d 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 dependence on men for labour, inputs and income. The tradition of registering land in the name of male household heads which was introduced in the colonial period has had very negative effects on women's independence, particularly in matrilineal clans where women's traditional inheritance rights were stronger. Also, the prevalence of women-headed households in many West African countries including Ghana, due to male migration, polygamy, conflict and other reasons means lack of legal ownership can restrict women's access to credit and extension services despite the fact that they are farm managers.
Development agencies which have failed to understand the independent nature of male and female farming have often created extra work for women because of their projects, or doomed development initiatives to failure. Let me give you an example. A project to support irrigated rice farming in the Gambia did not succeed because the planners assumed men were the main rice growers and women would help on their land. In reality, women were the dominant rice farmers and had no obligation to work on their husbands' land. Having lost their best rice plots to men under the project, women were pushed out to marginal land where they continued producing rice and other crops for family consumption. The poorer land reduced yields, having an impact on family nutrition. At the same time, intra-household conflicts developed because men refused to pay for women's labour for weeding and transplanting rice on the new fields. Women, already overworked on their marginal lands, withheld their assistance, resulting in further reduced yields on project land.31
With examples like this it is easy to see how misguided agricultural policies combined with periodic drought and rapidly growing populations has reduced Africa from a position of food self-sufficiency in 1950 to the current situation where the region meets only 86 per cent of its food staples needs, a figure which is expected to continue to fall to only 71 per cent by 2008.32 Surely we can no longe