The challenge of HIV/AIDS: Where does agroforestry fit in? - World ...

174World Agroforestry into the Futurecareful attention to gender relations, mobilityof residence and control over resourcesin different locations is needed to maximizethe impact of agroforestry programmes.Why are women’s rightsimportant?Property rights for women are important foragricultural productivity, women’s empowermentand household welfare. Rights toland and trees tend to shape women’s incentivesand authority to adopt agroforestrytechnologies more than other crop varietiesbecause of the relatively long time horizonbetween investment and returns. Studies inCameroon, Kenya, Mali, Uganda and Zambiahave found that tenants without longtermland rights are restricted in their rightsto plant or harvest from trees because ofinsecurity of tenure (Place 1994). In communalareas of Zimbabwe, Fortmann et al.(1997) found that the potential loss of landand trees following widowhood or divorcetended to make women feel insecure andlimited the amount of trees they planted onhousehold land. At the same time, womenand men were equally likely to plant treeson community woodlots because rightsover those trees derived from communitymembership and investment, not maritalstatus, and hence there were fewer genderdifferences in tenure security. However, differencesin socioeconomic status of householdswere a bigger factor than gender differencesalone in explaining tree plantingbehaviour overall: the poorest householdshad least ability to plant, and tended tofocus on trees for subsistence needs, ratherthan commercialization.Because credit, extension, and other servicesare generally directed preferentially tolandowners, the agricultural productivityof women without land rights is furtherrestricted by a lack of complementaryinputs. This is particularly a constraint foragroforestry, where access to informationand credit are important for adoption.Where women obtain land through theirhusbands (for example, in the dual-farmingsystems of Africa), they are often requiredto work on their husbands’ fields in orderto obtain their own plots for growing food,which restricts labour availability on women’sfields. When men are absent (due tomigration, divorce or death), the problemsof labour shortage are even more serious(Davison 1988; Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997).The high labour requirements for someagroforestry systems pose a particularproblem for women, who not only faceless control of others’ labour compared tomen, but also have high labour requirementsfor domestic tasks. Studies indicatethat reducing the gap between men’s andwomen’s control over capital and inputscould increase agricultural productivity insub-Saharan Africa (SSA), for example, by10–20 percent (Quisumbing 2003).There is a growing body of empirical evidenceindicating that property rights raisewomen’s status in the household as well asin the community, and this translates intogreater bargaining power (Agarwal 1994;Quisumbing 2003). When women controlresources, such as land and trees, they aremore likely to be managed in a way that isconsistent with women’s priorities. Longtermrights to land and trees also providesecurity for women in the event of widowhood,divorce or family crisis. Whetherbecause of this improved fallback positionor because of higher status, studies in variouscontexts have found that women withcontrol over land have more influence overdecisions at home, and may be subjectedless to domestic violence.The higher income and stronger bargainingpower of women with control overresources has implications for the distributionof welfare within the household,since women and men spend incomeunder their control in systematically differentways (Quisumbing 2003). Womenare observed to spend a higher proportionof their income on food and health care ofthe children (particularly of girls), whichhas important implications for overallfamily welfare and long-term poverty reduction.Thus, improving women’s statusand resources improves child health andnutrition (Smith et al. 2003). Trees can playa role in this, not only as an asset that mayincrease women’s bargaining power, butalso as a source of food, medicines, andfuelwood, which all tend to be importantto women.The complexity surroundingwomen’s rightsIt is one thing to recognize the importanceof women’s rights, but quite another tostrengthen them, particularly concerningland and trees. It is important to beginwith an understanding of existing rightssystems, which often involve complexrelationships between different uses andusers of the resources. Rather than simple‘ownership’ of resources, we often findseparate bundles of rights; for example,one person may have the right to plant atree and use its fruits, another to grow anannual crop on the land around the trees,and a third to graze their flocks on theland in the dry season. In other situations,one person has the right to use the land,but another holds the controlling or decision-makingrights. The different rights maybe held by different households (landlordand tenant), or even by different memberswithin a household (husband, wife andchildren). The duration of rights also varies,from a growing season (or less) to thelong term.