Month: June 2020

by: Stephanie Leder and Gitta Shrestha

In any pandemic or major socio-economic crisis, health and food security of marginalized populations will be affected the most. Social and economic inequalities will become visible because households and communities’ responses rely on their financial resources, as well as reliable information and social networks.

In rural Nepal, the most marginalized farmers have limited access to health care facilities, quick financial support, food and relief measures during COVID -19. For households where every day needs for food are covered through daily wage labor or remittances from out-migrated family members, a pandemic such as COVID-19 can have not only direct consequences for health, but also for short and long-term food security because of the immediate cut of income and restricted mobility and disruption of food production and supply chains.

Impact of COVID 19 lockdown on women farmers

In Nepal, citizens have been instructed to maintain physical distancing which limit their ability to farm since the lockdown has begun on March 24^th, 2020. The supply of agricultural inputs such as seeds and fertilizers are interrupted, and farmers suffered a huge loss since they were not able to transport their production in the market. Female smallholder vegetable farmers have been the hardest hit since they would carry and sell the vegetables door to door, so many lost the main source of their income. This situation was confirmed by a member of a Rural women farmers group in Rautahat and Sarlahi in a Gender in Humanitarian Action Task Team online meeting conducted by UN Women on April 27^th, 2020. She informed on the risk of growing food insecurity and anxiety of debt return especially among female headed households. Women in particular depend on informal loans with high interest rates. The failure of crop, the loss of livelihood and natural disasters add to their vulnerabilities.

Recent phone interviews to research participants in our field sites confirm similar experiences in Western Nepal. Three residents [1] in the villages of Selinge, Dadeldhura, and Tiltali, Doti, stated that in their villages, most keep physical distance and stay at home as advised on the radio and national TV news. Upon the return of migrants who have not returned home yet, communities hope they follow quarantine rules so that the virus will not be able to spread. Limited access to markets currently could severely affect the whole cropping season and thus their food security. In addition, the supply with soaps, vegetables or cell phone recharge cards from the market is limited, and they are advised not to leave their remote village which is perceived considerably safe. Instead, a truck delivers regularly food to them, which, however, is limited to those who can afford to buy food especially if their regular remittances may not arrive anymore.

Government Response on relief and recovery

The government of Nepal recently introduced emergency relief packages for farmers. However, voices from the field share exclusionary consequences of such packages. The relief package demand certain criteria to be the beneficiaries of the relief such as land entitlement and land size. The central government has announced a relief package of 750 Nepali rupees (6.20 USD) per kattha (338m²) of land. In Province 2, the government has recently announced a new relief package for farmers who own 10 kattha (3380m²) of land and cultivate themselves to receive 10,000 NPR cash in their account. This will de-facto exclude smallholders, tenant farmers, share croppers and daily agricultural wage laborers, of which the majority are women. This has huge implications on women’s well-being and family food security. While men equally suffer psychological stress due to the loss of income, research shows that in situation of emergencies, women are the ones to sell their assets first causing increased incidences of poverty among women and women headed households. Gender scholars have repeatedly highlighted the imperatives of gender and social inclusion perspectives in agricultural planning. However, in the past, a lack of strategies for gender equality and social inclusion in agricultural planning is evident in Nepal [2].

COVID-19 impact on women farmers

Social and gender discriminatory norms within households impact women’s health and well-being negatively in rural Nepal. Eating last in the family and dropping first from education falls on women and girls during emergencies. Ensuring water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) is traditionally women’s responsibility, and this has received greater attention of national and international governments in the recent pandemic. With reduced food security, income and mobility and increased water stress, girls and women may force to compromise on food, health, education and decision-making spaces. Access to resources and social networks is gendered, and this causes reduced resilience capacity of women to the impacts of pandemics and disasters. The consequences have already been evident with a 200 percent increase in the maternal mortality rate since the lockdown began, and increased cases of domestic and sexual violence.

Women organisations and inclusive digital platforms to spread awareness

Local women leaders and farmer-managed organisations such as water user associations may be an important backbone to handle the COVID crisis as they can reach out to rural farming populations. Women leaders and local farmer organisations, however, do not have sufficient resources and influence on decision-making. For example, in a webinar, Female Deputy Mayors from Nepal Province 2 said women farmers feel comfortable to share their concerns with them as female deputy mayors, but they themselves are underresourced and do not have sufficient influence to make sure relief packages at the district level reach the most marginalized.

To address these imbalances, substantial financial support for public awareness campaigns, the supply of relief packages and testing and medical kits via local networks to the most marginalized communities is necessary. Local groups and female health care workers such as Nepal’s network of Female Community Health Volunteers may be key informants for marginalized communities and local governments alike. The financial support of local organisations is also important as physical distancing is still a prevalent practice to discriminate historically lower caste members, and social stigma may easily spread and affect returning migrants. Therefore, access to reliable information on precautions and medical measures are needed building on existing structures at the local level.

COVID-19 brings even further to light gender inequalities and the vulnerable situation of small-scale farmers. This is now the chance to address these structural inequalities through the implementation of locally adapted sustainable food security measures such as subsidies, information, and adequate trainings for (female) farmers with small land holdings and tenant farmers and local staff.

Notes:

1. Three short phone interviews were conducted on April 15^th, 2020 by Yuvika Adhikari, research assistant at the Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS) in Kathmandu, Nepal, and in the FORMAS project “Revitalizing community-managed irrigation systems in the context of out-migration in Nepal” led by Stephanie Leder at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).
2. As a study on gendered practices in the water sector in Nepal shows, gender equality and social inclusion attempts are only focusing on gender quotas of 33% women in WUAs, without strategies to more inclusive decision-making overcoming unequal and gendered power relations (Shrestha & Clement 2019)

 

Dr. Stephanie Leder is a researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, and a visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK. Her four-year project “Revitalizing community-managed irrigation systems in the context of out-migration in Nepal” is funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS. Her research interests cover feminist political ecology, water governance, agrarian change, collective action and Education for Sustainable Development. Stephanie was a Postdoctoral Fellow for Gender, Poverty and Institutions at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Kathmandu, Nepal, and led studies in inter- and transdisciplinary projects within the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Program “Water, Land and Ecosystems” in India, Nepal and Bangladesh (2014-2017). Stephanie holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Cologne, Germany. Her book “Transformative Pedagogic Practice. Education for Sustainable Development and Water Conflicts in Indian Geography Education” is published with Springer in 2018. More information on Stephanie’s work can be found at: https://www.slu.se/cv/stephanie-leder/

 

Gitta Shrestha, BSc, MA, M.Phil. has training in geography, human geography and in the study of human adaptation to natural resource constraints. She has been trained in India, Nepal and Europe. She has worked extensively in a capacity of researcher and gender specialist for the past 14 years. Her research interest involves inquiring into the reproduction of social and gender inequalities and its impact on the changing human-environment relations. In the past, she has worked extensively on Gender and migration, Women in peace and conflict, Water Governance, Gender in organisations and Masculinities. Her ongoing research investigates Gender in Solar irrigation, Resilience capabilities of the left-behind against climate change & water-induced disasters, Gender & WASH, Youth migration, gender & rural agrarian transformation. She has developed gender training manuals, served as a trainer on gender and social inclusion for community mobilisers, mainstreamed gender in community implementation models, research projects & organisations. She has served as a lecturer at various reputed universities of Nepal and team leader for project evaluation teams at Social Welfare Council (Nepal). She has contributed as an author and reviewer to international journals and books on GESI across Nepal.

 

by: Angie Carter

I live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) on the shores of Lake Superior, and so I waited until mid-March of 2020 to start my tomato plants. As I tended to these plants, cities and states in the United States initiated voluntary and mandatory stay-at-home orders in response to COVID-19.

Soon after, the Women, Food and Agriculture Network actively engaged members in response to the pandemic. In addition to a gardener, I am also a rural sociologist and board member of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network (WFAN), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with a mission “to engage women in building an ecological and just food and agricultural system through individual and community power.” WFAN began as and remains the only national sustainable agricultural non-profit organization organized by and for those identifying as women and non-binary. Started in the mid-1990s in Iowa, the organization now has national reach and includes those working in sustainable agriculture, food systems, food justice, and community health & nutrition.

WFAN’s COVID-19 organizing in response to COVID-19 includes “community-centered tools which are significant in ensuring that community health is a critical priority, not just now, but always,” as described by staff member Amy Kousch in WFAN’s Profiles in Resilience. In mid-March, staff member Moselle Singh invited members to join a virtual discussion about localized mutual aid efforts and encouraging knowledge-sharing across the network. These “Growing Community Resilience” calls, initially held weekly, were facilitated by Kousch, Singh, and staff member Wren Almitra; staff also created a facebook group and online resource compilations to further facilitate and support members’ efforts. The profiles, virtual meetings, and social media platforms provided needed space to share strategies and resources as we worked through the beginnings of a global pandemic event many of us continue to experience in isolation. For example, board member Sarah Carroll shared her efforts to organize mutual aid by knocking on doors within her Minneapolis neighborhood: “It has been heartwarming and securing to know that we actually have many of the resources we need right here in our neighborhood.”

On a Growing Community Resilience call three months later, as a wave of protests originated in Minneapolis after George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin, WFAN members engaged in critical reflection and discussion about the intersections between food and racial justice. Soon after, WFAN shared a Statement in Solidarity with the Movements for Black Lives, acknowledging WFAN’s position as a majority-white agricultural organization in a food system rooted in Indigenous genocide, enslaved labor of African Americans, and the continuous exploitation of BIPOC. In the statement, WFAN committed to prioritizing anti-racism and challenging members through shared learning and hard conversations not only about the patriarchal control of resources and land in agriculture, but white settler control.

George Floyd’s murder and the continued failure, to date, to arrest the police who murdered Breonna Taylor are not accidental, but the outcome of hundreds of years of white supremacy created to power capitalist expansion; first, the plantations and, now, corporations. It is June 2020 as I write this; people have been in the streets now for three weeks without stop and a new wave of protest is beginning in Atlanta where police just killed Rayshard Brooks. The continued police brutality targeting Black lives and the health inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 are pre-existing conditions of our larger economic system. Similarly, the recklessness of Tyson, Smithfield, and other agrifood corporations in failing to protect their workers during this global pandemic are externalized costs in a system of food production and national food policy that prioritizes cheap food and commodifies the lives of agricultural and food laborers.

Monica White’s (2018) Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resilience and the Black Freedom Movement analyzes how Black agrarianism has and continues to create alternative systems and community transformation. White writes: “Community resilience is a way for a community to absorb a disturbance and reorganize itself while undergoing change. White resilience as a concept often does not take into account structural approaches and community engagement that includes indigenous knowledge and emotional experiences, and the kind of interracial and intraracial exchanges that we need to adapt” (145). WFAN staff had not read White’s work when they first began the “Growing Community Resilience” efforts, yet their organizing aligns with White’s definition of community resilience, its emphasis on structural change, critical reflection, and community engagement, as well as the valuation of the knowledges already held among the many diverse members of our communities.

White’s emphasis on interracial and intrarracial exchange, as well as WFAN board member Sarah Carroll’s point that the resources and knowledge we need to attend to these crises are “right here,” in our own communities, empowers us to begin the hard work of transformation now as we learn from and care for each other. In my own community this transformative work has been in collaboration with the Western UP Food Systems Council.

Food insecurity is high across our region. Knowing the already existing strain on our food access network, we began a new grassroots collective food redistribution program–Growing from the Heart–inviting people to plant and to share extra food. Informal food exchange in the UP, including gifting and bartering, are important, though often devalued, forms of food access. We chose to center these traditions. Our organizing intentionally worked to avoid the stigmatization of poverty, insisting upon fresh food as a right and emphasizing reciprocity and mutuality, as shared through the teachings of Keweenaw Bay Indian Community Natural Resource Department collaborators.

“The pandemic is a portal,” Arundhati Roy wrote presciently in her April 2020 essay of the same name; “it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” Agricultural organizations, such as WFAN, and researchers, such as myself, are engaging in critical examination, reflection, and interracial and intraracial exchanges described by White as necessary in the formation of a prefigurative politics and transformation. This is the work both of response to COVID-19 and police brutality, and the dismantling of the machine powering both crises.

Roy, Arundhati. (2020). “The pandemic is a portal.” Financial Times. Retrieved June 11, 2020 from https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

White, Monica. (2018). Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. The University of North Carolina Press.

 

Angie Carter is originally from Iowa, where she grew up on the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Oceti Sakowin, Iowa, Sauk, and Fox peoples. She is a descendent of white settlers who benefitted from the “Black Hawk Purchase,” really a massacre, that opened lands for her ancestors to farm. She now lives on the Keweenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Ojibwa, on lands ceded in the Treaty of 1842. She is a board member of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI. Her work focuses on agriculture, social justice, and social change.

 

by: Nozomi Kawarazuka and Pham Thu Huong

Although it is not widely acknowledged by the Western media, Vietnam has so far successfully contained the coronavirus by its rapid response and strict measures with, until now, fewer than 330 people infected and no deaths. As of the end of May, there has been no community transmission for 45 days. The government implemented social distancing policy in Hanoi for three weeks from April 1^st to April 22^nd.  In May, everyday lives returned almost to normal except that the borders remain closed, although the long-term impact of the global pandemic such as the loss of overseas remittances on rural faming households are yet unknown.

In the time of COVID-19, we are increasingly recognizing that women across the world play a range of critical roles in the household and in the society, from home teaching to front-line caring and cleaning work in hospitals and nursing homes, although they are unpaid or low-paid. In Vietnam, like elsewhere in the world, street food vendors are one of those whose contribution should be recognized and acknowledged. In Hanoi, fresh food is mainly sold through three channels: informal street markets, registered local markets and supermarkets. The first is the cheapest and most convenient option for many local Hanoians. The street vendors are often women from the suburbs of Hanoi or other provinces, who carry their own produce to sell or purchase fresh produce from wholesalers. They are often mobile, putting their produce in baskets and carrying them on foot or by bicycle or motorbike. During Hanoi’s social-distancing period, selling food on streets was strictly banned, meanwhile the socialist government provided financial support to the people whose business were affected by its social-distancing policy as well as others. Did all street vendors give up their livelihoods? Did all consumers shift their shopping to supermarkets? The answer is no. The vendors seized the opportunity for increased demand for home consumption and continued their business by avoiding the police, meanwhile consumers continue to purchase from those informal sellers.

Ms Trang grows leafy vegetables on her farm and sells them on a street in Hanoi. She cycles 15km every day, departing home at 4am. During the implementation of social-distancing rules, she kept going to Hanoi and selling her produce by carefully avoiding the police. She found more demand for her vegetables than before and she was able to sell all produce by 2pm, unlike in normal times when she has to sit on a street until early evening. Similarly, Ms Huyen sells vegetables, roots and tubers on a narrow street. The police were around, and many vendors had to run away each time. She negotiated with one of her regular customers to use the space in front of the customer’s house where the police do not come. She benefitted a lot from this arrangement as she got many new customers whose regular sellers moved elsewhere to avoid the police. From the following day, she asked her husband, a motorbike taxi driver who had nothing to do under the social-distancing rules, to help her business so that she could carry and sell more vegetables. After the restrictions were lifted, her husband returned to his job, but she did not go back to the previous informal street market as she now found many new regular customers in her new selling location.  Some other vendors were, however, not able to benefit from the increased demand. Ms Mai stopped selling her produce in March because her neighbours were concerned that she might bring the virus from Hanoi to her village. Mr. Nam continued selling fruit, but the business was not as good as in normal times as he had to evade the police many times and he was even stopped by the police and fined VND150,000 (US$6.4).

The higher demand for fresh food in informal street markets under the social-distancing rules is not only because home consumption increased but also domestic fresh food supply chains were interrupted as many provinces temporarily closed their provincial borders, and as a result some fresh food did not reach Hanoi on time. In this respect, local vegetables grown and sold by women in the suburbs of Hanoi played an important role in sustaining the urban food system. Street vendors also observed changes in consumer demand. Roots and tubers, well known as food for survival during the war time in Vietnam, were sold more during the social-distancing period although their prices were slightly higher than usual. This may be associated with their longer storability compared to other fresh vegetables.

In May, Hanoi’s informal street markets have returned to normal, and consumer behaviour is also back to normal. Informal street markets are resilient and remain as an essential part of Hanoi’s food system and food culture. From the perspective of food systems at a local and global level, it is clear that depending on a single market chain is extremely risky, as it leaves the city vulnerable, and diversification of market sources is increasingly important in the time of COVID-19 and beyond. In this respect women food producers and sellers need to be recognized as an integral part of the urban food system and should be supported instead of banned, like the case in Ahmedabad, India where a self-employed women’s organization and the Ahamed municipal corporation worked together to facilitate street vendors to continue their business during the lockdown period. Crises like this may call for a rethinking of gendered informal food systems. There may be untapped opportunity to support women vendors through establishing a new collaboration with other sectors and/or providing digital technology to them.

Lastly, as researchers who explore agriculture from a gender perspective, we believe that documenting the real stories of disadvantaged populations though face-to-face interviews in the field is very important. In many parts of the world, alternative research methods such as phone calling and online interviews became increasingly orthodox in the time of COVID-19. We do hope that the real impact of COVID-19 on women’s and men’s lives and livelihoods will be explored when this crisis is over, and we can visit those who have been most affected.

The names of vendors are fictitious to protect their privacy. The stories were collected by the authors during the everyday visit to local markets.

 

Nozomi Kawarazuka is currently a social scientist researcher with the International Potato Center (CIP), CGIAR.

 

Pham Thu Huong is a Research Assistant with Alliance Bioversity – The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), CGIAR.