Converting the Wetlands, Engendering the Environment: The Intersection of Gender with Agrarian Change in The Gambia

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how agricultural diversification and food security are transforming wetland environments in The Gambia. With irrigation schemes being implemented in lowland swamps to encourage year-round cultivation, agrarian relations are rife with conflict between men and women over the distribution of work and benefits of increased household earnings. Economic change gives rise to new claims over the communal tenure systems prevalent in lowland environments and allows male household heads to enclose wetlands and thereby control female family labor for consolidating their strategies of accumulation. The forms of female resistance are detailed in this paper.

Key words:

• irrigation
• resistance
• gender
• environment
• community property regimes