5.12 Women in Agriculture

In subsistence farming, especially in much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, women often grow most of the family's food crops, care for small animals, collect water and fuel, and process food by hand. Much of this work is unpaid or part of the informal economy, so it doesn't show up in official statistics.

In commercial farming, women's roles depend on the crop. Women make up a large share of tea pickers on estates in Kenya and India's Assam and of workers in Kenya's cut-flower greenhouses. In many places men control cash crops while women grow food crops for the household, which can mean men control the income.

In higher-income countries, women run and co-run many farms. The 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture counted about 1.2 million women producers, 36% of the total, and 58% of farms had at least one woman among their producers.

Women's roles reach beyond the field. In much of West Africa, women traders dominate food markets, such as Makola Market in Accra, Ghana, buying from farmers and selling to city shoppers. At the household scale, women in most societies still do most of the food buying and cooking, so they shape what families eat and how food budgets are spent.

• Land ownership: in many countries, laws or customs give land to men through inheritance or marriage, and women farm land they don't own. Without a title, they can't use land as collateral or be sure they'll keep it.
• Access to credit: without land or a formal income, women find it harder to get loans to buy seed, fertilizer or tools.
• Training and extension services: agricultural advisers have often worked mainly with men.
• Time: unpaid household work and caregiving leave less time for farming and selling.

FAO estimated in 2011 that if women farmers had the same access to resources as men, they could raise yields on their farms by 20–30%, enough to cut the number of hungry people in the world by about 12–17%. The gap isn't about skill; it's about access.

Responses include land reforms that register land jointly to wives and husbands, as Ethiopia's land certification program did, microloans for women (7.4), women's farming cooperatives, and training programs aimed at women. Fair trade cooperatives sometimes set aside funds for women members.