benefits2, particularly in terms of agricultural employment, as well as risks, which tend to be context-specific… This paper represents a first attempt to go beyond the traditional gender and biofuels debate, which has focused on the gender-differentiated health impacts of household use of solid biofuels. For a comprehensive evaluation of the potential effects of liquid biofuels production on people’s economic and social well-being in developing countries, understanding the gender related implications of such production in these countries (particularly in specific socioeconomic and policy contexts) is essential.