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akistan’s women farm workers have long been overlooked despite their significant contribution to the country’s agricultural sector, but their situation after the 2022 floods looks even bleaker.
Already underpaid and overworked before the catastrophic floods that lasted from mid-June to October last year, Pakistan’s women agricultural workers now have to contend with even less wages and little or no share of the crops as landlords point to increased expenses and smaller harvests.
Environmentalists and climate-change experts also say that many female farm workers have yet to receive any relief support from the government despite US$9 billion of aid pledged by donors to Pakistan.
This is even as agricultural workers – men and women alike – are still reeling from impact of the floods, which have been estimated to have racked up damages of about US$3.7 billion in the agriculture, food, livestock, and fisheries sector alone. In all, the total damage by the floods has been placed at around US$14.9 billion, with some 33 million of Pakistan’s 220 million people affected and at least eight million displaced. More than 1,700 people also lost their lives due to the floods.
Like most other South Asian nations, Pakistan’s agricultural sector is the biggest employer of women. In a 2018 report, UN Women Pakistan said that about 75 percent of women and girls in rural Pakistan are in agriculture, it said, doing work “mostly out of need and often without choice.”
Even in cases where they are not the main breadwinner, the contribution women farm workers make through their labor remains crucial to the family’s survival.
Yet Afia Salam, a renowned environmentalist, notes, “We are not hearing of any assistance to female-led households or women farmers by the disaster-management authorities or by the agricultural extension service to rehabilitate them after the floods. They have already lost their all and need assistance to get back on their feet.”
One problem after another
Holding a small harvesting scythe in one hand, Bibi Feroza is already anticipating more hardships ahead even as she prepares to harvest wheat with other women workers in a small village in Balochistan, in Pakistan’s southwest, which was among the hardest hit by last year’s floods.
According to the Balochistan Provincial Government’s flood-damage assessment, more than 475,721 acres (192,517.46 hectares) of agricultural land were completely destroyed in the 2022 floods while nearly 434,424 livestock perished.
Pakistan is considered to be among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, and the agriculture sector remains particularly exposed to extreme weather conditions and their aftermath.
“Nothing was left for us,” says the 42-year-old Feroza, who has been doing farm work for at least a decade now. “We are still reeling from the horrible floods (that) ruined a large swathe of standing paddy crop in our village last year. Now the local landlord says he has been cultivating wheat crops and he used borrowed money for the fertilizer, which would affect our share of wheat in this season.”
“I lost three family members and my cattle due to flood,” Feroza also tells Asia Democracy Chronicles. “We migrated to a safer place and faced severe waterborne disease weeks after the floods. Now agricultural and livelihood losses are the most hard-hitting, but I have no other source of income besides working as a farm laborer.”
That’s not surprising since UN Women Pakistan says that only 4 percent of the country’s rural female population have college degrees. Pakistan’s patriarchal society also limits employment for women, especially in the rural areas.
In truth, however, farm labor doesn’t yield much of an income for women who are still expected to do most, if not all, the chores at home. According to UN Women Pakistan, the returns to farm labor for women “are low: only 19 percent are in paid employment and 60 percent work as unpaid workers on family farms and enterprises.”
“Their unpaid work,” it says in its 2018 report, “is valued (using comparative median wages) at PKR 683 billion (US$2.3 billion), is 57 percent of all work done by women, and is 2.6 percent of GDP.”
No cash, no benefits
In Balochistan, majority of the women farm laborers get paid in kind due to the informal nature of the work, while most of their male counterparts receive wages in cash.
The women in the province — Pakistan’s largest, but least populated and least developed — also work as seasonal laborers and on casual basis. Explains Dr. Quratulain Bakhteari, Founding Director of the Institute for Development Studies and Practices (IDSP) in Balochistan: “Women farm workers usually come in at harvesting time. In Balochistan, there are two kinds of women farmers — one who comes from outside and gives labor to the landowners and the other are locals who live permanently on the lands … as tenants.”
In general, Pakistan’s women farm workers do not get holiday pay, sick or maternity leaves, or receive medical relief. And while landlords often avoid having written contracts with their workers due to tax and other legal concerns, the laborers who do have signed agreements are usually male.
When the women are paid in cash, the difference between their wages and those of men can be startling. In some areas where male farm workers are paid the equivalent of US$3 to US$5 a day, the women are getting only US$1 to US$2. A 2021 study by the India-based think tank Observer Research Foundation says that a gender wage gap exists in the agricultural sector across South Asia, but notes that it is highest in Pakistan, at 32.8 percent.
“There is no formal structure of wages in the agricultural sector,” says Nasir Mansoor, general secretary of the National Trade Union Federation Pakistan. He adds though that “women workers are paid 20 to 40 percent less as compared to men.”
“Currently, a woman farm laborer in Balochistan is paid PKR 200 per day (US$0.7),” continues Mansoor. “This is less than women laborers working in Punjab and Sindh. The post-flood situation is dire. They have lost livelihoods and have no work as the crops were wiped out. Those who are working in wheat harvesting after the floods are paid even less, around PKR 142 (US$0.5) per day.”
“There is no social security from the employer to these laborers,” he says. “The fruit farms are bought by the employers with standing crops and families permanently stay and work there — mostly women for years, in return for a small advance amount.”
Dr. Bakhteari, for her part, says that the “migrant workers are double affected” whenever calamity strikes. Referring to those whose lives were turned upside down by the recent disaster, she says, “They have no homes and the lands are destroyed by the floods. The land needs extraordinary plowing to prepare it for seeding.”
“I often find women too weak in body to work so hard and yet have no place for a home,” Bakhteari says. “They will have huge debts, no money, and are facing illnesses, with starved and sick children. Government provided seeds to the large landowners, but the government does not provide aid to the agriculture workers directly; it is left to the landowners.”
Sources: Asian Development Bank, Carbon Brief, International Potato Center, United Nations, Food and Agriculture Organization
Farah Azeem Shah, spokesperson of the Balochistan provincial government tells ADC, however:
“The government of Balochistan has distributed seeds among the agriculture workers in Balochistan and we are in the process of rehabilitation of the flood victims.”
A law yet to be implemented
In 2020, women’s rights advocates had lauded the passage of Women Agricultural Workers Act in Sindh, in the country’s southeast, with some hoping it would set a precedent for the other provinces. Three years later, however, the law has yet to be implemented. The registration of women agricultural workers has not even been initiated, and observers say that will take some time because Pakistan’s agricultural sector is not only huge but also set up rather informally.
A January 2023 post on the international agriculture and environment non-profit CABI’s Plantwise Plus blog meanwhile argues that “one main barrier to women’s access to agriculture advisory services” in Pakistan is that “(most) people believe that women are farm helpers and not farmers in their own right.”
“Most agricultural extension managers and field staff believe this,” the post asserts. “And this idea means that authorities do not design services to reach women farmers.”
Indeed, even when a woman is working side by side her spouse on a plot of land they rented as a couple, any queries from the landlord or a local authority would likely be addressed to the husband. Yet when things turn sour, the burden is shared by both the husband and wife.
Gul Naz, who spent more than six months with her three children in a tent city that was set on a main highway during the floods, is now at her wits’ end. She has returned to her village in her village in Jhat Pat, also in Balochistan, but she says it will take time before they can start cultivation again. According to the 24-year-old, most of the land there is not conducive for agriculture at the moment after being under water for months.
“My family is indebted,” she says. “We borrowed money for grocery and farm activities from the local landlord for the past few months. We bought the seeds on debt and cultivated on a piece of arable land that now won’t give us the expected yield.”◉
Putting together this story received support from the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Pakistan Program.
