[Music]
Okay we're gonna get started. It's just a tiny bit after 12:30 and
we may still have people walking in, but we'll get started. Welcome everybody,
I'm Maria Elisa Christie, I'm director of women and gender in international development
at CIRED, the center for international research
education and development, where Kaitlyn is a graduate research assistant.
Welcome to the last discussion series, women and gender
in development discussion series of this academic year.
I want to thank Outreach and International Affairs for their ongoing
support of this series for several years now.
We'd like to begin by acknowledging that this event is held on the traditional
lands of the Tutelo and Monocan people who are the original custodians of the
land of Virginia Tech is built on. Please fill in the sign in sheet which
has gone around and let us know if you'd like to be
added to the listserv if so put your email on there but you can also
fill in your name and with your grad undergrad and so on without putting your
email and we it's really helpful for us to have
you know track of who comes and how many people so our full calendar
any updates and videos from many of our previous speakers are on our website
which is at the CIRED website you can ask many of us who work here about that.
Okay this discussion will last approximately 40 minutes
followed by 10 minutes of discussion, well question and answer discussion.
All right, I'm going to introduce Kaitlyn.
I'm very happy to have had as a grad student for two years
see her graduate in just a couple more weeks
so she's currently a master's student in geography here at Virginia Tech
she's originally from Pennsylvania and has
a bachelor's degree in anthropology and a bachelor's of science in community
environment development from Penn State prior to coming here in 2016.
Her interests have focused on gender dimensions of equitable food security,
farmer decision making, smallholder agricultural production,
and social justice and food systems. In addition to her master's work in
Nepal that you'll learn about today, she has experience in east Africa
and Central America. In Kenya she was an intern with the green mountain coffee
roasters livelihoods project that helps diversify coffee crop
production, and in Tanzania she helped conduct community mental and nutritional
health assessments. Both of those were projects in her
undergraduate program. Her master's work led her to Nepal where
she studied the gender dimensions of integrated pest management practices, IPM,
she'll be presenting today. This fall Kaitlyn begins her PhD
at a program at Utah State in environment and society
where she is a presidential doctoral research fellow
will be beginning in August. Her work there will integrate remote sensing and
modeling with participatory methods to understand land use diversity and
yield among U.S. farmers. In her spare time Kaitlyn is
often either running hiking cooking eating or preparing to do so.
sorry i didn't have it in my notes so i see a lot of undergrad students and i'd
love to have an idea what classes you're from if there's a group of you from a
class so he's here from a women gender studies class just raise
your hand so we got one two three four five okay is there another
class that has several students which which causes that world regions
John Boyer's world regions raise your hand if you're from world regions
one two three four five six seven eight okay great, thank you.
[Kaitlyn Spangler] All right thanks everybody so much for coming
I'd like to just acknowledge how wonderful this is for me to see a room
full of a lot of people that I know and have
made this research completely possible and also a bunch of faces I don't know
that I hope at least you find it somewhat interesting for the next 40
minutes or get a little bit of extra credit.
I also would like to start this out by acknowledging and
respecting the people that I talked with in Nepal
all the farmers that made it possible and really that their
strength and resilience is what drives me to
learn more and become a better person so i kind of wanted to
center that before i even started talking so
the title of this talk which is a little bit different from my master's thesis, is
"Women do light work, men do heavy work: male out-migration, the feminization of
agriculture, and integrated pest management in the
Nepali mid hills." and okay yeah
so just so there's going to be a lot of moving pieces that hopefully I
tie together at the end of this but just to give you
a general structure of what i'm going to talk about so first
i'll give you a brief background of sort of the
these some processes going on in Nepal and really generally
give you a background on integrated pest management innovation lab
who which the director is sitting with us today um
and then describe a bit about what is this feminization of agriculture and
narrative what does that mean how is it conceptualized and then
which leads us right into my research questions
the framework that we asked the questions in and then basically
what we did what did we find why it matters
i'm trying to figure this thing out there we go
okay so in nepal mail at migration is a rapidly increasing trend and i chose
some very drastic graphs here to show how
rapid this really is on the left we have total number of absentees
residing outside of nepal from 1952 to 2011. so wide time frame
dark orange is men brown is women so you can also see this
huge gender gap as well as who's migrating
and just how much it's really increased over the past decade
on the right is labor permits issue to migrant workers
from 1994 to 2014 and again just a super rapid increase
and i will say that the labor permits of course is a proxy measure
of mail at migration but it does show the changing nature of mail-out
migration because nepali men do not our people do not need
labor permits to work in india so the fact that there's an
increase in in permits being issued shows that they're migrating to other
places namely gulf countries like saudi arabia
qatar uae and malaysia
oh and this was a photo i added this thing so i thought it was really cool
this is on my way home from nepal and i had a flight from kathmandu to
mumbai i think at the end um and i kid you know i was the only woman on this
entire flight so and i'm obviously not nepali so this was
in the airport in mumbai um just showing all the men that were on
the flight and they were sort of being directed okay if you're going to
malaysia dubai like wherever you're going they
had sort of this process so um i experienced that a little bit
firsthand uh also so just really generally the agricultural sector
of nepal is a bit different from other from other countries that it doesn't
actually comprise the the majority of the gdp um services do
because tourism is really huge in nepal so it
actually only comprises about 29 of the gdp but of course it can it is
the majority of the labor force so which is to say that
um it's 69 percent of people um derive their livelihoods from
agriculture um which is to say that it's really important
and that people are practicing agriculture mostly in subsistence by
nature but increasingly commercially
so uh sort of that background on nepal and now on the integrated pest
management innovation lab what is this and this is straight from the website of
and also a figure from george norton's book um ipm is really
the goal is to reduce crop losses due to pests through a
series of integrative and ecologically based and
sort of participatory approaches to managing pests while reducing the use of
chemical pesticides um so this is sort of a like a diagram
to show about how this process actually works and
i can't pretend to know any more about it than mooney would so
i don't want to you know embarrass myself by trying to explain
um but yeah so basically it's a really intensive process of
you know crop specific practices to reduce
um pests and pest invasions and these are the goals of the in the
innovation lab that's usaid funded so it's federally funded
um and right here this goal um is sort of is quite
literally where this research fits in that's where it's funded through
and that's also the purpose that this is serving
is to understand women's decision-making and participation in ipm
and also men's because gender is both women and men
and so more specifically this project is part of um so
the ipm innovation lab is a program um i believe and the age of vegetable crops
and mango is a specific project that focuses in
nepal bangladesh cambodia and ethiopia
at least in those three asian countries yeah uh
and so just to be a little bit more specific about what their goals are for
this project um so you know ipm has actually been
working in nepal for quite some time since 2008
um and it's addressing this overarching issue that
craft loss due to pests it's a big issue in asia 30 to 40 percent of crops
um are affected by that um and so it's the this project is is aiming to develop
adapt and diffuse ipm technologies um with these relationships between
public and private institutions scientists
um ngo personnel um and also just to highlight that this is
a vegetable project so focusing on vegetable
production which is a bit different from what nepal
and nepali farmers traditionally grow at least in the majority of what they
grow is rice maize and wheat and so vegetable
production is more high value crop production and that's
sort of the goal of this is to be able to manage that better
so the feminization of agriculture what is this
it's understood as a global process of change so something that's sort of
always changing there's a lot of moving pieces and on
this narrative as it's talked about in the literature
and also used in development context is generally understood as women's
increased labor participation and increased decision-making power so
because i'm a very visual person and i hope that this is
more pleasurable because there are a lot of diagrams coming your way
this is how we've conceptualized this this narrative of the feminization of ag
so we have different migratory patterns men
leaving for different purposes at different times
that affects the household composition who's in the household
and then it's understood as like i said labor participation so
labor feminization as it's referred to and then managerial feminization so
decision making changes
and so furthermore um and i've included these diagrams pretty uh
quickly in the the presentation because i want to be upfront about what concepts
we did consider and then obviously that means what
concept what concepts we didn't consider what really weren't part of this
research and so just to be sort of clear about what we were actually looking at
and considering and the choices that we had to make in that so we've
conceptualized labor feminization as agricultural labor and
household labor and that how that affects ipm use so
always kind of remember that our ipm use is the ultimate thing that we're
we're trying to explain it sort of anchors everything that we're
um we are looking at and that's how this presentation will also flow and
managerial feminism both in agricultural and financial
management decision making and then sort of intermediary step of
participation in farmer groups which is they are these self-organized
farmer groups that is sort of the the basis of the nepali agricultural
extension system um and so these are the the implementing
level of the ipm project so how does that then interact
iteratively uh interact with ipm use
uh however of course you know what does this
narrative this feminization of ag what are people saying about in research
contexts and how can we how can we contribute to that
so um there's been a lot of recent research
that says that this narrative as we've just talked about is often
oversimplified and is talked about in a way that isn't
really actually what's going on so um there's some calls for including
changes in norms expectations uses of space identity and
power relations and how this actually contributes to agrarian change
that perhaps just focusing on what women are doing
is perhaps too narrow and understanding this narrative
so paying attention with a bit more detail to the
contra contradictions and heterogeneity of processes basically
without trying to create one sweeping brush we actually need to pay attention
to how this this narrative may not hold up
and also that it needs to be considered in a wider
social and cultural context and this concept of the expanding rural space
which i'll kind of tie together at the end so
considering everything that i've just thrown at you
we asked the following questions which really sort of guided
what we did in the field and how we how we tried to answer
uh make sense of our data that we had um so the first general question um is
really just how does mail out migration affect
gender decision making and labor really this this narrative of the feminization
of ag what does it look like in the nepali mid-hills it's really what we
were trying to do and pay attention to those
that heterogeneity of of process and then more specifically integrating
these this ipm aspect is how does ipm both the
experimentation with and adoption of ipm practices
how does that relate to this feminization of ag narrative
now of course we've we had to set this within a theoretical framework that kind
of justified and guided how we were to approach these questions
so we asked these through two main theoretical frameworks
uh the first one is kind of where this study is anchored in it's feminist
political ecology which really emphasizes that daily the
the daily livelihoods and sort of the daily management of um
of natural resources and sort of these living landscapes
um and that the way people manage their spaces
in their daily livelihoods are inextricably linked to ecological
processes and it's fbe is understood through three
main dimensions which we've also sort of tried to get at in our
research gender knowledge gendered rights and
responsibilities and gendered environmental
activism and grassroots organizing basically collective action
secondly so fbe kind of comes from the ground up
focusing on individuals and their experiences we've also integrated the
social relations approach to empowerment um this is pretty old from kabir in
1994. and that's kind of as as i visualize it
a way of bringing it from the top down so what are some of the other social
systems and structures that affect power relations
and so this approach is conceptualized through four main institutions the state
the market the community and the family and the
certified their rules resources people activities and power so basically
trying to parcel out different levels that power relations
are acting in and how can we sort of integrate those with how
individuals are experiencing their lives
so in our methodologies considering those theoretical frameworks and also
the questions you're asking we used a mixed methods approach
the majority of data was collected in 68 semi-structure interviews with
farmers and key informants um these interviews lasted about an hour
give or take depending on people's availability of time and their
willingness to talk and semi-structured means that we had a
lot of questions to ask but we didn't necessarily ask everybody
the same exact questions in the same order like you would in a survey
we basically try to have more of a conversation but still trying to target
the the concepts we were trying to
understand this and a way of doing that was using
participatory mapping as a method of a breaking up an hour-long interview
through a translator nonetheless and b to understand sort of incorporate
this use of space so we asked farmers what are important
spaces to your livelihoods and also then would ask them about ipm
and literally give them a blank piece of
paper and ask them to draw spaces that they use every day that are
important and perhaps how they relate and
we had such a wide variety of maps people drew because obviously everyone's
lives are different um
that would happen uh okay sorry so the next when um marilisa
came to the field as well we uh we conducted seven focus groups that
were separated by men and women so um there were people that we did not
interview that we included in the focus groups and we
basically got them together in the community both
the same day and we conducted a series of activities including activity charts
more participatory mapping and we conducted the same activities with each
focus group to try to basically get more information or different information
that we wouldn't get by just talking to somebody one-on-one
and finally at the end of the field work and this fieldwork lasted about seven
weeks in the nepal in the circut district that i'll talk about later
is we went back to farmers that we were particularly
were open and willing and that we knew that even through a
translator it was a bit easier to communicate with them we would probably
get some richer data we conducted some
participant observation basically i asked them if i could follow
them around and and try to live like they did so
here's a picture it was it was rice planting season so here i am
planting rice with women and i was horrible at it it was so slow
um because they are just amazing um and here i'm trying to pick up some
fodder that i tried to cut with them and i quite
literally did not stand up i never stood up and a 12 year old girl
carried that it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life
and then we were actually at the bottom preparing jolmol which is a
bio-pesticide as part of an ipm practice that
is made through seven different types of locally sourced herbs
that are then mixed with cow urine and cow dung
and then like fermented for several days so we were helping a woman prepare
that for for her use so like i said uh field work it was
conducted actually in four separate communities uh in the cirquette
district so um here's nepal and then the circut
district is obviously the one in black and then here are four research sites um
so they're relatively clustered together but the reason we chose these research
sites is because they're the um the four sites in the
district that the ipm project has been working in for four years
so they're the the current research sites and there are several other
sites within the cirquette district that the project hopes to
to reach but they haven't quite had the establishment that
these four have so since our goal was to try to understand how ipm use is
affecting gender decision making and labor we wanted to
talk to farmers that are involved in ipm
overall we talked to 109 research participants and actually a relatively
good gender breakdown 64 earth sex breakdown
64 female and 45 male um i just want to also highlight that
the the geography of nepal is obviously important
but but nepal is such a squished little country but it's so biologically diverse
it's got three ecological zones that at the bottom
of nepal is the terrai or the flat land and it's actually where most of the
agricultural production occurs in the country because it's flat
in the mid hills which was where cirquette lies um and that's why i
included these pictures because those are hills
not mountains in nepal um which i learned very quickly
um and so the mid hills kind of makes up the middle portion of nepal and at the
top you have the himalayas so you have the tallest mountains of the world
at the top so agricultural production is really varied depending on where you are
even in the same ecological zone so that's really important
to to understand also in the circut district
i just have some quits quick stats and the total population is about 350 000
um and they have recorded um the total number of female-headed
households that's 8.7 percent but there are about 20 000 more women
than men in the district this is based on census data
so in terms of who we actually talked to here's
some more demographics of our actual research participants
so here's the cast breakdown cast is obviously this
intersecting and highly important variable to consider and understand
in our research and understanding um the nepali context
and so there are four main casts there are a few others but these are the main
ones that we um that we saw in the district and so
the majority are chatri 55 and these are actually ordered in
sort of hierarchy of casts as well so brahmin is the highest
and dali is the lowest uh we also so the average remittances of
of the people that we talk to obviously of
migrant households is about um 170 the equivalent of 172 dollars and
that's per month um us dollars that is um the average
annual income which i will say this is you know this is obviously we're
asking people to estimate their annual income and a lot of it is
not you know recorded so um there's probably some issues with that
but what we do have is that the average annual income per year is equivalent of
forty four thousand one hundred forty three
dollars um average land size is almost half a
hectare and a hectare is two point two acres
um and the average household size is 5.2 persons
so you might be wondering although maybe not uh what we were asking
these farmers what were we possibly talking to them about for an hour
uh so and i also had the same thought before i like what am i going to talk to
them about uh when i get there so uh we drew on the
whea which is the women's empowerment and agriculture index and it's a
commonly used index in development on its derive it
was made for that purpose and so you know the index which
obviously the the result of the index is to come up
with a number um but we just actually use the concepts of the wea
to inform the questions we ask so basically to try to get different
domains of people's life and ask them about it is specifically
with agricultural production so then we overlaid that with anoth
another framework to inform this methodology the gender
dimensions framework up here by reuben at all and so
obviously the colors align with that um on how we overlay that to try to get
a breadth of questions that we ask people
and then so tying it into this concept of feminization
this is how we we have seen um that how these questions could possibly tell
us about these this feminization narrative
so for example managerial feminization the question under decision making over
production how do you decide what crop to plant
and that's coded as practices and participation in green
for labor feminization we have for example under group participation and
leadership or i'm sorry time allocation what do you
wish you had more time to do so we asked them what they
did and then what they wish they had more time to do
and that's coded as beliefs and perceptions
just to give you a little snapshot of what we were actually asking them
uh and this is also to show just maybe give a little insight onto my fall
semester of what is qualitative coding because i
will tell you it is really difficult um so we analyzed
all of the interviews that we i you know wrote up all the notes we analyzed this
using qualitative coding in atlas um so don't freak out because
you're probably not going to be able to read
what these actually say but it's just to show you that there were a lot of codes
which means codes are concepts that we basically
attach to words in the interview and then try to make sense of it based on
these concepts so i had 68 total codes that relate to
different aspects of all of these questions um so here's an example of
what coding might look like so here we have the ipm trainings are
held as a cooperative in the village at someone's house
sometimes even at her house and at the collection center so we've
coded that as acquiring knowledge as well as
participation in community activities and mobility so
just to give you an example of what that looks like so then
uh i know like throwing these horrible things at you
um but i kind of want you to be overwhelmed because i was so
you know so then we try to make sense of all these things these concepts and so
these are all the concepts that we considered all the codes that we looked
at again to tell the story i'm about to tell you
or i'm in the middle of telling you so for example i'll highlight the code
about household we have household decision making and finance ag
household headship household composition we've linked all of these in sort of a
web of what links with what that ultimately informed uh the the
findings which i will begin to tell you about
right now so um i'm gonna actually keep referring back
to this diagram because i think it's helpful to see
where i'm at in this story as well as um yeah just help you
understand like what the heck is she talking about and
how does it relate so i'm first gonna start with talking about household
composition and migratory patterns um and uh so really
you know as we're remembering we're trying to understand this this narrative
of the feminization of ag and really we're trying to
we're paying attention to the the heterogeneity of processes
so the first thing both in the field that i realized and then in our
coding process that migratory patterns are really complicated um it's not just
like do you have a migrant or not um so we've we've complicated them in
this way um that if you remember i had short-term
and long-term migrant migration how do i possibly understand that because what
happens is some men leave around the planting of rice so they
leave they go to india they don't need a labor permit and they go sort of
opportunistically as they can and they come back when they harvest the
rice or for a dacine festival in october other men are
migrating for more long-term contracts they actually sign a contract
for two to five years they come back once a year for a break
and those are the men typically going to countries like saudi arabia malaysia
other gulf countries so um in the you know i wanted to try to show this
numerically of how did we classify these migrants
so we have some that are gone for less than seven months per year without a
break those are the short-term migrants then
we have migrants gone for eight months or more
per year some as you can see some have not come home in a really long time and
those are actually more soldiers that are gone and this also
aligns quite well with our sample of
contractual and non-contractual labor
so this then leads us to understand that household composition as this anchoring
concept in this narrative is really dynamic so we have migrants
coming and going in different patterns which makes households look really
different so here we have a household on the left
that is a joint household so it's two brothers that share the same land
are technically one household and then on the right we have a woman whose
husband has been migrated for several years
her son has also migrated so their household consists
of for the majority of the year the the mother-in-law the daughter-in-law and
her daughter so that i think that's really important
both contextually to anchor ourselves in as well as um understand
how that complicates this narrative of the feminization of agriculture
um so in in terms of sampling so who did we
decide to talk to which i will tell you was one of the hardest things to decide
in the field when i'm there like you know sweating because it's 100 degrees
is that we we basically sampled on if there was a migrant or not so that
binary that we kind of realized was not didn't tell the
full story so we actually sampled equal parts
migrant and non-migrant households across
all four research sites but then when we kind of started looking at the data a
little bit we realized that this actually isn't
super helpful and we need to be a bit more specific
so we classified these households into four types
through our data analysis because co-residents with in-laws in nepal is
such an important thing because arranged marriage is the norm
so daughters-in-law will move in with their their in-laws
at least for a few years um and that's regardless of if
her new husband is migrated or not so there are some women who move in
to a new house and you know her husband actually hasn't been there even for a
few years so co-residence with in-laws was this
extremely important variable that we decided
to anchor the analysis in because it helped explain what's actually going on
so um like another diagram for you uh so we kind of yeah we restructured
the way we were thinking about household
composition to be a bit more specific that
we've got labor and managerial feminization going on
um in different ways and all of these types of households
and because we're actually trying to explain how migration
affects these processes we decided to focus on these two types of households
basically migrant households both residing with their in-laws and
separate from their in-laws hi sana so this conversation of complicating
the household composition also led us to to dive a bit deeper in this concept of
household headship um what does that mean it's often used
as an indicator in development reports and also in the
census it's somewhat of a convenient indicator
um but it's changing in in a lot of different ways based on these migratory
patterns as well as different household compositions and so
in households that still live with their
in-laws the father-in-law remains sort of the de jure household head
that power structure isn't really changing and that even if his son
migrates the father-in-law still a household head
and sort of retains that ultimate authority or
you know like permissive control over the household um
although i don't mean to say that in a super negative way that's just how
you know that he remains the formal household head
but in households that are in migrant households separate from their in-laws
this concept of household headship is changing
um and it it also allows for the household members
to kind of renegotiate this concept of household headship
so this woman um as she's working in her field
she said if my husband's home he's the head if he's not i am
um so you know i didn't ask her who's when i did ask her her household
head that's what she told me she couldn't pick one she wasn't ready to
pick one because she's like well it's it changes throughout the year um
okay so now we're gonna talk about labor feminization
so household composition as this as i've just
tried to convince you is uh is really important and that
defines how migration will impact labor changes so what's going on labor
labor-wise for people's workload in the household
when somebody migrates so in migrant households that still live
with their in-laws as i just said you know the
father-in-law remains the formal household head and his labor duties
really don't change when when his son might migrate because
ultimately he's in charge of typically plowing the field and other
agricultural tasks that don't change um as i said if his son leaves however
women in these households namely the
mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law that are still there and other women
other daughters and sisters um they did say that their labor does increase and
that's that's mainly household labor that they are basically like well we
have one less person so we are we have more work to do in the house
and um this would also be the same in in you know this power structure of the
father-in-law um doing like everyone performing those
certain tasks in the father-in-law plowing that would be the same in
non-migrant households but as i said we're focusing on how migration changes
that uh in households that are separate from
their in-laws it's a little bit of a different story so
women also you know women that in those separate households said that their
labor workload is also increasing um however these new agricultural labor
responsibilities are changing because they have to somehow figure out
how they're going to perform these the agricultural labor tasks that perhaps
their husband was doing before or they were they were managing a
different way before they were migrating so we found that these four strategies
were enacted by women in various ways depending on how they
can make those decisions they were either reducing their
production so cultivating less land hiring paid labor to plow which plowing
in nepal is a predominantly male task it is culturally done by men and women
are really not supposed to do it and it's not encouraged for women to do it
um in a broad cultural level they also may be able to if their
children are old enough to involve their children on the farm
or they are taking on these labor roles themselves
and so here i have a picture the only one i got the entire time i was there of
a woman plowing in the field so this is actually an increasing
presence in all four of the communities we saw although it's not the norm
the norm is that they hire paid labor but as we see this push to sort of
contest traditional gender norms for women to plow against
sort of what they're expected to do is driven by a lot of things
and in some cases it's driven by a lack of alternatives so
a woman here she describes how
how she learned to plow and how she didn't really have another option
because because nobody was there to hire because all the men are gone the young
men that would be available to hire are gone
and i also want to say that as i'm going through these results i
am going to include the households that these that we saw these patterns for so
um there are women in in non-migrant households that are plowing for
different reasons for example we have one woman who is plowing
because her husband is drunk and she can't rely on him to plow their field so
she's like well i'm going to do it myself and she also applause her
neighbor's field so it's not just mail out migration
that's changing these trends but it's an important thing to consider
about who's doing what on the farm and what how that might change over time
so then we have ipm as this this new agricultural technology for people to
to learn and ultimately change the way they
use and value their land and so across all households
um ipm is having a really positive impact
farmers are excited about growing vegetables and they're seeing now after
four years they're seeing some some benefits of that however it's not a
labor saving technology and it's not really marketed to be
because it's an integrated approach to changing
the way that you manage pests on your farm so farmers said that
rather than saving them time they were kind of just doing different things on
their farms so rather than spraying chemical pesticides
they're spending more time weeding um and
but most people kind of describe it as this like breaking even they're like
yeah well i'm not necessarily saving time but i'm
growing more vegetables
and growing these vegetables since it's such an important part of their
their diet it does supplement household nutrition because basically don't need
to buy it at the market but and it does supplement their income
but it's limited um not not all households can produce
the same amount of vegetables for pretty obvious reasons who has more
access to water and who has more land um so those are definitely cropping up
in the the presence that ipm ipm has and
here comes the title of the talk is that this perception that ipm
and vegetable cultivation is seen as women's light work
um sort of in contrast to the heavy work of a male outmigration and like more
physical labor such as construction or masonry or
things that men are migrating to do and this was something that was said to
me when i first got to the field that i saw as this like well women do light
work men do heavy work and i think that it's important to
highlight in the conte in the conversation of ipm
because increasingly and i saw this trend and farmers are
excited about the profitability of ipm and they're excited
as i said about growing more vegetables and so um
this this perception that i you know growing vegetables just light work which
i can assure you it is not but that perception may also be changing
in this context of how they value their land
so in terms of managerial feminization um i'll first start with financial
decision making uh so in the two hou and basically in
migrant households both um in their with their in-laws are not
um remittances comprise the majority of of household income and so as i said i
showed you that they averaged about 172 us dollars per
a month which is which is quite significant
um but across all households as i just said that the
sale of ipm vegetables if they're able and i should say that because not all
households are able to sell vegetables it does supplement their
household income but it's used for daily expenses such as sugar tea oil
those things and remittances are typically used for larger purchases
like school fees medication and putting into savings and that kind
of stuff
i'll also say that in long-term migration the remittances are higher
which might make more sense because they're contractual so they actually
average um their well they range from a
145 to 480 us dollars a month so it's pretty wide range um but for
short-term migrants so ones that you know might go to india for
um as they can it's about 77 and 96 us dollars per month so there's
again a difference in that
and so uh in sort of management of these finances
uh migrant households with their in-laws um
sort of in line with this this similar power structure
the father-in-law and mother-in-law is is managing the money and they retain
that ultimate control however in migrant households separate from their in-laws
they're having different conversations about how to manage money because
men aren't there to manage it and they're sending money home through wire
transfers
so in some households uh women may say yeah i manage the money when he's gone
but when he comes back he manages it or some say i just manage it all the
time because uh you know why would he do that when he
comes home for a month or two and um the somewhat frustrating but sort
of the reality of it is that the response i got is that
it depends on the household and how they decide how to manage their money
that there isn't this dominant narrative we can say about
how households decide in the context of migration to manage their money
and one woman explained to me that it actually depends on the
woman's skill set are they good at managing money which makes so much sense
because it's a skill to be able to manage money
effectively especially in the long term and in speaking of long-term financial
management the savings and credit cooperatives which is part of
the ipm farmer group that's sort of another piece of it and it's also
very present in nepal to have separate private um savings and credit
cooperatives they sort of formalize these financial
decisions so across all households um you know
because all the people we talk to are members of this
of cooperatives they save in their own name which sort of
helps with this like if women are members and they're the ones saving in
these cooperatives even if they're the only one in their
household to be doing so and there are certain the the aims of
certain cooperatives not the ipm one is to increase access for women
increase access to loans for women that they may not have been able to have
because they don't own land typically which would sort of limit
your ability to take a loan
and the decision-making process of of loans is uh done collectively across all
households every single household told me they would never take a loan or sell
their land without talking to their household first
so we have some individuality and sort of membership and these savings
cooperatives but there still is this piece of um of
cooperation in the household and uh so in the context of migration
again agricultural management now we're
switching over to the ag side um ag management is changing so
with migration and both in-laws and separate from in-laws
women are managing agricultural production which is
new and this is not this is a recent trend in nepal 10 to 15 years ago
women were not involved in agricultural production um
and so this woman is saying that before her husband left she wasn't involved in
ag they actually weren't really producing
much and then he left to migrate as a soldier
and that's when she started taking on these agricultural management roles
and she said when he comes home then he can decide uh what we do with the ag
because basically i'm the one home so i'm the one deciding
and now this isn't to say that this is the case for every household
but it's to show that as men migrate people are there there's this
renegotiation process of who is managing the ag
land which is new
uh and also um it's sort of on top of that ipm is this
again this new way of using their land it's a new technology
and it's a risk at first but but it's having a positive effect that
they're able to see that they can grow more vegetables
um as they start to use some of these technologies
so this woman is explaining how when she first planted using proper spacing in
ipm she was kind of nervous because she's like well i've never
planted this little seeds before and now i'm not even sure what i'm going to get
and then she saw that she actually grew more vegetables than she had been before
so that initial risk of who do i trust and how do i make this decision
is important because vegetable production is not how they've typically
valued their land it's kind of like a side thing
and as that increases as they can see those compounding benefits that also
changes who's managing what because women as men
are migrating are the ones involved in ipm in those migrant households
and so um speaking of trust and kind of bringing it back to this you know
bringing it to our our really exciting findings is that um
the ipm knowledge network is relational meaning that there's so many
relationships of trust that that ipm relies on
for farmers to understand what to do with their crops in each season
they may decide in the in the the dry season to plant some cauliflower but
then they may decide something different the next year they may decide something
different in a few months but it's not this
i understand ipm and now i can use it but it's changing all the time
as different pests are coming as well so this information
is completely dependent on the relationships that are built
um sorry so uh you know i've drawn i've drawn a brief
little uh network of who's involved and all of the
those didactic arrows that depend on on communication and relationship
um cpred is the on the ground implementing an
organization that basically like the university partners in ide nepal
who's our our ngo in nepal that we work with um they talk to seep
red and chakra who's the the ag technician in
surquet is the one who quite literally talks to the
community-based facilitators who are again this liaison they're
community elected leaders from the farmer groups that
basically interact with chakra and the project in a larger sense and
it's how this whole process works so then
the cbs they also talk with the agrovets the agrovets are private entrepreneurs
that are the ones who are selling the ipm
products the traps the lures the bio pesticides all of
those things come from the agri-vets whom which the cbs
and the agrovets have a relationship um
and then the the ipm pharma group as i've said is the
this self-organized group of people um through the ipm project that then meet
together once a month visit a demonstration plot that's a
picture from one of the demonstration plots
and basically talk to each other about what they're doing and how to do ipm
and then those farmers talk to their households and so this knowledge network
is relational it's really the whole point of this
and those relationships are so important because we we found and we kind of
got to a place where we couldn't ignore the fact that agricultural decision
making um extends beyond the household it's not
just household members making decisions about
what they grow and how they grow it that across all households we're finding
that you know as this man described that he discusses with his
wife but he also discusses with the cbf other technicians
from the project that may come he discusses with other farmers in the
community and his wife is doing the same thing too
and then they come together at the ipm you know the farmer cooperative and they
talk together about what they're going to do and then what
they do is they order sort of order products through the cbf
about which traps they're going to use for which type of crop variety
the cbf goes to the aggro vet purchases the
the products that they want and then takes them back to the
the community so they actually quite literally have to decide together about
what they're going to use and that this decision actually happens
at the cooperative so we're kind of interrogating this
concept of household agricultural decision making because it's just not
that's not what's happening with ipm in this new technology
and as i said uh farmers are kind of hungry for more information about ipm
they want to learn more and they want to be able to produce more
based on these networks of of knowledge that they um are sort of
entrenched in
and this i'm not going to spend too much time on it so i'm running out of time
but this is a participatory map from a focus
group that just is able to show the different spaces that
people um participate in and so um throughout this sort of ipm
value channel it's not a value chain ipm process
um that there are different spaces of interaction to learn
practice and then talk about ipm that are really important to parcel out
and then in terms of gender norms participating
in these community spaces actually has the potential of contesting
traditional gender norms so um this woman said in a focus group that
i think men wouldn't allow us to gather like this 10 years ago
without having food first um or cooking for her family and if
if we would be here he her husband would come and chase us out
and now i came here without having food so
men and women being in the same space in the community or even having their
own spaces is really important and this is sort of building this this social
network of being able to learn new things and iteratively
talk about them practice them um and that this has value and this is
important in in the project
so here's this big um big long diagram that basically is is
summarizing everything i've just told you that um
yeah i mean i've been building this the entire time and i just kind of want to
briefly summarize what i've said basically that migratory patterns are
different um and that this is important to
understand short long-term migration and that
affects the household in these uh in these various ways and
then also these circles um residing with in-laws
and not residing with in-laws has a really important
it has an important uh impact on power relations in the household and how
migration is going to affect that
and also in terms of labor and managerial feminization and how these
relate to different types of households
that in migrant households residing with their in-laws labor feminization
it you know labor isn't changing that much because we still have these these
power structures in place the father-in-law is still there
and basically we have one less person so women and and
mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws are having labor increases
um however women are increasingly becoming involved in ipm
use um in terms of migrant seven from separate from in-laws is different
because um women are having to make a decision
about how they're gonna manage the agricultural labor that
um used to be managed together or by their husband
and that also affects the ability to which their or their interest
in practicing ipm
and then across all households and just in terms of ipm
ipm is changing things and it seems to be for the better that they're producing
more vegetables um and that they're excited about this
potential to earn more income from that but the way that households are able to
participate in that is very different and then in terms of managerial
feminization basically that migrants residing with
their in-laws that who's making decisions doesn't
necessarily change if one person migrates because um
the father-in-law is still there retaining that power structure
but um those decisions are are changing with migrants stepping from
in-laws especially with financial decision-making
and then across all households are that they're making decisions that they're
cooperative together through these relational
knowledge networks um that is totally contingent on how ipm can
continuously be used so i'm going to sum all of this up in
two really quick slides um to just you know emphasize the
importance of this basically um we found and couldn't
ignore that the feminization of ag must incorporate expanding royal spaces
which is something i mentioned at the beginning
that contextual factors in nepal and anywhere where this narrative might be
applied are going to change the way household
structure and composition is is defined and understood and so
using and and we've we're sort of faced with that what do we do with
all these different types of households and then we realize that using the
household as the only unit of analysis and understanding this process
overlooks the community spaces that people are participating in
and and so you know using fpe and the social relations approach those
theoretical frameworks we used actually helped us parcel that out without
totally ignoring the way people are participating in the
community spaces because we weren't just focused on the
household although it is an important thing to consider
and finally in this relevance to ipm these community spaces are integral to
the success and continued sustainability of ipm if they
want to farmers want to engage more with ipm as
they learn about it and see its impacts and the nature of ipm knowledge needs
continuous relationships and support to be sustainable they need
to be able to talk to each other physically um in cooperative spaces
and that this collective nature of those spaces
beyond just learning about ipm which is really important
but the the value of gathering people together
and potentially contesting the spaces that men and women
are are in um that are were traditionally in and now
they're together participating in a common goal
the value of those spaces is uh is a critical place that ipm can become
community owned and contribute to men's and women's
empowerment
so uh as i conclude i just want to highlight some really special things
from the bottom of my heart to my field team
my translator lena chakra um our field team over here the people at
ide nepal as well as the wonderful wgd team and my advisor
maria lisa who has made all of this possible
and i'd be happy to take any questions
oh my gosh that was first go ahead emma down here um i i'm curious about
if you if you were seeing some generational differences if there was
if there was i guess you could say the feminization that sort of
empowerment um along kind of on a continuum from that
the households were there wasn't migration but they weren't living with
their in-laws in comparison to the both of the migrant
communities like it's basically a younger generation
of spouses were kind of integrating more into some of
these newer trends yeah no that's such a good that's such a
good thing because we realized that kind of staring us in the face when we
got together some focus groups and one community we got our our men
only focus group and we realized they were all old men
and then our women-only focus group was all young
women um and we were like wow this is extremely
important because um of course the the older men are not
migrating as much male 1 migration is young men and i
apologize for not being clear about that um but yeah and so the the way that
older men might see the value of ipm is like ah we have this
new way of earning a living off of our land um and
there are a few households in which only those older men are the ones
involved in ipm and his wife's like it's his thing
but in the the younger households where the men are migrating and they either
live with their in-laws or don't um it's a bit different because they're
you know they're trying to manage their their
land in different ways whether or not they have decision
uh you know if they live with their in-laws they might not have
um the the overall permission to be able to to change what
they're growing but it's like if they come to their
father-in-law and say well we learn about this new technology and we want to
start growing vegetables because it'll help
us potentially earn income or at least grow our own vegetables he's like
yeah let's do it so that level of engagement is hard to kind of
to sweep with a broad brush but it's there's definitely a generational gap
because of really who's migrating who's not and
then also there's that period of typically once they live with their
in-laws then they'll eventually move out um and so but when they live when
they're living with their in-laws they're younger they're
pretty much just married so yeah so you have the different different kinds
of migrations so you have the more permanent
migration from the middle east or the the
temporal migration to india were there any trends around um
sort of the household aid and like the presence of the
spout the daughter-in-law with a father-in-law like if they went
if the husbands were going to they run farther away more permanently
was there sort of a cultural bias that they should stay with their
in-laws or were those because were they independent
of them the cultural bias of who's staying
with like basically women being permanently in
female heavy household so
no but i was going to say people who are from sea red i would actually since
there's so many undergrads i'd rather and we have this room for another half
hour i'd rather you have this conversation
afterwards along i'm just saying so i'd like to get
some questions from undergrad because it's already 1 30
and so if we get one question from undergrad and then don't feel bad if you
get up and leave but welcome to stay so any one of these
undergraduate students have a question yeah
um what they like to do more like what they want to
do with their free time some of the things that women would
rather be doing yeah that's a hard question to ask you i
thought that that would be like you know i thought that it would be
easier to ask but they were like well i don't know i mean i don't i don't have
much free time like okay but if you did you know if you had
like if you had an ideal world what would you do um and typically the
women said that they would um they would spend more time visiting
friends and relatives in the community um you know they weren't saying they
want to like you know go on vacation or something it's like i
just wish i had more time with my friends basically
um and that was a pretty common answer even for men as well
um but it's hard for them to consider or really anyone consider like i don't
know if i had more free time i guess i would read but uh yeah so
they pretty much said that they would spend more time with other people or
just take rest okay one more did you speak with any families that
have moved into this region specifically to do this kind of agriculture
like farming um from there they were all from there i mean the
women were not because they were obviously moving from their home
communities to cirquette but um there are no and i don't i don't know if
it's quite has quite enough of this like a long-standing presence for that
yet um because you know when i asked do
people know if these if these vegetables have a
or if they're produced through ipm at the market some of the farmers say yeah
because most people know that insurquet vegetables are produced this way or they
know these communities are producing it that way so there's an
acknowledgement that they know that this is what people are doing but i'm not
sure if it has enough of a draw to do that quite yet because it's only
been four years since the project has been there
so no i have not okay so can we have a hand for this wonderful presentation
it's the final announcement so thank you all for coming this is
great uh participation in our last discussion series semester
we're going to send you those of you signed up and put your email we really
are going to send you a short survey take you five minutes to do it it's
really important to us so please answer that survey and the
video for this event will be on our website and also on the library website
within a couple weeks we have snacks coffee
that you're welcome to take with you and also the position uh the graduate
assistant position that helps organize these discussion series is open i'm
looking to recruit someone for a graduate student for next year so
anybody looks like we're mostly undergrads here
but the description of that position is on the table here by the suites
and you can also write me or whatever so it'll also be on the website and
courtney's gonna put on the website today
so yes thank you all right