Unweaving the Threads : The Experiences of Female Farmers with Biotech Cotton in Colombia

The pioneering work of Ester Boserup (1970) led to extensive research on gender-differentiated adoption and impacts of agricultural innovations. Reviewing 25 years of this research, Doss (2001) concluded that whether a farmer is male or female is not, in and of itself, the most important factor affecting adoption of agricultural technologies. Instead, it is the underlying and persistent difference in access to resources (such as land, labor, and knowledge) which generates differential adoption rates between male and female farmers. In their policy review, Quisumbing and Pandolfelli (2010) also note that differences among women—related to their socio-economic status and roles within households—influence their capacity to adopt new varieties and the benefits they earn. They also highlight the importance of recognizing that men and women often value different crop traits, which is a reflection of their household roles and crop uses. The cumulative knowledge from decades of research on women in agriculture is compiled in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) State of the World Report (2011) and 2012 World Development Report (World Bank, 2012), and is too vast to summarize here. Unfortunately, applied economics research on women and biotech crops trails far behind this work. A systematic review of the literature about the impacts of adoption of biotech crops in developing countries confirmed that, so far, researchers have paid scant attention to understanding the differences among men and women as users of biotech crops. Of the more than 125 papers that assess the economic impact of genetically modified (GM) crops on farmers (see introduction in this issue), we found only a few that made explicit references to gender. For instance, when conducting detailed interviews with 32 households growing Bt cotton in Makhathini Flats, South Africa, Bennett, Buthelezi, Ismael, and Morse (2003) concluded that reducing the number of insecticide sprays would allow for more free time for women, with subsequent benefits for the family. They noted that that an “equal number of men and women do the spraying” (Morse, 2003, p. 5) but that a day’s labor saved is more important to women given their many households responsibilities. Sixty percent of households in their sample were headed by women. Thirtle, Beyers, Ismael, and Piesse (2003) documented the fact that during the first planting season of Bt cotton in the Makhathini Flats most farmers who were offered Bt seed were the larger cotton growers; these farmers were mainly men. In the second season, after seeing the success of the technology, women were more active in securing the seed so they could plant it. Forty-two percent of households interviewed in their sample of 100 were headed by women. In a later article, using company records from Vunisa Cotton, Morse, Bennett, and Ismael (2006) found that during the first three years of adoption, the majority of adopters were Patricia Zambrano International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC