THE AGRARIAN RURAL HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY

This baseline survey forms part of an action learning
process that will inform TA’s interventions. It provides a
basis for monitoring those interventions to track changes
over time. Agrarian change is a value-neutral concept.
We encounter agrarian change as part of a dynamic
capitalist system, including dispossession and
marginalisation. We may find, when the survey is conducted
a second time, that conditions have got worse, not better.
The measurement, therefore, cannot only be a measure
of the success of TA’s interventions. There are many much
larger factors outside the control of TA, including global
economic crises, trade regimes, political conflict, state
regulation, service provision, demographic changes and
new technologies, etc., which will have a far greater
impact on the lives of the rural population than the
interventions of a few small NGOs. Therefore, the baseline
is not designed specifically to monitor TA’s impact. However,
it may give an indication of the kinds of changes being
experienced in rural areas. Part of TA’s task is to understand
why these changes take place, and to define appropriate
responses that might have a positive impact on the lives
of the people we are working with and their broader
communities (in whatever way we may choose to define
‘community’).
The survey can be used to identify the current state of
affairs on some key variables, and to launch a discussion
about appropriate interventions. This is the action learning
process. Producers and their organisations are to be
drawn into the process from the outset as key partners,
with NGOs facilitating intersections between producers
in different locations and between producers and
appropriate technical and organisational support as
required.
There are limits to quantitative methodologies such as
surveys of this nature. A survey often freezes dynamic
THE AGRARIAN RURAL HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY REPORT
methodology
relations, fails to capture social nuances, ignores important
questions and issues, and loses the relationships between
processes and ‘facts’ (the frozen presentation of variables
in reality). Nevertheless a survey can offer a basis for
comparison. For example, it may provide some insight
into the extent of food production and consumption, or
access to land and agricultural support, and establish
some basic relationships between these.
A key part of the survey was to capture gendered dynamics
of land access and production. We ran into some insoluble
problems in this regard. The primary issue was that, apart
from demographic information, most questions were asked
at a household rather than an individual level. This meant
we could not look at the individual gender differences
in production and land access. But even if we had posed
questions to individuals in the household, the results would
have been in adequate, because the household is the
primary unit of economic activity; it is a pooling of the
individual contributions of its members, albeit unevenly
distributed. These are dynamics which we seek to dissect
and engage with, but cannot do so easily in a survey,
because of the nature of the household as a shared pool
of resources.
Even if we had consistently established the designated
head of the household, this would still have ignored the
reality of ‘situational leadership’, whereby men and women
take leadership responsibility for different aspects of their
joint relationship, even if this often is skewed in favour of
men making decisions. Women almost always take
primary responsibility for children and family health, and
often take decisions about the use and allocation of
household resources. Further, assigning household
characteristics on the basis of gender to the head of the
household would have revealed little more about
gendered intra-household dynamics.
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