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

This report is concerned with programmes and policies that have a bearing on household food security (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 the analysis of these issues, use is made of both a priori theoretical considerations and the empirical evidence collected for this study in 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 of increased market orientation on the food security of the poor, (ii) the identification of the elements in women-focused intervention programmes 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 intervention programmes targeted to 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 more substantial 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 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 production for markets. 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 livelihoods that is made possible by market orientation. Second, there is also a negative effect as the loss of subsistence production deprives the poor of a buffer against periodic shocks to food security. This negative effect must be neutralized in order for people to reap the full benefit of interventions. In other words, measures to facilitate market orientation must be complemented by measures to protect the subsistence bases of the poorest households.

Since the shift from subsistence production to increased market orientation requires time, the complementary measures must be such that the level of subsistence production can at least be maintained, if not improved, in spite of the reduced labour input. What is needed is a labour-saving land-augmenting type of technological improvement in 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 considered in this report revolves around the concern with identifying the elements of IFAD-type interventions that are the most crucial from the point of view of household food security. Evidence shows that these interventions have enhanced the food security of project participants in both India and Nepal and that the longer the beneficiaries are involved with these programmes, the bigger the impact on food security. There have been 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. Evidence shows that those women who have acquired greater access and control over their use of time also enjoy more improvement in food security compared with those whose access and control have either 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 were formed during the process of programme implementation. According to the women’s own perception, formal organization was the most important determinant of their enhanced access to resources, their control over decision-making and, ultimately, their ability to improve HFS. It is also significant that the region where women’s organizations have been the weakest (Andhra Pradesh) is also the one where HFS has improved the least.

The policy implication is obvious: organizational activity involving women must be considered an essential component of any programme for improving household food security. If resources and services are provided without the organizational input, the potential beneficiaries may not achieve either the awareness or the confidence needed to claim these 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. 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 dealt with in this report revolves around the question of 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 ‘costs’.

First, since the women were already overburdened with work, their involvement in income-oriented activities had to be accommodated by sacrificing some domestic tasks. This entailed a trade-off between the acquisition and utilization aspects of food security.

Second, in many cases, as women have become more committed to income-earning activities, husbands have partially withdrawn from employment, 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 such costs, interventions will fail to deliver the full potential benefits for 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 those that facilitate time-saving in the performance of domestic tasks, institutional facilities for childcare and assistance in gaining easier access to essential commodities such as fuel wood and water. Such services are of course desirable in their own right, but they are particularly necessary as measures that complement interventions seeking 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 for men to spend more time in productive activities, or at least not to withdraw from them. But this may have to be supplemented by non-economic actions, such as motivational work through men’s groups organized by NGOs, for example, 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 in the same way as women. While it is perfectly sensible to give preferential treatment to women in view of their crucial role in HFS on the one hand and the greater severity of their constraints on the other, focusing exclusively on them may defeat the purpose of the interventions.

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 complementary measures; the benefits of certain types of interventions can be reaped in full only if the interventions are combined with such measures. Thus, interventions designed to encourage market orientation must be complemented by measures to protect a minimum basis of subsistence; steps to improve women’s access to resources and their control over decision-making must be complemented by appropriate organizational activities, and programmes targeted towards women must be complemented by programmes targeted towards men.

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

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

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

Lack of education and grinding poverty have always made the tribals easy prey to outside traders, who buy their 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 on 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 tribals’ reliance 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, however, the system is not working well. Most of the tribals still market their produce through traders, and this applies even to 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 perhaps lies 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 harvest time, but they buy the essential consumer goods throughout the year. There are periods in the year when they have no cash at all and still need their consumer goods. Traders then come forward to supply them their daily needs on credit, and it is this credit bondage that compels the tribals to sell their products to traders at the time of harvest. The GCC cannot compete with the traders because it 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 tribals’ produce and supplying the tribals with consumer goods, but it has failed to address the crucial complementarity in the sphere of consumption credit. Until this shortcoming is eliminated (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 complementarities that need to be addressed, but there could well be others. The precise nature of complementarities will vary, depending on the nature of the interventions proposed and the particular circumstances in which they are implemented.