Special Issue of Latin American Perspectives: Agrarian Movements and Women in Agriculture

Issue Editors:
Norma Giarracca and Miguel Teubal

It is generally agreed that the structural adjustment policies applied throughout Latin America in the past decades have substantially worsened the living conditions of the vast majority of farmers, peasants and agricultural workers. This is pointed out in numerous studies analyzing the impact of neoliberalism on the agricultural sector, not only in Latin America but throughout the world (i.e. Spoor, 2002; Patnaik, 2003; Teubal and Rodríguez, 2002). Although national governments have tried a variety of policies with respect to "opening" to world markets, domestic liberalization and deregulation of all sorts, nowhere have these resulted in increased welfare for a majority of society, much less for those involved in agriculture.

The question that emerges, and which we propose to discuss in this special issue of Latin American Perspectives, is what are the impacts of structural adjustment -- and neoliberalism in general -- on rural women in Latin America?

Women are an important part of the Latin American agrarian universe. In 1990 they represented 13.3% of the agricultural workforce, down from 25.5% in 1970. This proportion was slightly less than their importance in manufacturing, and substantially lower than in services (where they constitute 71% of total workforce). The degree of female participation in the agricultural workforce varied substantially among countries, from 57% in Haiti and 45.2% in Bolivia, down to only 2.9% in Argentina. In between we find Perú with 22.3%, Honduras 24.7%, Brazil 12.9%, Colombia 11.6%, México 11.6% and Cuba with 8.4%. Of the total of 7.5 million women in the agricultural workforce of Latin America, more then half live in Brazil and México, with large numbers also in Haití, Colombia, Perú and Bolivia. It should be noted that these data are not always trustworthy, given the importance of women's non income-earning household labor in Latin American rural societies.

Meanwhile, living conditions have deteriorated substantially throughout Latin America, as is indicated by increased rates of poverty and extreme poverty, which now affect vast segments of the population. According to data provided by ECLAC, in 1990 43.9% of the region's total population, that is, 225 million persons, were living below the poverty line, and 100 million of these (19.4%) were considered to be in extreme poverty. Women represent an increasing share of this population: in 1994, 36% of the working poor were women; by 2002, the proportion had increased to 43%. The percentage of poor households headed by women in the 20-59 age bracket has also increased in recent years. In agriculture, both in the countryside itself and in small rural towns, the impact of neoliberalism has been enormous. Those who inhabit these places have contributed disproportionately to the increased poverty rates in Latin America as a whole.

The devastation caused by recent crises is reflected in all dimensions of social life affecting women, who have been forced to increase their responsibilities vis a vis their family members. Women peasants and farmers, and the wives of peasants, middle farmers and rural wage earners, have confronted these decades in numerous ways. Some, as in México or Argentina, have sought employment in the fruit and vegetable packing agro-industries. Others have taken to following migrant circuits with their husbands and families, seeking national or international employment. Still others have diversified their activities, seeking employment in urban areas or intensifying their employment in urban domestic activities. Meanwhile, women have also had to continue to care for their households, provide for the needs of their children, and uphold their responsibility for the social reproduction of life. Beyond these individual strategies, however, agrarian women in Latin America have also undertaken collective actions to preserve rights that were being trampled upon by the new policies of neoliberalism, and to secure new rights. Thus we find indigenous women struggling for their land and the preservation of natural resources as part of the struggles of the indigenous people of Ecuador, Bolivia and México; women peasants struggling for the land and their settlements as part of the MST in Brazil and Paraguay; and women farmers in Argentina struggling not to lose their lands to debt.

We propose that this special issue of LAP evaluate the economical, social, political and cultural contributions of women in all of the social spaces encompassed by agriculture and agro-industry, from the countryside itself to the rural worlds of the small towns and cities away from metropolitan centers.

The sheer vastness of Latin America induces us to pay special attention to regional variations, and to the singularities of cultures and countries. In modern Latin American, indigenous communities, where the struggles for communitarian rights and autonomy predominate (as in Chiapas, and to some extent Bolivia), coexist side by side with vast agro-industries that employ workers organized in ways similar to those in the highly industrialized countries.

This diversity in the organizational forms in which women participate is also expressed in the ways the struggles in one region carry over to another, for example from the indigenous and ejidal communities of southern Mexico to industrialized northern México, or even the US. Similarly, in Argentina very different cultures and forms of organizing work coexist. Migrations from neighboring countries within Latin America also make the local situations and processes much more complex.

Women enter and leave different worlds, cultures, and languages, and they do this with surprising facility. While it is impossible to cover every aspect of this diversity, it is fundamentally important that the diversity itself be considered at the beginning of our analysis of women's role.

Works Consulted
Deere, Carmen Diana and Magdalena León, Género, propiedad y empoderamiento:
tierra, Estado y mercado en América Latina, México D.F.y Quito, UNAM y
FLACSO-Ecuador, 2002;

Giarracca, Norma (Editor) ¿Una nueva realidad en América Latina?, Buenos Aires, CLACSO.

Patnaik, Utsa, "Global Capitalism, Deflation and Agrarian Crisis in Developing Countries", in Special Issue on Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol 3, Nº 1 and 2, January and April 2003.

Spoor, Max, "Policy Regimes and Performance of the Agricultural Sector in Latin America and the Caribbean During the Last Three Decades", Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 2, Nº 3, July 2002.

Teubal, Miguel and Javier Rodríguez, Agro y alimentos en la globalización. Una perspectiva crítica. Buenos Aires, Editorial La Colmena, 2002.

Norma Giarracca and Miguel Teubal are coordinating this issue.
For more information about the issue, please contact:
Norma Giarracca: ngiarra@mail.retina.ar
or Miguel Teubal: teubal@mail.retina.ar

Manuscripts should be no longer than 25 pages of double-spaced text in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. If possible, submit two copies along with a cover sheet and basic biographical information. With these items, we also require that the manuscript be sent on a CD-R, by e-mail, or on a floppy disk if the other formats are not available. The LAP style guide is available on request or online.

Please send any manuscript submissions to:
Managing Editor, Latin American Perspectives¸ P.O. Box 5703, Riverside, California 92517-5703