Rendered voiceless due to gender

T

he strange weather was making Haleema worried and tense, but she continued nonetheless to work on the fields in southern Punjab, tending to her crops of wheat. This was in 2022 — and for all her toil, Haleema would end up with no harvest. In August that year, Pakistan came under extreme volumes of monsoon rain that caused sections of the country to remain under water for months. Thousands of people were killed, millions more displaced, and hectares upon hectares of crops were destroyed, including that of Haleema.

“I did not have a cell phone and nobody told me about the floods,” she tells Asia Democracy Chronicles. “People who were listening and watching news were totally prepared for it, but I had no knowledge of it.”

‘’I worked day and night in the fields,” the 46-year-old widow says, “but when it came time (for the government) to compensate us for our lost crops after the disaster, I was not contacted from anyone. We had nothing to eat. I lost my crops, I lost my chickens and goats.”

Today Haleema is again harvesting wheat on land owned by her brothers, and raising chickens and goats. But she remains traumatized by what she and many others went through two years ago, and she says that she keeps having flashbacks of what happened to her. She has also realized that should the weather turn nasty again, she will once more wind up with nothing to show for her months of work – and that there is little she can do to change that.

“The number of women involved in decision-making policy regarding climate change and agriculture is very low,” says climate activist Rashid Ali. “In rural areas and small cities of Pakistan, only men are hired for positions in agriculture departments, where they hold meetings with only men in their luxurious rooms. This is where the problem persists: rural women farmers’ non-existence on mainstream platforms. These gaps need to be identified.’’

Fellow climate activist Iram Akmal of the non-profit Rural Aid Pakistan also says, “In Pakistan women are already socially, economically, and culturally marginalized, which also makes them more vulnerable to climate change as compared to men. But unfortunately, policy makers are not doing any serious measures for them.”

The Global Climate Risk Index ranks Pakistan as the fifth most vulnerable to climate change among countries across the world. According to U.N. Habitat Pakistan, this “indicates that the country will experience increasingly severe extreme weather events,” with floods and droughts now expected to occur yearly. The South Asian nation’s agricultural sector has been among the hardest hit by these extreme weather disturbances, and consequently its farmers, particularly the women.

Accounting for some 24 percent of Pakistan’s GDP and described by the Bureau of Statistics as the country’s “largest source of foreign exchange earnings,” agriculture has a workforce that is 68 percent female and 22 percent male. But despite their dominance in terms of number among agricultural laborers, women and girls in Pakistan come into the sector handicapped by their gender, which guarantees that they will always be low in any priority list – from nutrition to education and training, to wages and even just recognition for the work that they do. 

In the 2023 Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Pakistan ranked 142 out of 146 countries, besting only Iran, Algeria, Chad, and Afghanistan. And this was supposed to be Pakistan’s best showing on the Index yet in nearly two decades.

Woe is woman

Many of Pakistan’s women farmers have barely had formal schooling, which can rob them of the confidence to upgrade their skills and seek more training to make them more efficient in their work. For Pakistani women farmers, though, more skills do not necessarily translate into more pay. In fact, a 2018 study by the women’s rights group Aurat Foundation noted that in Punjab, which contributes the most to Pakistan’s agricultural production, 75 percent of the women farmers go unpaid. 

Women farmers there and elsewhere are also likely to miss out on important updates that affect their work – such as the gravity of upcoming weather disturbances, as in the case of Haleema – not only because they may have less access to these, but also because their male counterparts do not see it necessary to tell them about these environmental phenomena. Women are apparently not seen as farmers in their own right, but are considered mere farm hands or farm helpers.

A 2023 policy brief by the United Nations Development Programme on women and agriculture in Pakistan observed that only 17 percent of the country’s rural women have mobile phones, compared to more than 60 percent of the men. Only seven percent of the women use the Internet, it said, compared to 16 percent of the men. Such limited mobile and Internet access impedes the women’s access to vital information all the more, as does their lack of contacts or network outside of their clan and neighbors.

The women farmers’ list of woes goes on. Cultural norms, for instance, put land ownership out of reach of many women farmers. While having little or no money is one important factor for this, another is the fact that women in many rural communities across Pakistan are not allowed to own or inherit land. 

All these mean that Pakistan’s women farmers are ill-equipped to cope with and recover from climate disasters, as the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) pointed out in an article on the 2022 floods. For one, it said, government disaster compensation schemes are based on land ownership, thus shutting out women farmers of state aid to recoup their losses. For another, CGIAR noted that women would have no land to offer as collateral should they want to take out loans. 

That is certainly the case with Rubina, a farmer in a small Punjabi village of just 52 people. On a cold, rainy day, Rubina is staring morosely at her crops, unable to harvest them. Aside from the rain, smog has made it harder for her to do her work. She worries that the cold and rain will render much of her crops useless, and affect the family budget; last year, hailstorms had destroyed half the wheat she had planted.

“I have been working in the field for more than 15 years and I haven’t seen weather changing this much,” says Rubina. “Due to loss in our crops we have to take loans now sometimes.’’ But since the land belongs to her brother, she will need him to agree to take out any loan in her stead.

The ever-changing weather patterns mean longer hours for women, too. This takes a toll on their health, which is usually not ideal to begin with, since in Pakistani families, the men and boys have priority when it comes to food. Aside from farm work, women also have household duties that include child and elderly care, cooking, cleaning, and laundry. According to the Aurat study, women farmers in Punjab are already spending as much as 15 hours each day for agricultural work, which can range from fetching water and dairy production to rice transplanting and harvesting crops.

“Climate change not only affect (the women’s) mental and physical health but also increases their number of work hours,” says Akmal. But at the same time, she says, climate change “can reduce their ability to work in extreme heat and drought situations.”

Ali agrees, saying, “When it comes to the impact of climate change, rural women farmers are more vulnerable because they are already marginalized and underrepresented. Adding to their misery, climate change puts an extra burden on rural women farmers and increases the work for women more as compared to men… (even as they attend to more) health issues.’’

After the deluge

For sure, though, the 2022 floods highlighted the devastating effect of climate change on women and spurred political pledges and initiatives for more gender-sensitive policies on climate-change mitigation and agriculture. Up to now, however, these have remained mere words on paper.  

Ali himself acknowledges that Pakistan has “specific programs aimed at protecting the livelihoods of rural communities,” but he says that the government has “failed” to implement them. He adds, “There are national policy measures to fight with climate change, but they are of no use.’’

Local government initiatives have so far gone nowhere as well. Even Sindh province’s 2019 groundbreaking law aimed at protecting the rights of women farmers and ensure their participation in decision-making has yet to be fully implemented, much less replicated elsewhere in Pakistan.

“This like many others laws has shown no such kind of progress,” comments Sindh-based journalist Rahmat Tunio. “Good laws are being made on daily basis, but they are hardly practiced. This law is like that. We cannot admit this law having an impact on the ground.”

In November 2022, as the massive floods that year were finally receding in many places, Punjab hosted the launch of Pakistan’s first Climate Change Gender Action Plan (ccGAP), a joint initiative of the Pakistani government and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. At the event, Dr. Sohail Anwar, then the secretary of the Punjab Planning and Development Board, said that “climate change is not gender neutral.”

“In Punjab, we always promote the initiatives to strengthen the productive role of women (and ensure it is) enhanced, well recognized and acknowledged,” he also said. “Punjab province will lead from the front.”

Whether or not the initiative has moved forward since is uncertain. But for the likes of Rubina in Punjab, what is certain is that, nearly two years on, women farmers still have no seat at the table. She has yet to be invited to the farmers’ meetings in her village and in the city, she says.

“The male members of our households tell us we should stay home because we are women, they will go to city and meet people,” she says. “It is not custom in our area for women to go outside and interact with men.’’ ◉