11
Gender, Resource Management and
the Rural Landscape: Implications for Agroforestry and Farming Systems Research
Dianne E. Rocheleau l:
Agroforestry is a form of land use and management familiar to millions of farmers and forest-dwellers throughout the world. Formally, agroforestry is any system of land use in which woody plants are deliberately combined, in space or over time, on the same land management unit as herbaceous crops and animals (Lundgren 1982). This definition applies to a variety of land use systems ranging from very intensive farming to extensive pastoral systems, including: bush fallow farming; management of fodder trees in private or communal grazing lands; planting of trees and shrubs as live fences on farm boundaries for fuelwood, small timber, and other useful pioductsi intercropping of tree cash crops with food, timber, fodder and soil improving crops; intercropping of hedges with grain crops for leaf mulch; home gardens of all types where trees and annual crops are mixed; and many other systems where farmers and herders combine trees with field crops or animals (Rocheleau 1986). In many of these systems women are primarily responsible for planting, tending, gathering, harvesting, processing, and using woody plants, in addition to performing their roles in crop and animal production and consumption within the larger agroforestry system.
Agroforestry systems reflect the prevailing sexual division of labor, skill, responsibility, and control within the larger society. In cases where new systems are introduced, precedents may be set for the sexual division of costs and benefits from new classes of plants or types of work not previously known in the same way. The success or failure of future research efforts to improve existing agroforestry systems or to develop new ones will depend largely on the ability of researchers to serve the social objectives of diverse groups of rural producers and to reconcile or accommodate the conflicts between men and women and between classes of rural clients.