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The triple burden: the impact of time poverty on women’s participation in coffee producer organizational governance in Mexico

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Abstract

In the mid-1990s, fairtrade-organic registration data showed that only 9 % of Oaxaca, Mexico’s organic coffee ‘farm operators’ were women; by 2013 the female farmer rate had increased to 42 %. Our research investigates the impact of this significant increase in women’s coffee association participation among 210 members of two coffee producer associations in Oaxaca, Mexico. We find that female coffee organization members report high levels of household decision-making power and they are more likely than their male counterparts to report control over their coffee income. These significant advances in women’s agency within the household are offset by the fact that the women experience significant time poverty as they engage in coffee production while bearing a disproportionate share of domestic labor obligations. The women coffee producers view organizational labor as a third burden on their time, after their reproductive and productive labor. The time poverty they experience limits their ability to fully participate in coffee organizational governance and consequently there are few women leaders at all levels of the coffee producer businesses. This is problematic because it limits women’s ability to fully benefit from organizational membership: when women fully participate in governance they gain valuable business and leadership skills and producer associations with active female members may also be more likely to develop and maintain programs and policies that enhance gender equity. Our findings indicate that targeted agricultural development programs to improve gender equity among agricultural smallholders should involve creative ways to ease women’s labor burdens and reduce their time poverty in order to facilitate full organizational participation. The research findings fill a gap in existing studies of agricultural global value chains (GVCs) by demonstrating how the certified coffee GVC depends on women’s under and un-paid labor not only within the household but also within producer organizations.

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Notes

  1. For example, see Doss (2013), Fletschner and Kenney (2011), Meinzen-Dick et al. (2011), Vargas Hill and Vigneri (2011), World Bank (2011), Gonzalez Manchón and MacLeod (2010), Lyon et al (2010), Peterman et al. (2010) and Allen and Sachs (2007).

  2. The FAO estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men they could increase yields by 20–30 %. This increased productivity would reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12–17 % (FAO 2011). A study across multiple developing countries showed that women spend on average 90 % of their income supporting family needs whereas men devote only 40 % of their own income to the same (Smith and Haddad 2000).

  3. The organizations’ names are pseudonyms to protect participant confidentiality.

  4. This statistic is derived from an analysis of a statewide producer database, which includes more than 4000 registered organic coffee farmers. It parallels similar changes evident in the producer databases maintained by CERTIMEX, an organic coffee certifier.

  5. In our study, 80 % of surveyed members in UPCOBJ and 67 % in the Café de Oro identified as comuneros, although the actual number might be higher as many respondents chose not to provide this information.

  6. Plan 2011; 89 % of Oaxaca's coffee farmers own plots smaller than five hectares (Porter 2002) and there are 104,879 registered coffee farmers in the state [out of a total 511,679 registered Mexican coffee farmers (AMECAFE 2013)].

  7. For a comprehensive look at smallholder coffee production in Oaxaca, see Jaffee (2007).

  8. This rate parallels that found in the sample as a whole which showed 42 % of women joining organizations in the last 10 years (however, in the sample as the whole 34 % of men joined during the same time frame).

  9. 154,560 kilos (280 sacks of 69 kilos/container).

  10. The members of both groups, on average, are also older than the sample of 56 non-organized coffee producers (drawn from across the state of Oaxaca) who, on average, are 47 years old.

  11. See the Sustainable Coffee Program’s Coffee Toolkit for more information (Hivos 2014).

  12. This project is similar to the tool libraries that Grassi et al. (2015, p. 21) note have been developed in some African villages where women pool resources to buy tools that are rented at a fixed rate, thereby increasing their productivity and income. They find that the time saved in travel and manual labor reduces women's time poverty.

  13. The WEAI was developed to track the change in women’s empowerment levels that occurs as a direct or indirect result of interventions under Feed the Future, the US government’s global hunger and food security initiative. The United States Agency for International Development, International Food Policy Research Institute, and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative collaboratively developed it (IFPRI 2015).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Weissberg Family Foundation, Root Capital, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, and the Institute of Sociological Research, Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca for their generous funding of this research. The authors thank Arenys Santiago for her assistance with the research and project management and the members of the participating coffee producer organizations. Finally, the authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor, Harvey James, for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA

    Sarah Lyon

  2. Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA

    Tad Mutersbaugh

  3. Institute of Sociological Research, Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca, 68050, Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico

    Holly Worthen

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Correspondence to Sarah Lyon.

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Lyon, S., Mutersbaugh, T. & Worthen, H. The triple burden: the impact of time poverty on women’s participation in coffee producer organizational governance in Mexico. Agric Hum Values 34, 317–331 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9716-1

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