Jump to... Introduction Food security Project areas Market orientation Project intervention Women's work burden Tables Technical appendix References

This report is concerned with programmes and policies that have a bearing on HFS, especially to the extent that they have an impact on women. After developing a conceptual framework for analysing issues related to HFS, the report addresses a number of issues that should be of particular interest to policy-makers. In analysing these issues, the report makes use of both a priori theoretical considerations and empirical evidence collected for this study from three locations in India and Nepal where IFAD has been involved in projects concerned with the rural poor, especially women.

Three sets of issues are considered: (i) the impact on the food security of the poor of increased market orientation, (ii) the identification of the elements in the interventions of programmes focused on women that are crucial from the point of view of household food security and (iii) the trade-offs that may arise in attempts to improve food security through the typical programme intervention targeted towards women.

The impact of market orientation on the food security of the poor has become a matter of considerable interest in recent years as structural adjustment programmes usher in greater roles for the market throughout the Developing World. As incentives for greater market orientation are provided at the macro level, it is likely that a shift will occur at the micro level as well, with people moving more and more out of subsistence production and towards production for the market. This trend is likely to be reinforced by micro-level interventions, such as credit delivery programmes that encourage poor households to engage in market-oriented production. The designers of policies and programmes at both macro and micro levels should therefore be aware of the likely impact of such a shift on the food security of the poor.

This report argues that increased market orientation among the poor has two opposing effects on food security. First, there is a positive effect arising from the diversification in livelihood structures that is made possible by market orientation. But there is also a negative effect because the loss of subsistence production deprives the poor of a useful buffer against periodic shocks to food security. This negative effect must be neutralized if households are to reap the full benefit of interventions. In other words, measures to facilitate market orientation must be complemented by measures to protect the subsistence base of the poorest households.

Since the shift from subsistence production to greater market orientation generally takes time, these complementary measures must be such that the level of subsistence production can at least be maintained, if not improved, in spite of reduced labour input. In other words, a labour-saving, land-augmenting type of technological improvement is needed in the sphere of subsistence production. Measures to provide such a technological input should be taken in tandem with measures to provide credit and other facilities for market-oriented production in order to ensure that interventions have the greatest possible impact on the food security of households.

The second issue revolves around the need to identify the elements of IFAD-type interventions that are most crucial from the point of view of household food security. The evidence shows that these interventions did enhance the food security of project participants in both India and Nepal and that the longer the beneficiaries are involved in these programmes, the bigger the impact on food security. There are two important channels through which this impact has been achieved: first, by improving women’s access to resources and, second, by enabling women to gain greater control over decision-making within the household. The evidence shows that those women who have acquired greater access and control eventually also enjoy more improvement in food security compared with those women whose access and control have declined or remained unchanged.

Further enquiry has revealed that the key element behind improved access and control on the part of women is the confidence-boosting effect of the women’s organizations that have been formed in the process of programme implementation. According to the women’s own perceptions, organization has been the most important determinant of their access to resources, their control over decision-making and, ultimately, their ability to improve HFS. It is also significant that the region in which women’s organization is the weakest (Andhra Pradesh) is also the one in which HFS has improved the least.

The policy implication is obvious: organizational activity involving women must be considered an essential component of any programme aimed at improving household food security. If resources and services are provided without the organizational input, the potential beneficiaries may not achieve the awareness or the confidence to claim those services and resources fully. Similarly, merely facilitating women’s involvement in income-earning activities may not empower them sufficiently so that they can gain greater control within the household. Something more is needed to counteract the cultural norm of male domination and patriarchal society. The organizational strength of women may provide the necessary countervailing power.

Of course, organization cannot be successful in a vacuum. Project interventions must provide women with access to resources and with incentives to engage in income-earning activities. But these interventions must be complemented by an organizational input so as to maximize the impact on food security.

The third and final issue revolves around the trade-offs. While project interventions of the type assisted by IFAD have been found to improve HFS by empowering women and by giving them better access to resources, this success has been achieved at a cost. This report identifies two types of such costs.

First, since the women are already overburdened with work, they have to accommodate their increased involvement in income-oriented activities by sacrificing some domestic work. This entails a trade-off between the acquisition aspect of food security and the utilization aspect.

Second, in many cases, as women engage more in income-earning activities, husbands partially withdraw from work, deciding to enjoy more leisure at the expence of their hard-working wives. Both of these costs have potentially negative consequences for HFS, and so, unless some way is found to minimize them, interventions will fail to deliver the full potential impact on food security.

In order to minimize the cost of forgone domestic work, complementary interventions are needed in the form of the provision of services such as time-saving services for domestic work, institutional facilities for childcare and easier access to essential commodities such as fuel wood and water. These services are of course desirable in their own right, but they are particularly necessary as complementary measures whenever interventions seek to encourage women to spend more time on market-oriented activities.

Regarding the second type of cost, perhaps a combination of economic and non-economic measures would be useful. The economic component should consist of incentives to encourage men to spend more time in productive activities or at least not to withdraw from them. But these may have to be supplemented by non-economic actions such as motivational work through, say, men’s groups organized by NGOs, so that a social stigma comes to be attached to riding on the back of a hard-working wife.

These suggestions have a rather unorthodox implication, namely, that it may be a mistake to implement interventions that are focused exclusively on women. Men, too, need to be given incentives, such as credit facilities, and men need to be organized as well. While it is perfectly sensible to give preferential treatment to women in view of their crucial role in HFS and the greater severity of their constraints, an exclusive focus on women may defeat the purpose of the programmes.

One common lesson emerges from the preceding discussion: in order to maximize the benefits of project interventions, policy-makers must be on the lookout for complementarities, because the benefits of certain types of interventions can be reaped in full only if these interventions are combined with complementary interventions. Thus, interventions designed to encourage market orientation must be complemented by measures to protect a minimum basis of subsistence; measures to improve women’s access to resources and their control over decision-making must be complemented by appropriate organizational activities, and programmes targeted to women must be complemented by programmes targeted to men.

The importance of exploiting complementarities is already appreciated to some extent in some aspects of IFAD-supported programmes. For instance, in the Tamil Nadu projects, households receiving credit for horticulture are sometimes given an additional loan so that they can rear sheep and goats. The idea is that, since horticultural investment has a relatively long gestation period, people ought to have access to a short-gestation project as well so as to be able to earn a livelihood until their trees begin to bear fruit. In this way, short-term loans complement long-term ones to ensure the food security of the poor in both the short and the long run.

This is an example of complementarity within the sphere of market-oriented activities. But it is also necessary to exploit complementarities between subsistence and market-oriented activities. For landless and near-landless households, the exploitation of complementarities within the market sphere may be all that can be done. But whenever households have the scope for subsistence production, that opportunity must be seized to ensure complementarity between the two spheres.

There are examples of IFAD-supported programmes in which certain measures have been taken apparently with complementarities in view, but these are not working well because of a failure to identify the most crucial complementarities. A prime example is offered in the Andhra Pradesh Tribal Development Project. An important component of this project is a multi-purpose cooperative called the Girijan Cooperative Corporation, which offers various services to tribals. These services include the marketing of the produce of tribals and the supply to them of essential consumer goods, with the laudable objective of freeing them from the clutches of unscrupulous traders (saukars).

Grinding poverty and lack of education have always made tribals an easy prey to outside traders, who buy the tribals’ products at rock-bottom prices and sell them at a high profit in urban markets. The GCC has sought to end this exploitation by claiming monopoly rights for the marketing of forest products and competing directly with traders for the marketing of agricultural products. To their credit, the designers of the GCC realized quite early that engaging in marketing alone would not do the trick. The tribals who sell their products to the traders also rely on the traders for the supply of essential consumer goods. Unless this two-track relationship can be replaced by another, more attractive two-track relationship, there is no hope of ending the reliance of tribals on traders. The GCC has thus realized that its marketing effort must be complemented by efforts to supply the tribals with essential consumer goods at competitive prices. With this objective in view, it has set up a large number of so-called daily requirement depots throughout the project area.

Unfortunately, the system is not working well. Most of the tribals still market their produce through traders, and this applies even to the forest products over which the GCC is supposed to have a legal monopoly. Corruption of GCC officials, lack of awareness on the part of the tribals and various other factors have been blamed for this failure. But the most fundamental reason may lie elsewhere.

Both tribals and traders engage in a barter exchange of a special kind, one in which two sides of the exchange are separated in time. The tribals sell their products at the harvest time, but they buy the essential consumer goods throughout the year. There are moments during the year when they have no cash at all but still need their consumer goods. The traders then come forward to fulfil their daily needs on credit, and it is this credit bondage that compels the tribals to sell their products to traders at harvest time. The GCC cannot compete because they cannot supply consumer goods on credit.

Consumption credit is therefore the most crucial complementary factor that is missing in this case. The project has correctly identified the complementarity between the marketing of the produce of tribals and the need to supply them with consumer goods, but it has failed to address the crucial complementarity in the sphere of consumption credit. Until this failing is addressed (for example, through the formation of mutual savings groups within tribal villages), the GCC will continue to fight a losing battle against the wily saukars. The project is actually supposed to encourage the formation of such savings groups, especially among women, but this is one area of the Andhra Pradesh project in which very little success has been achieved, reflecting the weakness of the project’s organizational input.

These are some examples of the complementarities that need to be addressed, but there could well be others. The precise nature of the complementarities will vary depending on the nature of the interventions proposed and the particular circumstances in which the interventions are carried out.