Gender
Panel 4: Ignored Producers: Women's Role in South Asian Agriculture
Weakest Link in the Textile Chain: Pakistani Cotton Pickers after the Quota Expiry
by Karin Astrid Siegmann* and Nazima Shaheen**
Million tonnes of cotton are hand-picked by women and girls every year between August and February in the cotton growing belt of Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces. Directly, it accounts for 9% of the value added in agriculture and contributes about 2% percent to GDP. Through its use in the T&C industry, it is indirectly responsible for another tenth of the GDP and about two thirds of total merchandise exports. Despite such evident contribution to the national economy, the pickers’ fates remain invisible in the daily headlines on cotton production and prices.
This article tries to address this blind spot. Pakistani cotton pickers’ working conditions are the focus of attention of this paper. It investigates determinants of their work, wages and occupational safety and health and asks whether the link to the global cotton chain benefits labourers in Pakistan’s cotton fields. Special attention is given to the question whether the liberalisation of T&C trade through the recent expiry of the ATC has affected the working conditions of cotton pickers. The paper is based on a quantitative survey of cotton growers and focus group discussions that took place in Southern Punjab in 2005.
The results reveal that the high concentration of female labourers in cotton harvesting appears to lower their bargaining power and, consequently, depressing wage rates and constrain their ability to protect themselves against occupational hazards, most importantly in the form of poisonous pesticides. It has been emphasised that the precarious types and poor conditions of their work are embedded in their social position assigned by patriarchal gender norms. The emerging picture shows macro-economic success that is parasitic on the poor bargaining power of women workers at the level of cotton fields.
The outlined competitiveness on women’s back not sustainable, not in terms of agricultural workers’ health and well-being and probably in the long term also not in terms of the sustained competitiveness of cheap cotton-based manufactures that compromise on quality. Suggested measures to strengthen this ‘weakest link in the textile chain’ include premia for uncontaminated cotton that reach labourers, systematic attention to female workforce in agricultural policies and the coverage of the agricultural sector with labour laws, support for integrated pest management and organic cotton production. An effective way of empowering women cotton pickers and thus improving their working conditions is by supporting organisations representing their interest and bargaining collectively with cotton growers.
* Dr. Karin Astrid Siegmann is a Research Fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad, Pakistan. She holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Bonn, Germany. Her specialization is in gender and globalization.
** Nazima Shaheen is working as a Research Assistant at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad, Pakistan. She holds a Masters degree in Environmental Sciences from the Fatimah Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Cholistani Women and Informal Economy: Survival Strategies in Times of Economic Restructuring.
by Rukhsana Hasan*
Women’s labor in any system of production as primary producers of utilities and commodities, as well as maintainers and reproducers of labor power is vital for the survival and continuation of that system. The structural adjustment policies and the process of globalization of the past two decades have restructured the national economies, community resources and intra-household gender division of labor in many parts of the world, including Pakistan. The progressive process of political, economic incorporation of the Cholistani pastoral economy into a broader sphere of national capital has promoted sharp divisions on the basis of economic resources among Cholistani pastoralists.
The objectives of this paper are to document the effect of politico-economic incorporation of the pastoral community of Cholistan desert on the community/household resources and intra-household gender division of labor, as well as looking at how various gender related ideologies and relationships amongst household members provide bases that channel women towards certain positions in the paid production process.
The widening gulf between rich and poor households among Cholistani pastoralists has resulted in impoverishment of the pastoral community in general and of pastoral women in particular. Apart from being the lowest paid wage workers, they also bear the cost of market production and the reproduction of the labor force. Religious ideologies of seclusion and veiling and dominant middle class urban ideology of “women as housewives have worked together with a particular set of productive relations to assure a cheap supply of female labor”1 (Moore 1988:85) to entrepreneurs in Bahawalpur city. This in turn alters the nature of gender relations from simply asymmetrical to one of domination and subordination.
Reference:
1. Moore Henrieta L. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. University of Minnesota Press.
* Dr. Rukhsana Hasan is in-charge of the Gender Studies Program at the Fatima Jinnah Women’s University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
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