Climate change adaptation a gendered study of organic agriculture in three disaster prone zones of India

Abstract

This inter-disciplinary research adopts a feminist approach to climate change adaptation in agriculture for a just transition to a more climate-resilient world. Climate change impacts on men and women, and their adaptive capacities, are very different. The research uses gender analysis frameworks and field-based data from 150 farmer households in three disaster-prone areas of India - flood-prone Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, cyclone-prone Sunderbans in West Bengal and drought-prone Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh to compare conventional and organic farmers using six gender empowerment indices access to agriculture credit, land ownership, workload, decision-making, assistance from government programmes and control over income. The quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that organic farming is climate resilient, economically and environmentally viable, but it deepens gender-based power relations by increasing women organic farmers workload and retaining gender stereotypes with regard to credit, land-ownership, decision-making and control over income. Indian policies on organic farming and women s empowerment are also divergent although there is feministion of agriculture labour and organic farming especially relies on women s labour. Civil society organizations (CSOs) too ignore the higher women s workload in organic farming. Findings show there is a complete disjunct between climate change and gender empowerment processes at the United Nations level, both at the climate science and climate policy levels. Much of India s agriculture is carried out in disaster-prone areas and is highly climate-sensitive. India is highly vulnerability to climate vagaries and home to the world s largest number of organic farmers -mostly poor, small and marginal. Given that anthropogenic climate change is perhaps one of the biggest threats to humankind, the thesis concludes by suggesting an inter-disciplinary feminist conceptual framework for policy and practice changes for a just transition in agriculture. newline