Title: Social Reconstruction in Rural Africa: A Gendered Class Analysis of Women's Resistance to Export Crop Production in Kenya
Abstract: ABSTRACT This study traces the struggles in Kenya of two groups of landless women to assert control over their own labour in agricultural production in the decade 1986–1997. In the first case, at least two thousand women of Maragua have refused to produce coffee, an export cash crop, and instead are producing bananas and selling them independently. In the second and very different setting of Mwea, a government rice producing project, hundreds of women have appropriated the inputs, notably irrigation water, to produce garden crops for their own consumption and sale. The study uses a “gendered class analysis” to consider how women farmers resist exploitation at the household, national and international levels. The success of grassroot women's sustainable, sustenance agriculture is linked to their success in establishing control over their own labour power, in the face of efforts by husbands, the state and private firms to retain control.
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 7
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