Mortgaging women's lives: feminist critiques of structural adjustment

Abstract

Apart from introductory and concluding chapters by editor Pamela Sparr, this book contains seven country case studies: two from Asia (Sri Lanka and the Philippines), two from subSaharan Africa (Ghana and Nigeria), two from the Middle East (Turkey and Egypt) and one from the Caribbean (Jamaica). All were written by who grew up in the country they write about and many include original field work? The purpose of these studies is to show how structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund in some five dozen countries has affected women's lives. With the usual holistic approach of researchers, the studies deal both with the economic activity of (in the formal market, in the informal market and within the household) and with women, and their children, as consumers of market goods, homegrown produce and public services. Sparr notes three goals of structural adjustment: 1) getting right which means eliminating price controls and subsidies and often making imports much cheaper to the detriment of local industries producing for the domestic market; 2) minimizing government involvement which implies privatization of government-owned companies, cutbacks in public services, and deregulation in areas such as labour standards but also in areas such as agricultural marketing boards; and 3) creating an open economy which generally means developing export-oriented industries and abandoning those seeking to compete with imports; this, in turn, generally requires significant devaluation of the country's currency and therefore a major decline in real wages and living standards. Given the level of development of these countries and therefore the kind of economic activities available to women, four themes dominate the case studies: in agriculture (whether for home production, local markets or, more rarely, export markets); in manufacturing, including traditional handicraft or cottage industries, producing for local entrepreneurs or in the free-trade zones dominated by multinational corporations; entrepreneurs, which generally means small-scale commercial ventures or higglering (a term used in both Nigeria and Jamaica, although not with exactly the same meaning); and women, many with professional training, in the public service. One of the important lessons of this book is that women are an extremely diverse group and that the impact of structural adjustment policies, or any kind of policy for that matter, differs not only from one country to another, but also between urban and rural women, between social classes, between age groups, and even between the kind of crop produced or the product manufactured. Examples taken from the texts are, therefore, intended to illustrate the richness of the analysis and not to provide generalizations. In agriculture, one of the main thrusts of SAP is to remove subsidies from food crops for local consumption and to promote export production even though world prices may be extremely low. For example, in the Philippines, land was transferred from the traditional crops of rice and corn to the production of sugar cane, bananas and pineapples with a concomitant increase in the size of holdings and greater mechanization but also a rise in the number of landless households. The main result was to further marginalize in crop production as they are largely excluded from the sugar cultivation. The loss of small holdings meant that many could no longer rely on a subsistence crop. In Nigeria, agricultural development projects, specifically designed to provide money to help modernize farming actually made it harder for to get credit or training. In both these countries, overall declines in wages and money income have forced both to increase household work and to seek outside employment, in areas where jobs are scarce, or to try to start a small business. In Sri Lanka and Jamaica, SAPs have led to the establishment of free-trade zones. …

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