Empowering women farmers through collective action: The case of Odisha

Women play a crucial role in agriculture in India

Women play an important role in agriculture besides contributing to household food and nutrition security and account for as high as 80 percent of the farm work in India. Women toil hard in the fields and perform multiple activities ranging from land preparation, seed selection and treatment, sowing, transplanting, weeding, fertilisation harvesting, threshing, winnowing including key post-harvest activities such as processing and storage.

Absence of land titles disempowers and invisibilises women

However, despite their significant contribution to agriculture, women’s access to resources is much less than men, especially in terms of land ownership informs this paper titled 'Empowering women farmers through collective action: a case study of Khanizpur Hamlet, Odisha' published in Gender, Technology and Development. Thus, while more and more women are managing and engaging with family farms, it has not translated into a rise in land ownership among women and women engage in agriculture either as tenant cultivators on others’ land or as agricultural labourers on their family farm.

The agriculture census (2011) defines a farmer as the “operational holder” or someone who has responsibility for the agricultural land  and land is a state subject and state governments consider only people with a land title as farmers. The census (2011) calls anyone who operates a piece of agricultural land a “cultivator”.

Thus, 3.6 crore women without land titles who engage in agriculture are classified as mere “cultivators” and not farmers. Thus most women in agriculture, including tenant farmers, cannot make use of the governmental schemes meant for farmers, access institutional credit for farming or qualify to receive subsidies. Apart from a land title, small landholdings coupled with limited access to productive resources such as credit, inputs such as water, fertilisers, pesticides, seeds, extension services, transportation, storage, technical assistance besides lack bargaining power in input and output markets because of their farm size prevents women farmers from adopting new technologies or selling their produce.

Women farmers are thus forced to borrow at a high rate of interest and purchase inputs such as fertiliser, pesticide, and seeds at market price. When operating as a tenant cultivator, they are denied access to government procurement centers as they cannot furnish the required documents (such as land ownership documents or sharecropper certificates from landowners) to register their names for sale of their produce. 

Sharecropping is the most commonly used land tenure contract by small or marginal farmers who cannot afford to buy land in which a tenant cultivates the land for the landowner and the output is shared on some pre-determined basis. The output share ranges from 25% to 50% for the landlord Marginal farmers are forced to put all their available resources such as human and animal resoirces to use with the hope of increasing their total harvest and farm income. However, if the crop fails, then the landowner receives the government compensation, not the tenant farmers.

Does collective action help farm women

The challenges faced by small and marginal women cultivators/farmers thus require a holistic approach that blends targeted interventions and policy reforms along with changes in socio-cultural practices and belief systems. The paper discusses the findings of a pilot study of a collective action (CA) model, namely the “Small Farmers Large Field” (SFLF), conducted in Khanizpur Pradhansahi, is a small hamlet in Gop block of Puri District of Odisha. 

Agriculture in Khanizpur is mostly managed by the women as all the men work as labourers in factories, construction sites, and in the nearby markets. Majorityn (90 percent) of households in the village do not own any land and lease/rent land every season to cultivate paddy for household food security. They plant paddy only in the wet season and leave the land fallow in the dry season because there are no irrigation facilities as  operating plots are not always close to the hamlet and the landowners of the plots do not invest in installing any irrigation infrastructure such as tube wells and diesel pumps. The government database has no record of Khanizpur villagers due to lack of land ownership and the hamlet does not get covered under any of the state government’s irrigation schemes.

In this study, a collective action (CA) model, Small Farmers Large Field (SFLF), was piloted in Khanizpur with landless women tenant farmers to examine to what extent they could be empowered to overcome the gender-specific challenges they face in agricultural engagement and livelihood support. The capabilities of small and marginal farmers were developed by strengthening their backward and forward integration along the supply chain, thus giving them greater bargaining power in input and output markets through CA.

A group of 35 women farmers were given 38 acres of land in 111 plots to the SFLF model. All of the participating women farmers were tenant farmers and operated on very small plots (average land size of 1 acre). The model was customized to fit the requirement of the group. Bulk purchases of seeds, fertiliser, pesticide, and herbicide were made to obtain a discount and several activities such as seedbed preparation, transplanting, and harvesting were synchronised to improve efficiency and save time. A key synchronised group activity involved raising a nursery bed for seedlings. The farmers were organised in three small groups to work in three patches, based on the location of individual plots. 

The findings

The study found that:

• The per acre net income incurred a profit of INR 15,065. This increase in net income was due to a 60 percent increase in yield from 1.5 tons per acre to 2.4 tons per acres. Several factors, including the use of good-quality seeds and adoption of improved practices such as transplanting of young seedlings and timely application of fertilisers of the right dosage, contributed to this huge yield improvement. 
• CA among farmers also led to nonmonetary benefits such as improved knowledge on technology and production practices, stronger social network and civic engagement, and efficient use of water. In addition, the women farmers saved a significant amount of time required in different field operations and purchased inputs, which were used in supporting other family activities. 

The recent farm policy reforms of liberalisation and legalisation of the restrictive land leasing system in the country can be greatly beneficial for landless women tenant farmers and legalisation of the tenancy act will recognise tenants as the operators of land and will enable them to apply for institutional loans, insurance, and disaster relief and participate in government schemes. 

This will also encourage these women tenant farmers to participate in a CA model such as SFLF to improve efficiency and diminish cost. During our pilot study, it was found that many sharecroppers were not able to participate in the SFLF model because of restrictions from the landlords. Therefore, legalisation will also give freedom to tenants to participate in any activity, including SFLF and other forms of land consolidation, argues the paper.