Globalization, Gender, and Poverty in the Senegal River Valley

Abstract

In an impressive attempt to guarantee food security, well over two billion dollars have been invested in the modernization of the agrarian economy in the Senegal River Valley. But, even though two huge dams and thousands of village-based irrigation schemes have been constructed since the late 1970s, food security is still as illusive as ever. This study attempts to explain why. In doing so it focuses on the impact of donor-dominated macro-structural change on gender and class relations. This analytical perspective has two benefits: First, it reveals the risks posed by foreign domination of development programs for different segments of the rural population. Second, it points to a critical element in a new approach to improving farm productivity and food security – improving women's access to land and technology.

Keywords:

• Foreign aid
• structural adjustment
• food security
• women's land rights
• inequality
• JEL Codes: N57, Q01

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me with this study, but I owe the greatest debts to my friends and colleagues from the Senegal River Valley, all of whom provided invaluable insights and generous hospitality. I would like to thank them individually, but since I don't want to link them to the criticisms or errors for which only I bear the responsibility, I have reluctantly decided to forego naming names. Among those to whom I owe the most are the people who shared their homes with me, members of the village research team, the villagers who attended open meetings, the people who responded to our questionnaire, and my research assistant, who contributed ideas and masterful interpretation.

My second set of debts is to the extremely helpful and patient guest editors of this special issue (especially Günseli Berik), three anonymous reviewers, the discussants at the Feminist Economics workshop on this volume, and the Feminist Economics style editors. Finally, I thank the many long-suffering friends who read and offered advice on the paper's many drafts.

Notes

¹ Structural adjustment policies included fiscal and monetary policies designed to reduce government spending and to increase exports and reduce imports so that governments would have the foreign exchange needed to service their international debts. For an overview of the impact of these policies in rural Africa, see Philip Raikes (2000). For Senegal, see Gilles Duruflé (1995), Demba Moussa Dembele (2003), and Jeanne Koopman (2007). For case studies of the impact on African women farmers, see Christina Gladwin (1990).

² In emphasizing the dominance of Northern power in negotiations over national investment and agrarian policies, I do not mean to imply that national leaders were powerless to defend the interests of their rural populations. Rather, I think they have reacted to tremendous pressure to go along with World Bank/IMF demands, knowing that most Northern donors required compliance as a prerequisite to obtaining new loans. Nonetheless, by accepting structural adjustment, both socialist and liberal governments in Senegal bear considerable responsibility for the policies and practices that have badly damaged peasant livelihoods in the Senegal River Valley.

³ These issues will be discussed and the assertions supported in subsequent sections.

⁴ See Aly Tandian (2003) for an epistemological justification for the use of the term caste in socioeconomic analyses of Halpulaar society. See Yaya Wane (1969) for an extensive description of specific castes and a discussion of salience of caste relations in the 1960s.

⁵ Data from 1974 showed that in southern Cameroon, where women have extensive responsibility for growing nearly all the household food, the average woman's contribution to household cash earnings was only 28 percent, but her contribution to cash and subsistence income combined was over 47 percent (Jeanne Koopman Henn 1978: 165).

⁶ The hydroelectric plant was finally built in 2002, over fifteen years after the dams were completed. Since its completion, electricity generation has become the number one priority in the water management system. It has also become the major source of funding for servicing the international debts incurred by the dams and for running the international agency that controls the dam's water policy (Koopman 2007).

⁷ The impact of the dams and irrigation schemes on nutrition has not been adequately studied. The nutrition studies conducted in 1958 (when the traditional system was still strong) and in 1990–1 (when the dams had badly damaged flood-dependent livelihoods) are unfortunately not comparable. The 1958 nutrition study was conducted in three villages spread throughout the valley (Boutillier et al. 1962: 173). It found that caloric intake surpassed WHO standards and that protein intake was 230 percent of these standards, even for the ex-slave caste (Boutillier et al. 1962: 191). The 1990–1 nutrition study was conducted in a single area where all households farmed a newly renovated mid-sized irrigation scheme (Bénéfice and Simondon 1993: 50). It found adequate caloric and protein consumption on average, but it also found that 35 percent of households did not meet their energy requirements (Bénéfice and Simondon 1993: 58). The Bénéfice and Simondon results can obviously not be generalized. They show only that when irrigation is widely accessible, nutrition can be adequate on average, but that it will probably not be adequate for a third of irrigated rice farmers. The fact that the great majority of households in the valley have not had sustained access to viable irrigation schemes due to the inability of the state to construct enough village irrigation schemes and even more importantly, to the economic crisis in the rice sector since the beginning of structural adjustment in the 1980s. To assess the nutritional results of thirty years of modernization in the valley, a truly comprehensive nutrition study is sorely needed.

⁸ See the Appendix for a fuller description of the studies on which the comparisons in Table 1 and Table 2 are based.

⁹ While all household members also worked on domestic tasks, such as cooking, firewood collection, and house repair, the gender distribution of domestic labor was extremely skewed. The 1991–2 labor time survey found that the average woman spent the equivalent of 200 eight-hour labor days on domestic tasks, the average girl 125 days, a boy 23 days, and a man less than 16 (Salem-Murdock and Niasse 1993: 293, 295).

¹⁰ The devaluation was engineered by France, which has controlled the CFA franc, the currency of most West and Central African francophone countries, since the colonial period. By 1994, France considered the CFA franc overvalued compared to the French franc to which it was pegged, so it proceeded to devalue the CFA by 100 percent. Instead of 50 CFA per French franc, importers now had to pay 100 CFA per franc.

¹¹ World rice prices are highly volatile because the international rice market is small relative to the amounts of rice produced and consumed globally. Production changes in Thailand, India, and the US can drastically affect world prices. Large subsidies to American rice exporters also have an important effect on world prices.

¹² We did not conduct a labor time survey. Information about annual hours of work done on the valley's the irrigation schemes by gender and age has not been systematically gathered since 1991–2.

¹³ I use the term “give” somewhat loosely, although that is the term that was used in my notes of conversations about the origins of the women's gardens. It may be that the male landowners considered the land as a long-term loan, but the fact that they did not formally contest the registration of this land as the property of the women's groups supports the characterization of this land by both presidents of the women's groups as gifts from their fathers. These women transferred the land to their women's groups.

¹⁴ The caste inclusiveness of women's gardens supports Agarwal's (1994) argument for India that women are generally more willing to cross caste boundaries than men.

¹⁵ The option of registering the so-called household plots in both men's and women's names was not considered.

¹⁶ There is no doubt that women were interested in gaining access to the rehabilitated irrigation plots, but they have been continually frustrated. Even after the women's gardens had been irrigated, women who found their plots too small formally petitioned the all-male (indeed all elite male) management committees to allow them to cultivate women's crops during the dry season when rice was not cultivated. They were denied.

¹⁷ Because the village research team was able to gather complex production and cost data from women vegetable producers as well as from both men and women whose households produce rice, I was able to compare the contributions to household income of average net incomes from women's gardens and average net incomes from rice production. For women's garden plots, data were gathered on the quantities of all crops produced over the course of a year. These data were valued at market prices and reduced to a net value by deducting input costs. This calculation of net earnings follows the method generally used for irrigated rice, taking into account cash payments for inputs and credit as well as wages to non-household workers (often paid in kind), but not calculating an implicit payment for unpaid family labor.