Without Feminism, There is no Agroecology

The countryside tends to be a hostile terrain for Latin American women. They usually cultivate distant lands, have few opportunities for education and little access to health care, as well as long working days. Furthermore, less than half of women participate in making decisions about production. However, they maintain a high level of agrobiodiversity for their communities’ consumption through patios and gardens where they grow vegetables, grains, fruits, medicinal plants, and flowers, as well as raising animals and exchanging supplies and knowledges. For example, a project with 879 peasant women in northeast Brazil demonstrated that, between August 2019 and February 2020, they produced 1,228 plant and animal agroecological products: a quantity that is sufficient to guarantee the survival of families in the region. 

However, many of these practices are not recognized as productive, but rather considered an extension of domestic work, which is not properly recognized as work. Therefore, peasant women insist that agroecology must also challenge the masculine control of resources, division of labor, and decision-making in organizations and rural property. To do so, women’s movements in the countryside demand that agroecology find roots in another movement: feminism.

No more housewives, just farmers 

Vía Campesina and the Latin America Coordinator of Rural Organizations (Coordinadora Latinoamerica de Organizaciones del Campo, CLOC) speak of a peasant and grassroots feminism that is able to respond to the demands of women in specific contexts. This allows them to be called farmers and not housewives, as, for example, peasant women of northern Nicaragua have argued. The entrance of this feminist perspective makes it possible to speak of a paradigm shift taking place in communities, in which responsibility for care labor does not fall solely on women. 

Studies demonstrate that women’s participation in organizations and markets increases their freedom of action, improves their self-esteem, and, in some cases, redistributes power relations within the family. One example is that of the National Association of Peasant, Black, and Indigenous Women of Colombia (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas, Negras e Indígenas de Colombia, ANMUCIC), whose members have made progress on proposals to eradicate gender-based violence and laws pertaining to land access and ownership. 

The countryside is becoming more female

Agricultural production also gives women market access, economic independence, and political empowerment. In the Bolivian highlands, the feminization of the countryside has been increasing as men frequently migrate to urban centers. That masculine absence in the community, while it requires women to work more to sustain their family economy, also facilitates their political participation. For example, they attend communal meetings and assemblies, participate in educational activities, and take control of local markets. 

In the last two decades, Mexican peasant women have worked to transform and revalue the milpa1. Members of the Indigenous cooperative Tosepan Siuamej operate and administrate tortillerías, shops, bakeries, and workshops making sweets and liquor. Another example is the Chiltoyac cooperative, a collective of women from Xalapa dedicated to restoring the traditional recipe for Mexican mole2 and challenging the industrialization of food through solidarity and fair trade networks. 

Rural women are also involved in the struggle against toxic pesticides. In Argentina and Uruguay, rural school teachers are some of the main complainants against the consequences of the use of pesticides, such as their impacts on human health and biodiversity, resulting in dead fish, birds, and amphibians. Between 2009 and 2012, the Argentine collective Madres de Ituzaingó, pushed for the first trial against fumigation in Latin America. In the sentence, environmental contamination was recognized as a crime. In 2016, those women – environmentalists and residents of the Malvinas Argentinas neighborhood – stopped the construction of what would have been Monsanto’s largest corn seed processing plant on the continent. 

Alliances strengthen the feminist movement

Peasant women organizations also collaborate with women in academia. In 2013, researchers in the region founded the Alliance of Women in Agroecology (Alianza de Mujeres en Agroecología, AMA-AWA), with the twofold purpose of highlighting the agroecological knowledge produced by women and strengthening alliances between peasant women and academia. 

Between 2004 and 2015, dialogues between rural organizations, NGOs, and the Brazilian state enabled the creation of the Program for the Promotion of Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Equality and the National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture, along with the incorporation of a gender perspective into the Plan for Public Policies in Family Agriculture and Agroecology. Thanks to this, in all of the public calls for technical assistance and rural extension, 50% of beneficiaries must be women and 30% of resources must be dedicated to activities specifically for women in their projects. 

The educational processes of the Latin American Agroecology Institute Cultivators of Hope (Instituto Latinoamericano de Agroecología Sembradoras de Esperanza), organized by the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Rurales e Indígenas, ANAMURI) are similar. 

Equal rights require new role models in agriculture

However, there is no automatic relationship between women and agroecology. Women’s movements warn about the fact that, no matter how many spaces of participation are created, if unequal gender relations and male violence in agroecological production are not challenged, women will continue to be forced to fulfill roles of the “good mother” and “caretakers of the home and environment,” roles that should be taken up by everyone in the community. 

To change this reality, feminist agriculturalists in Latin America call for greater access to quality land, as well as technical assistance and fair trade networks, as well as social and economic recognition of their everyday work. Rural and agroecological women are not “helpers,” but rather protagonists in the struggle for life. 

This text was first published in a web dossier on agroecology in Latin America.

Translation from Spanish: Liz Mason-Deese

Editorial team: Latin-America-Unit and Lena Luig

This article was first published in Portuguese and Spanish.

Collective of authors of the Latin American agroecology dossier

Employees of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung: Ingrid Hausinger (Büro San Salvador, Zentralamerika), Marcelo Montenegro (Büro Rio de Janeiro), Emilia Jomalinis, Joana Simoni, Maureen Santos (zuvor Büro Rio de Janeiro), Dolores Rojas und Jenny Zapata (Büro Mexiko-Stadt); Natalia Orduz Salinas (zuvor Büro Bogotá), Gloria Lilo (zuvor Büro Santiago de Chile), Pablo Arístide (Büro Buenos Aires)

Research collaboration: Rodica Weitzman, Marcus Vinicius Branco de Assis Vaz, Dulce Espinosa und Luis Bracamontes, Julián Ariza, Irene Mamani Velazco, Henry Picado Cerdas, Corporación Ecológica y Cultural Penca de Sábila

Guest authors: Giuseppe Bandeira, Júlia Dolce, Nemo Augusto Moés Côrtes