Food Security, Productivity, and Gender Inequality - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 277

developing countries, women operate small farms (in most of South Asia, 80% of farm-
ers cultivate under two hectares). Landlessness has also been growing. Women, in any
case, have historically been largely landless, in that most own little or no land them-
selves, even if their families own some. A vast proportion of them works as unpaid labor
on family farms, or as laborers on the fields of others, or under insecure tenure arrange-
ments on land obtained through the family or markets (World Bank 2007, 80). In most
regions, the “self-employed” women are typically those working on family farms where
the land is owned by spouses or male relatives, rather than by the women themselves.
Although few countries collect country-level gender-disaggregated data on land or
asset ownership, information gleaned from those that do, and from small-scale studies
in others, shows a substantial gender inequality. In most of South Asia, except Sri Lanka,
for instance, few women own land (Agarwal 1994). In Nepal—a rare country that col-
lected information on landownership by gender in its 2001 census—women were found
to own land in only 14% of landowning rural households (Allendorf 2007). In India,
although there are no comprehensive data for ownership holdings, the Agricultural
Census of 2010-2011 shows that women held only 12.8% of all operational (i.e., culti-
vated) land holdings covering 10.4% of the operated area (GoI 2010-2011). In rural
China, women constitute an estimated 70% of the landless since they are not alloted use
rights in community land under the household responsibility system, when they relo-
cate on getting married or divorced (Li 2003: 4).
Within Asia as a whole, the gender gap in access to land is much larger in South Asia
than in Southeast Asia; and within South Asia the gap is larger in the northern belt
(northwest India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan) than in south India and Sri Lanka (Agarwal
1994). Underlying these regional variations are differences in laws, culture (especially
postmarital residence: distant marriages reduce access), ecology-linked cropping pat-
terns (e.g., women's work contribution is more visible in rice than in wheat cultivation),
ethnic and religious diversity, political freedoms, and overall development. In Africa,
again, we see substantial gender gaps. In Ghana, women hold land in only 10% of the
households relative to 16-23% among men (Deere and Doss 2006). In Kenya, women are
5% of registered landholders. In Latin America, too, there are notable gender inequalities
in land ownership (Deere and de Leon 2001; Lastarria-Cornhiel and Manji 2010). But
even when women have access to land, their control over it (in terms of rights to lease,
mortgage, or sell it, or use it as collateral) tends to be more restricted than men's.4
A comparison of land held by male and female headed households is also reveal-
ing.5 Household surveys, compiled by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)
for 20 countries, show that male-headed households (MHHs) operate much larger
farms on average than female-headed households (FHHs). In Bangladesh, Ecuador,
and Pakistan, for instance, the farm size of male household heads is twice that of female
household heads.6 Moreover, Anriquez (2010) finds that rural FHHs have a higher share
of elderly dependents (over 64 years of age), whereas rural MHHs have a higher share
of child dependents. Female-headed households are therefore likely to be more labor
constrained than MHHs which would have access to youth labor as the children grow to
adulthood.