CHAPTER 5
 THE WORK OF PEASANT WOMEN IN FLOWER AGRIBUSINESS: THE CASE OF
 THE COMMUNITY OF MULAUCO IN THE ECUADORIAN ANDES

 Thus far in this thesis the economic, political, and social conditions that have

provoked the involvement of rural women in paid work, particularly in the so-called

NTAEs, have been examined. Before analyzing the determinant conditions that drove

women from Mulauco to work in the NTAE-flower industry, I will show some Latin

American experiences of female participation in these types of industry.

 Additionally, in this chapter I will analyze the disruption of the traditional

household economy in the Mulauco community. This dynamic process will be helpful in

the understanding of the involvement of women in flower work since the early 1990s. In

the last part of this chapter I will review the changes that the life of the peasant women

has experienced due to flower work. This section is based on field-research done in the

Comuna Mulauco. As was explained in Chapter 1, this field research was conducted

using semi-structured and non-structured interviews, which were carried out with 20

people that include current and former women flower workers, some relatives of these

women, and flower agribusiness managers.

 The NTAEs and Female Work: Experiences from Latin America

 In the last two decades, numerous case studies have been published on the impacts

on rural women in Latin America of paid work in Non Traditional Agriculture Exports

(NTAEs). These analyses, which describe the positive and negative impacts of wage

labor on rural women, are relevant to the situation of women from Mulauco, a