New Seeds and Women’s Welfare – The Case of NERICA Upland Rice and Labor Dynamics in Hoima District, Uganda

Johanna Bergman Lodin

Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden

Magnus Jirström

Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden

and

Milly Mugenyi

Council for Economic Empowerment for Women of Africa, Kampala, Uganda

Introduction

In this paper we present findings from our research in Uganda on NERICA (New Rice for Africa). This new group of high-yielding and stress tolerant upland rice varieties were developed in Africa for Africa so as to address the continental-wide rice cereal challenge, poverty and food insecurity (Africa Rice Center/FAO/SAA 2008). As such, it has been described as a ‘boon’, a ‘miracle’, and a ‘revolution’; some even believing it can become a similar locomotive in Africa’s ‘Green Revolution’ as the new rice HYVs were for Asia (Diagne 2006; Afrol News 2002). However, to date, this branding of ‘success’ exclusively resides in empirical household welfare outcomes, such as production growth and household income gain that create shifts in income poverty on household level. None of the research on NERICA to date is particularly gender-informed, and it is not concerned with how these household welfare outcomes were arrived at and at whatand whose cost. Instead, intra-household dynamics are systematically ignored. Little is therefore known about how the introduction of NERICA affects the different household members’ well-being. Since it is widely accepted that rice turns on labor-intensive cultivation practices compared to other crops and that there is rich evidence from other rice-based interventions of disappointing adoption dynamics relating to labor (see e.g. Dey 1981; Carney & Watts 1991; Thelma & Chi 2005), documenting how labor burdens are shared becomes particularly relevant. This paper therefore addresses this lacuna, providing a timely illustration of the impact the introduction of NERICA upland rice in Hoima District, Uganda, has had on the gender labor dynamics in smallholder households there, grounded in the local context and the lived experiences of particularly women farmers.

Methods

The study was mainly carried out in HoimaDistrict; one of the first in Uganda where the rice was disseminated on a larger scale and that by now boasts high adoption rates. Data was collected during 2008/2009 using a mixed methods approach covering quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods, including a survey of 302 NERICA farmers, a diary study charting precise family labor input in NERICA production for 13 households, over 50 focus group discussions with farmers and children and key informant interviews with various rice value chain stakeholders.Farmers were also interviewed in Luwero and Wakiso districts, two other early targeted districts for NERICA dissemination. The quantitative data collected was analyzed using e.g. t-tests and chi square tests in SPSS while the qualitative data was explored in an inductive way and coded according to the different themes that arose throughout the analysis in line with grounded theory.

Results

The households that have adopted NERICA in Hoima District dedicate on average more than one third of their cultivated land to the crop, andthe more than 75 percent that is sold off has come to generate over half of their farm income. For these households, NERICA has turned out to be an economic opportunity that goes unmatched. In short, it has made the households, as units, better off in economic terms, with their income poverty decreasing. But, this welfare outcome was only reached through hard work performed by family labor. In fact, farmers identified the labor intensive nature of NERICA as their core production concern and constraint, saying that the rice demands more labor and causes more ‘suffering’ (sic!) than the other crops they are cultivating. They mainly derive this from two activities: bird scaring and weeding. These are activities that normally are carried out by women, and since the rigid gender division of labor in Hoima offers little flexibility to substitute female with male labor, this means it is mainly women’s labor that has been expended with the introduction of NERICA.

Farmers explained that avian pests, particularly the conspicuous and destructive red-billed quelea weaverbird (Quealea quelea), can easily wipe out the whole rice crop. This is a well-known fact in Uganda and many other African countries (The New Vision 2006;Elliott 2000). Therefore they need to guard it properly from dawn till dusk during the crop’s most vulnerable stages, translating into 12–13hrs/day for well over a month, or more than a third of the total hours invested in NERICA production. During this time, the birds – or the rice – are controlling these women’s lives. Some report that they feel like ‘slaves to the rice’ (sic!) not being able to even look after themselves, link up with friends, participate in functions and so on. Others describe how they need to ‘bring the kitchen to the garden’ (sic!). The children also complain about how bird scaring now is affecting their schooling in a negative way when they have to help their mothers in the fields. Girls are also reported to have to take on domestic workand/or look after their younger siblings while their mothers are trying to control the birds.

Protecting the crop from depredation means that the women and children have to run up and down in the field, shouting, waving, clapping hands, throwing stones and sometimes trying to scare the ravenous birds off with rattles and drums. Thereby, this activity is not only time consuming but labor exhausting due to the great amounts of effort, or drudgery, that need to be invested, as measured in energy and sweat.

Weeding is less time consuming, only claiming one tenth of all the hours invested in the crop. But the farmers say that weeding NERICA is more time consuming than it is to weed other crops. The explanation is that most farmers weed NERICA thrice, or at least twice, while other crops only once, since rice is more susceptible to weeds. That weeds, if not perfectly controlled, will take a great toll on the output has also been widely described elsewhere (NaCCRI 2009, Africa Rice Center/FAO/SAA 2008).

As for bird scaring, farmers also find weeding highly labor exhausting. While weeding can be assumed to always be backbreaking work, it makes a world’s difference if you have to do it once or thrice. And again, since it mainly is a female domain, it is also first and foremost affecting women and children.

The new and greater demands on women’s time and effort have also had several extra-rice ramifications. It has meant that the women have had less time to devote to the other (subsistence) crops and to the reproductive work within the domestic arena. It has been parasitic on their residual nonwork time, leaving them with less time to recuperate and rest. They have been suffering from greater exhaustion, which in the long run can affect their health and pregnant women’s maternal health. And finally, as women’s time has become ever more squeezed, this has also affected their children, including these children’s schooling, with particularly negative ramifications for the well-being of girls.

Therefore, when NERICA was introduced into these households’ crop portfolios,women farmers’ time poverty and drudgery increased,with negative spill-over effects on their children.

Finally, it is worth noting that for men, the introduction of NERICA has not had similar ramifications. This can be derived from that the farming activity that they mainly are responsible for, namely land preparation, while being reported as the third most time consuming activity is also the activity that the households mainly hire labor for, with more than half reporting on doing that. Men’s labor is further replaced and saved as households access subsidized tractor hire services or hire oxen to plough the land, although such partial mechanization of the land preparation yet only benefited thirteen percent of the sample. However,there are no similar services whatsoever available that can save women’s labor with regard to bird and weed control.

Discussion

While Hoiman households as units gain from cultivating NERICA and become better off in economic terms, with their income poverty decreasing, there are highly problematic aspects in the production with regard to labor that affect the household members’ well-being differently. The extreme labor burden NERICA induces on women and children in especially bird scaring and weeding exacerbates their time poverty and drudgery. But potentially it may also reduce or prevent the formation of their social and human capitals when e.g. women find themselves having little or no time to socialize or participate in different organized groups, and children repeatedly miss out on school. And while not discussed in this paper, given the invariably patriarchal structure of the households, many women are not in control of the output, hence the money generated by NERICA sales does not necessarily reach the women’s pockets, or at least not a fair share, despite their heavy involvement in the production.

In Asia, the new rice HYVs became a locomotive in the Green Revolution. If Uganda, as well as other African countries, want to maintain, or even further, the ‘NERICA Revolution’, it is crucial that farmers embrace the crop in a sustained manner. Because adoption is not an irreversible state, and in Uganda we can in some places already note systematic dropouts, such as in Luwero and Wakiso districts. The reason provided by women that we have interviewed there is that they were not able to cope with the new and grueling labor, why the rice consequently failed and the households therefore soon opted out of production. High dropout rates have also been recorded by Kijima (2008), who surveyed 240 households in nine districts in 2004 and then again in 2007. In more than half of the re-surveyed districts the dropout rates ranged from over a quarter to almost two thirds.

Uganda clearly needs to boost national rice production in order to satisfy domestic demand and achieve food security. However, the suboptimal distribution of labor, sandwiched with the inefficient distribution of productive inputs between men and women, as well as the unequal sharing of proceeds and benefits within farm households, may jeopardize the success of future interventions and the chances to achieve sustainable results in regard to NERICA.

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