Understanding the Roles of Gender in Rural Development: The Case of Labour-Intensive Chilli Production in Indonesia

The increasing transformation of horticultural consumption in South East Asia raises issues concerning changing horticultural production. Quantity and quality improvements are required to meet the demand for horticultural products. The use of hybrid seeds is one of the agricultural improvement strategies to address demand because hybrid seeds offer more stable and higher yields. In rural areas, this transformation not only changes the horticultural products market but also inputs markets, including labour markets, which may bring advantages for certain groups of smallholder farmers in rural areas, including women. The roles of women in this transformation have been studied but the findings are controversial. Evidence shows the importance of women’s roles in agricultural and rural development; however, extensive research also indicates that women’ contributions in agriculture are still lower compared to men. The underestimated contributions of women could contribute to a bias in the design of development policies and strategies. To examine the contributions of women in agriculture in-depth, this thesis explores the roles of women in agriculture in three analytical chapters. This thesis employs data which was collected from two surveys. The surveys were conducted in 2010 and 2016. The first survey involved 597 chilli farmers. The second survey included 574 chilli farmers, but only 251 out of 597 farmers grew chilli in the last one year when the second survey was conducted. The first and second analytical chapters utilise the second-round survey data, while the third chapter employs data from the first and the second- round surveys. The first analytical chapter presented in Chapter 4 examines the impacts of hybrid chilli seed adoption on demand for male and female labour by gender. Adopting new technology, including hybrid seeds, may change the demand for labour. However, there is relatively little understanding of the impacts of hybrid chilli seed adoption on the demand for family labour, particularly female family members. Since hybrid seed adoption often requires more labour, it may affect female members in the households to work on-farm that contributes to extra work demands on women’s time in rural areas, including in Indonesia, who are mostly responsible for domestic chores and child-rearing. This study extends previous research on household labour demands through an assessment of the impacts on both family and hired labour on a gender-specific basis. An instrumental variables 2SLS approach is employed to address the endogeneity issues that may occur related to hybrid seeds choices. Results show that adopting hybrid seeds is not associated with demand for female labour within the family. However, it is found that hybrid chilli seeds are more likely to increase demand for hiring both male and female labour. Consequently, hybrid seed adoption could generate rural employment opportunities and empower women who generally have fewer employment opportunities compared to men. The second analytical chapter explored in Chapter 5 evaluates the roles of women associated with chilli productivity and revenue. The existing literature on gender in agricultural productivity comes mainly from African countries and uses a binary gender indicator to compare productivity with and without female roles using production functions estimations. These approaches may fail to reflect the full female contribution to production since, in Asian countries, male and female farmers often jointly manage land plots. This study employs Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to outline a range of indices which indicate women’s leadership and also disagreement between household heads (husband and wife pairs) about their roles in farming activities. These indices were included in interaction revenue function analysis of chilli production. The results show that woman’s leadership in specific farming activities is more likely to increase chilli revenue. Moreover, household disagreement between males and females about their respective responsibilities seems to reduce revenue. The results suggest the more complex considerations of female’s roles in production that are needed for examining communities in which activities and farm management are shared between male and female household. This study provides evidence that women’s empowerment, through the leadership of agronomic activities, can improve both productivity and positive outcomes for households. Chapter 6 explores the third analytical chapter discussing the roles of women in farmers’ decisions about the adoption of hybrid chilli seeds. While there is an extensive literature that focuses on hybrid seed adoption in developing countries, less is understood regarding the continuity of the adoption behaviours over time. This study examines adoption behaviour using four categories — non-adoption, late-adoption, continual-adoption, and disadoption— to extend previous studies that mainly focus only on adoption and non-adoption. A multinomial logit model is estimated where dynamic adoption behaviours are specified for a two-period panel data set of chilli farmers. Results show that variables associated with continual-adopters are different from variables related to late-adopters, which suggests that each category of farmers has different characteristics. Results reveal that females identifying farming as their main occupation and farmer group membership are positively associated with being a continual-adopter of hybrid chilli seeds and they reduce the possibility of being a non-adopter. However, these variables are not relevant to late-adopters. These results indicate that the adoption stages are complex and may assist adoption policies to pay more attention to targeting differences among adoption categories. Also, integrating women in hybrid chilli seed dissemination programs may encourage more farmers to become continual- adopters.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Centre for Global Food and Resources, 202