Technology

We are far from easing the drudgery of women farm workers. But there is growing interest in designing technologies to improve their lives, report M Sreelata and Naomi Antony.

The seemingly simple act of removing the husks from maize cobs by hand is tougher than it sounds. A female worker uses her fingertips on average 522 times, her fingernails 144 times and her palms 55 times for every single kilogram of grain she produces, according to a survey carried out last year by India's Ministry of Agriculture.

Women — whether young or old, healthy or sick — can be found across the developing world working long hours without rest. They pick tea, process tobacco, shell cotton pods, spread fertilisers on fields and transplant rice.

In the developed world, this work is usually done by machines. But in poor countries, much of the labour is done by hand — and a woman's hand at that.

"It's shameful," says Anil Gupta, executive vice-chair of India's National Innovation Foundation (NIF).

"India can send up ten satellites in a single launch in different orbits. The science and technology capacity that we have is enormous. And yet when it comes to problems that women face, there's a huge silence, there is a huge indifference."

The meeting was organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions.

More than 700 participants from 50 countries attended the meeting, which took place in the context of two reports on the role of women in agriculture — one in 2010 from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the other from the World Bank, released in 2011.

The UN report estimates that women contribute 47 per cent of global agricultural labour. But this international average is misleading. In many countries it is far higher; in Lesotho, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, for example, women carry more than 60 per cent of the agricultural workload. In Egypt women make up less than half of the agricultural workforce but account for 85 per cent of unpaid farm labour.