The Role of Mainstreaming Gender in Agricultural Research and Development

This paper seeks to highlight one of the major contradictions bedeviling efforts to feed the ECA region in the present times; whereas the gendered management system of food production in particular and agricultural production in general has not changed much over the last century, the bio-physical production system has undergone tremendous change. As a result, there has been increasing demand for food without commensurate increases in food production. Unfortunately, while the deteriorating bio-physical production system that has depressed food production has evidently received research and policy attention, the static gendered management system has received scanty attention. This is because the gendered management system is part of the broader structure of gender relations that are so entrenched in the formal and informal institutions in society that they are treated as givens or natural. Hence, agricultural and social scientists and policy makers rarely recognize the challenges posed by the gendered management system to food production.