 the actual costs of replacing breast-milk with substitutes, it could easily be overwhelming for many families whether large or small. Yet Eve's contribution to the economy, through the milk she produces from her own flesh, is ignored and even pushed out of sight.
Neither of these methods is completely satisfactory, however.. With regard to replacement cost estimates, the personalized services provided by a wife and mother would be difficult to purchase on the market. Furthermore, as the breastfeeding example shows clearly, there are many intangible and non-quantifiable aspects to the goods and services provided by women. At the same time, the 'opportunity cost' estimates are also unrealistic. They depend on the labour force being expandable to accommodate all women who are now housewives, and on these women having skills which are needed by the labour force. There are obvious problems with both assumptions. Furthermore, the opportunity cost would be calculated based on already deflated wages, given that women are often confined to low status and low paying jobs regardless of their personal potential.28 And since most rural women in Africa are engaged in subsistence agricultural production rather than, or in addition to, wage employment, determining the opportunity cost of their time becomes even more complex.
Women's roles in agriculture are often overlooked as productive activity, unless they work for wages. Women constitute on average approximately 50 per cent of the agricultural labour force in Sub-Saharan Africa, 30 per cent in North Africa and the Middle East, 40 per cent in South Asia, 54 per cent in South-East Asia, 40 per cent in the Caribbean and 18 per cent in Latin America.29 It was Esther Boserup's influential study in 1970 entitled Women's Role in Economic Development which first brought the role of African women in agriculture to the eyes of the world as a whole. Boserup classified much traditional African agriculture as female-oriented due to its shifting nature and hand tool technology. She showed how agricultural development from the colonial period onward placed increasing emphasis on larger-scale and higher technology farming and acted to marginalize women's small-holder agriculture and to jeopardize long-term food security in Africa.30 While Boserup's conclusion that women are subsistence-food producers and men are export-crop producers is too simplistic to represent reality, it does show the importance and productive nature of women's work. Rural African women are involved in various tasks for both food and non-food agriculture, for subsistence as well as for market and export, both independently on their own farms and in many situations as family labour on their husband's and relatives' land.
It is common for a gender division of labour to exist in agricultural production as well as in the household. This division of labour is sometimes organized around certain crops, some of which are commonly controlled by men and others by women, or around different tasks. Male and female tasks are usually sequential, so that men may be responsible for breaking and preparing the ground, both sexes may cooperate in planting and harvesting, but women are usually responsible for weeding, processing crops after harvest, and storing seeds for the following year. In some cases both men and women are involved in growing the same crops, but do so on separate fields, with each gender controlling the income from their own plots. Complex arrangements for the exchange of labour, produce or other resources between men and women are usually associated with these divisions of labour.
In Ghana, where two thirds of the total population live in rural areas, the majority of both adult men and adult women are farmers, for the most part working independently on different crops. An interdependence between men and women has traditionally been associated with this arrangement. However, this century has seen an unprecedented erosion of women's independent access to land and other resources, and a corresponding increase in their dependen