Carmen Bain

Gendering Agricultural Aid An Analysis of Whether International Development Assistance Targets Women and Gender

Gender-based inequalities constrain women’s ability to participate in efforts to enhance agricultural production and reduce poverty and food insecurity. To resolve this, development organizations have targeted women and more recently “mainstreamed” gender within their agricultural aid programs. Through an analysis of agricultural-related development aid, we examine whether funded agricultural projects have increasingly targeted women and/or gender. Our results show that the number of agricultural aid projects and the dollar amounts targeting women/gender increased between 1978 and 2003. However, the increase was modest and, as a percentage of all agricultural development aid, has declined since the late 1990s. Significantly, this decline occurs at a time when there are an increasing number of women engaged in agriculture. Our findings suggest that the rhetoric of gender mainstreaming outstrips efforts to develop projects aimed at women and gender inequality and that the concept may be being used to legitimize a decline in focusing explicitly on women.

Interrogating Social Sustainability in the Biofuels Sector in Latin America: Tensions Between Global Standards and Local Experiences in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.

Across the Americas, biofuels production systems are diverse due to geographic conditions, historical patterns of land tenure, different land use patterns, government policy frameworks, and relations between the national state and civil society, all of which shape the role that biofuels play in individual nations. Although many national governments throughout the Americas continue to incentivize growth of the biofuels industry, one key challenge for biofuels sustainability has been concern about its social impacts. In this article, we discuss some of the key social issues and tensions related to the recent expansion of biofuels production in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. We argue that a process of “simplification” of ecological and cultural diversity has aided the expansion of the biofuels frontier in these countries, but is also undermining their viability. We consider the ability of governments and non-state actors in multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI) to address social and environmental concerns that affect rural livelihoods as a result of biofuels expansion. We analyze the tensions between global sustainability standards, national level policies for biofuels development, and local level impacts and visions of sustainability. We find that both government and MSI efforts to address sustainability concerns have limited impact, and recommend greater incorporation of local needs and expertise to improve governance.

Sustainability Standards and Their Implications for Agroecology

Agroecology has helped produce a movement where consumers are concerned about more than price. The qualities sought include the process by which a product is grown or produced. When supply-chains are long, it is difficult to know whether to believe any particular production quality claimed on a label. This review describes the evolution of market, government (state) and civil society efforts to devise credible certification schemes that would allow consumers to use their dollars to build healthy ecosystems that are socially just and economically secure for producers and workers. Market groups now control governmentally sanctioned certifiers, such as the International Standards Organization and the ISO 14000 family of standards, regulation and enforcement mechanisms. At the same time, numerous market-led and civil-society led certifying efforts are competing to determine what is ecologically sound and socially just. These mechanisms and their negotiations are discussed and the future of sustainability standards for agroecology assessed.

Review: The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy, by Bill Winders. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 274pp.

and social-status-oriented consumption also do not receive much attention. Given the materialist perspective taken, it would have been useful to connect with the literature on the inter-relationships between people (culture) and design of objects (of consumption). This research suggests that choice of designs (products) by ethnic and cultural groups is affected by cultural values, beliefs, and preferences. Mention of frugality, referenced to Gandhi, and the discussion of religion also raise questions from a non-materialist perspective of appropriate consumption and whether consumption really is freedom or a form of bondage? The numerous spelling and English errors should have been caught by a sharp editor the publisher clearly did not provide. Use of more standard transliteration (e.g. Durga, dhobi, thachushastram, Sanskrit, Nambudiri, etc.) would have made reading easier. The maps and pictures helped ground the account; more would have been better.