Food Security, Productivity, and Gender Inequality - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 289

and because labor could be saved (Foster and Rosenzweig 2010). Moreover, a group
would be better placed to enter into nonexploitative contract farming arrangements that
(as noted) typically exclude small farmers and women, or include them under exploit-
ative conditions.15 Within a group, it would also be easier to transfer knowledge about
improved farming techniques to a second generation, especially to adolescent girls
who could be future farmers and farm managers. In addition, groups would deal better
with short-term shocks, such as rising input prices, and the long-term effects of climate
change. Collective effort is necessary, for instance, for conserving soils, water, and for-
ests. Potentially, these benefits of joint investment and cultivation can extend to both
land owners and land lessees. Socially, working in a group can help women overcome
disabling social norms that restrict their public interactions in conservative cultures,
by drawing on the support of other women. In community forest management, for
instance, women are found more likely to attend meetings, speak up for their interests,
and take on leadership roles when they constitute a critical mass of 25-30% of the group
members (Agarwal 2010a, 2010b).
Overall, therefore, we would expect the poor to be better protected, both as producers
and as consumers, if they form groups. As producers, they would have better prospects
of overcoming their production constraints and moving from being deficit to surplus
farmers. As consumers, they could more effectively undertake income smoothing and
enjoy welfare benefits. Can this potential be fulfilled in practice? Known examples of
group farming suggest so.
There are diverse examples of small farmers cooperating successfully, including in
terms of joint planning and investment in farm inputs; collective marketing of pro-
duce via cooperatives and producer companies; joint investment in irrigation and other
lumpy inputs; and most particularly, farming collectively by pooling resources, includ-
ing land (owned, purchased, or leased in). Successful group farming with land pool-
ing can be found especially in the transition economies and in parts of South Asia. The
groups are constituted of families in the former and of poor rural women in the latter
(see Agarwal 2010c for details).
Countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe that undertook large-scale collectiv-
ization during the 1950s to 1970s, de-collectivized in the 1980s and 1990s, thus enabling
farmers to revert to individual family farming. However, many families in countries
such as Kyrgyzstan, Romania, and East Germany, voluntarily chose to form new group
enterprises (with friends, relatives, or neighbours), by pooling their land and other
resources to farm collectively on the restituted land, or by continuing in much down-
sized former collectives. The productivity in these group enterprises is found to be sig-
nificantly higher than in individual family farms, since, as a group, they could overcome
constraints arising from small land size, labor scarcity, a lack of access to machinery, and
so on.16
In the second type of example, drawn mainly from India, the groups consist only of
women. The earliest initiative relates to Andhra Pradesh in south India and dates from
the 1980s. With the support of the Deccan Development Society (DDS, an NGO),
poor, low-caste women in the drought-prone Medak district have been leasing in or