No cash, no food. Gendered reorganization of livelihoods and food security in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the gendered dimension of rural livelihood reorganization in Cambodia, and its consequences on food security. With the growing need for cash, men predominantly have engaged in wage work. However, out of necessity, women also engage in wage work. Thus, new gender divisions of productive labour contribute to reshaping normative gender roles and spaces, and provide women some autonomy, in a way. At the same time, since women remain responsible for family food procurement they are dependent on men's income. Above all, the majority of women experience stress from lack of time and lack of money for food.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural commercialization
• gender relations
• labour
• food security

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the many people who took the time and trusted us to discuss their experiences as well as to our colleagues from the Demeter project and interpreters who took part in the field research. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided critical comments that enabled us to strengthen the article. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Frewer (2017) for a critical analysis of the simplified portrays of highland women produced by and for development projects.

2 These codes of conducts mainly apply to Khmer groups and less so indigenous peoples, although there has been a gradual process of infiltration of these norms even within communities.

3 Our strategy for sampling was multi-staged. In a first stage, we selected provinces that had current and historical differences in food security situations as well as differences in gendered norms and cultural practice. In a second stage, we randomly selected different villages for each province (12 for Kampong Thom, 10 for Kratie and 7 for Ratanakiri). Finally, at household level, we randomly selected two hundred households for each province.

4 Before going to the field, a tailor-made interview-training (October 2015) was organized which resulted in four topical interview-guides (on land, livelihood, gender and food security).

5 Remittances from migrants have not been integrated in this article, because they represent only 5% of total household incomes (Table 3) and we didn't conduct research at migrants’ places of destination.

6 If we look at the Appendix (Table A1), we have the marginal effects at the means. (We must calculate the marginal effects at the means or the average marginal effects because in these models the marginal effects are not constant like in linear models.) The marginal effect of being a woman is -7%, which means that being a woman reduces the probability of participating in wage employment by 7%. Apart from that, there is the effect of having a young child in the household which is almost 0, and not significant. When we include an interaction term with gender, we see whether the effect of having a young child in the household is different for men and women. In that sense, the 0% marginal effect corresponds to that of men, whereas for women, we must add the effect of the interaction term, reaching a marginal effect of −15%. This highlights the gendered difference in the effect of having young children on participating in wage employment.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in the frame of the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development [grant number: 400540_152034], for which we are grateful.

Notes on contributors

Christophe Gironde

Christophe Gironde is a political economist, currently working as a senior lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). His main domains for teaching and research are agrarian change and human development, with in particular extensive field research experience in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Fenneke Reysoo

Fenneke Reysoo is an anthropologist, gender expert committed to combating social injustice. Her current research focuses on the intersectional and gendered impact of agriculture and land commercialization from a right to food perspective (Cambodia, Switzerland). She is an emeritus senior lecturer and research director of the Gender Center at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva 2000–2021).

Andres Torrico Ramirez

Andres Torrico Ramirez is a researcher, specialized in rural development and indigenous communities. He holds a Master in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva) and a Master in Public Policy and Management from the Catholic University in Bolivia. He is a research associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in the frame of the Demeter project. Prior to joining the institute, he worked for the Research Center and Promotion of Peasantry in Bolivia (CIPCA).

Seng Suon

Suon Seng is an agricultural economist. His research focuses mainly on agricultural development, rural development policies and livelihoods. He is an associate researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in the frame of Demeter project. He also worked for many years in Cambodia as a consultant for the government, international and non-governmental organizations.