The Challenges Facing Delungra Women Farmers' Active Participation in Development

Introduction

Photovoice was used in Delungra to begin a community-based dialogue rooted in local experiences about a polarizing social problem: agricultural pollution in the state's waterways. Landowner women have not been visible in the public debate on water quality in Delungra due to the low invitation to participate in conversations about agricultural conservation practices and the cultural expectation that decision-making will cede to tenants, who are often men (Australian Women in Agriculture, 2018). Agriculture is a big business in Delungra, more than 90% of the land in Delungra is used for agricultural production. Family farmers adopt various strategies to increase and diversify their income and livelihoods. These strategies are usually gender-based: men tend to focus on lucrative crops or migrate as seasonal or permanent workers; while women cultivate family land for family consumption, care for small livestock and process or sell part of their products in local markets (Australian Women in Agriculture Movement, 2018). Increasingly, rural women also migrate to find employment outside their areas of origin. Rural women participate in agricultural and non-agricultural activities to guarantee the food security of their families and to diversify the sources of income. They contribute to family farming with their work and knowledge of agricultural practices and biodiversity(Australian Women in Agriculture, 2018). Their off-farm work is often poorly qualified and poorly paid, but it is essential to mitigate shocks that affect agriculture, such as droughts, floods or economic fluctuations. Poverty levels in Delungra are pretty high, and through empowering women in agriculture, the problem may be solved.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Reducing gender inequality is essential to eliminate hunger and develop sustainable food systems. Family farmers, who are mostly women, are the dominant force in world food production, and at the same time, they are among the most vulnerable people in the world. Much of the future of global food security depends on taking advantage of its potential. Unemployed rural women play an important role, not only as peasants, but also in the preparation and preparation of food, and in local markets (Australian Women in Agriculture Movement, 2018). According to several studies, the agricultural productivity of women in developing countries would increase by 20 to 30 percent if they had the same access to resources as men (Empowering Women in Agriculture: Australia and Beyond, 2016). Improving the productivity of existing agricultural lands will not only reduce poverty but is also an essential way to address deforestation and cope with climate change.

It is common to see women working side by side with men on plantations. However, although women are the central axis of one of the most important industries for the country's economy, they are often marginalized and have less access to financial resources, knowledge, and technology (Australian Women in Agriculture Movement, 2018). Women living in Delungra are particularly vulnerable, as the transfer of communal land tenure to the state and the patriarchal system have undermined their rights to land ownership. In addition, indigenous women work more frequently with short-term plantation contracts (Australian Women in Agriculture, 2018). However, women play an important role in disseminating the use of new cultivation techniques and in influencing others to invest in better practices, such as the intercropping of orchards.

Empowerment has become a significant element for reflecting and visualizing the development of communities today since it is related to the ability to decide on individual well-being, and even that of the family and the community (Empowering Women in Agriculture: Australia and Beyond, 2016). Empowerment is one of the great objectives of the millennium, especially in the case of women, because it leads to an increase in the power of decision within and outside the home, which implies independence and autonomy to assume and direct the main factors that lead them to improve their living conditions. In this way, the analysis of empowerment from the gender perspective allows identifying structural differences rooted in a model of functional organization in the home, which defines the type of decision power of men and women according to specific roles (Empowering Women in Agriculture: Australia and Beyond, 2016). This would cause an unequal distribution of this power over material resources, such as income, land or credits; but, also, it would limit access to other decision spaces such as the labor market or political and social organizations. In this sense, this approach provides empowerment analysis with more solid tools to interpret the dynamics under which the development of communities and societies is directed.

The route of women's empowerment towards better nutrition is influenced by a number of factors, including social norms, knowledge, skills and how power in decision-making is shared within households(Empowering Women in Agriculture: Australia and Beyond, 2016). In recent years, the responsibility for agricultural production has been led by women due to the temporary migration of men in the search for new sources of income, due to the effects of climate change and the increase in vulnerability to risk threats such as drought, frost, hail,and others that have affected agricultural production. On the other hand, with regard to regulations, progress has not guaranteed access to resources such as land, water, technical assistance, inputs for production, and access to productive infrastructure (Empowering Women in Agriculture: Australia and Beyond, 2016). In some communities, cultural practices still apply that men are prioritized in relation to women. It is therefore fundamental that alternatives and measures for compliance with access to resources be sought.

Other activities in which women have been venturing and has been a space to visualize their leadership, in some cases, are the actions of transformation of products, linked to the Rural Economic Organizations (OECAs) that has allowed the development of new skills and skills, although it cannot be denied that this autonomy and strengthening of women's leadership has not ensured that co-responsibility in reproductive roles is achieved, even though these actions have principles of social justice and sustainability (Empowering Women in Agriculture: Australia and Beyond, 2016). On the other hand, due to the diversity of interests of both men and women, their participation is minimal in decision-making spaces regarding agriculture. Thus, there is still a need to integrate the gender perspective in family farming in general to transform the power relations and the roles assigned to people of different genders, to turn their enterprises into spaces of empowerment and empowerment, as well as to promote construction of masculinities as part of the deconstruction of patriarchy and as a tool to promote gender equality; promoting the autonomy of rural women is not only possible with the recognition of their work and achieving co-responsibility of men in household tasks, but also recognizing them as economic actors.

Women are the backbone of the rural economy, especially in developing countries, since they represent almost half of the world's farmers, and in the last decades, they have expanded their participation in agriculture. The number of households headed by women has also increased as more men have migrated to the cities (Empowering Women in Agriculture: Australia and Beyond, 2016). As the main caretakers of their families and communities, women are responsible for providing food and nutrition and are the link between farms and household canteens. While the global community strives to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - including SDG 2, which aims to end hunger and malnutrition by 2030 - women can become the key change agents in the world in areas of agriculture, nutrition, and rural development. With better access to information, training, and technology, they can transform the production and consumption of food so that land and resources are used in a sustainable manner.

Overview of the Chosen Community

Although the conditions of Delungra differ and the objectives of the projects implemented also, we consider it necessary to highlight the benefits of collaborating and exchanging experiences related to the processes and results of designing and carrying out participatory research, especially when Photovoice was used. According to Sassen (2015), it is important to recognize the systemic tendencies behind what happens around us because it does not matter the diversity of social and visual orders, what drives them is the desire to obtain profits and indifference to the environment. For which she suggests it is necessary to carry out both empirical research and conceptual recoding in order to recognize and understand them.

For his part, Bell (2015) argues that as academics we have the ability to study the consequences of neoliberalism on the lives of people, and the power to expose and attract attention to these consequences through the methodologies with which we choose to drive our research projects. Thus, participatory research challenges us as researchers by asking ourselves if this research perpetuates the status quo or if it contributes to the transformation of power to achieve a more inclusive and just community. It was my desire to transform my surroundings that I decided to use photovoice as a method that allows us to change the conceptualizations of power, specifically those based on gender within agricultural spaces (Dakin, Parker, Amell, & Rogers, 2015). Photovoice is a methodology with strong links to activism and feminism, focusing on the experiences lived by people -which are considered collaborators in research projects- while privileging local knowledge (Litchy, 2013). Based on the theory of point of view, making photovoice projects in collaboration with groups that are historically considered marginalized and that are rarely invited to collaborate in this type of initiative, can generate awareness about the impact of this omission (Nelson & Christensen, 2009; Warne, Snyder, & Gillander-Gadin, 2012). The study of the experiences of marginalized people can contribute to their subordination by objectifying and reformulating their experiences so that they fit into the dominant epistemologies (Evans-Agnew, Sanon, &Boutain, 2013). These experiences are the center of analysis in the search to generate knowledge and thus create new possibilities for empowerment. It is then that by placing the experience of women farmers in the center of these studies I seek to identify new ways of understanding their experiences within broader narratives, and if it were possible to identify possibilities for intervention.

This emphasis on critical participation is justified in the fact that the beginnings of Photovoice are framed in Popular Pedagogy, in Feminist Theory, and in documentary photography based on the community, which converges in their commitment to rescue and contribute the subjective vision of the situation from the perspective of the most vulnerable:

Freire's methodology involves the selection and use of photographs and sketches as facilitators to encourage dialogue (Chio & Fandt, 2007). Photovoic...