Women and Land Deals in Africa and Asia: Weighing the Implications and Changing the Game

Abstract

Large-scale land deals have attracted much attention from media and policymakers, and several international initiatives are attempting to regulate and address the impacts of such deals. Little attention has been paid to the gendered implications of such deals in the literature, and most regulatory initiatives do not address gender adequately. To fill this gap, this contribution identifies implications of land deals for women and recommends measures to mitigate negative impacts. It reviews evidence from four case studies commissioned for the International Land Coalition (ILC) Global Study of Commercial Pressures on Land conducted in 2010. The evidence is analyzed within a framework that posits women's vulnerability to land deals as due to four dimensions of underlying discrimination. This study analyzes three of these dimensions in depth, arguing that women are likely to be affected differently by land deals and disproportionately more likely to be negatively affected than men.

Keywords:

• Women
• land
• rural economic development
• gender

JEL Codes::

• Q
• Q15
• Q18

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are deeply grateful for the constructive comments received on a first draft of this paper from three anonymous peer reviewers, the guest editors of the Feminist Economics special issue on Land, Gender, and Food Security, and participants at a Feminist Economics workshop in Barcelona in June 2012, as well as to the guest editors, journal editors and two further anonymous peer reviewers for subsequent comments on revised drafts. We are also indebted to our colleagues on the International Land Coalition's Global Study of Commercial Pressures on Land, particularly the authors of the four country case studies featured in this study: Messele Fisseha; Muriel Veldman and Marco Lankhorst; Dennis F. Calvan and Jay Martin S. Abiola; and Vida Bhushan Rawat, Mamidi Bharath Bhushan, and Sujatha Surepally.

Notes

¹ Land concentration “into the hands of those few with the resources to invest in land development on a larger scale” is mainly driven by market pressures that push poorer rights holders, both of legal (formal) and customary (informal) rights, to sell or lease their land; land privatization occurs in contexts of limited formal rights, when customary rights holders become dispossessed as others obtain legal rights to their land (Elizabeth Daley 2011: 2).

² “We denounce all forms of land grabbing, whether international or national. We denounce local level land grabs, particularly by powerful local elites, within communities or among family members. We denounce large-scale land grabbing, which has accelerated hugely over the past three years, and which we define as acquisitions or concessions that are one or more of the following: (i) in violation of human rights, particularly the equal rights of women; (ii) not based on free, prior, and informed consent of the affected land users; (iii) not based on a thorough assessment or are in disregard of social, economic, and environmental impacts, including the way they are gendered; (iv) not based on transparent contracts that specify clear and binding commitments about activities, employment, and benefits sharing, and; (v) not based on effective democratic planning, independent oversight, and meaningful participation” (ILC 2012; bold and italics in the original).

³ Gender justice is the ending of, and provision of redress for, inequalities between women and men that result in women's subordination to men. It implies access to and control over resources, combined with sufficient agency to be able to make choices about those resources (A. M. Goetz 2007).

⁴ Despite continuing debate over the official statistics for women's agricultural labor force participation rates in different countries (as both paid and unpaid workers) and their actual contribution to global food production, data in FAO (2011) clearly show that women have less access than men to land, inputs, and extension services for their own agricultural production; are more likely than men to hold seasonal, part-time, and low-paid jobs and receive lower wages for the same labor when employed in rural areas; and disproportionately shoulder the burden of household chores.

⁵ All data on this case comes from Messele Fisseha (2011) and Daley (2011).

⁶ All data on this case comes from Muriel Veldman and Marco Lankhorst (2011) and Daley (2011); as well as from personal observations by Elizabeth Daley, 2006–09.

⁷ All data are from Dennis F. Calvan and Jay Martin S. Abiola (2011) and Daley (2011).

⁸ All data are from Vidya Bhushan Rawat, Mamidi Bharath Bhushan, and Sujatha Surepally (2011).

⁹ Elizabeth Daley, personal observation, 2010–11; Sabine Pallas, personal observation, 2009–12.

¹⁰ See the above-mentioned technical guide (FAO 2013) for a much more comprehensive elaboration of practical measures and arenas for action in supporting change in the land deals game for women through the implementation of responsible gender-equitable governance of land tenure.

¹¹ See http://landportal.info/landmatrix (last accessed October 17, 2013).