It is work, not help: women in agroecology

Calling a woman’s agricultural labor “help” places someone else in the position of the real worker. In É trabalho, não é ajuda!, Vanessa Schottz, Maitê Maronhas and Elisabeth Cardoso challenge that arrangement through feminist economics and women’s self-organization in Brazil’s agroecology networks. The article appeared in the December 2015 issue of Agriculturas, pages 48–53. Its argument connects the naming of work to the practical authority to organize production, participate in groups and determine how everyday needs are met.

The authors discuss a project coordinated by the Women’s Working Group of the National Agroecology Articulation, GT Mulheres da ANA. Conducted from 2008 to 2012, it systematized 56 individual and collective experiences across different regions. Here, systematization means participants reflecting on and organizing their experiences into shared knowledge. The 56 are not a random sample of individual women, and the article is not an independent impact evaluation proving what agroecology does everywhere.

Value does not begin at the point of sale

The original magazine article distinguishes productive work directed toward commerce from reproductive work sustaining people and households. Its purpose is to challenge the hierarchy between them. Cooking, processing food, caring for dependants and growing food for family consumption all require labor and resources. Excluding those activities from an economic account makes a farm look more self-sufficient than the distribution of work actually allows.

Credit exposes a concrete consequence. The authors describe women having difficulty obtaining bank finance when production is primarily for household consumption, even with a women-specific credit line formally available. Food that need not be purchased can reduce dependence on markets while remaining poorly recognized as repayment capacity. This is a historical account, not current borrowing guidance. Its question is how institutions decide which forms of household provisioning count as economic activity worth supporting.

Visibility is selective even when money changes hands. Women’s earnings can be treated as minor because they pay for clothes, shoes or school materials—ordinary necessities that disappear into the household’s maintenance. The problem is therefore not simply that unpaid work lacks a price. It is also that work and income associated with daily reproduction receive less recognition than contributions understood as the household’s main enterprise.

Joining a group requires someone to share the work

Collective organizing meets this hierarchy at home. The São José women’s group in Rio Grande do Sul recounts discouragement and, in some cases, partners preventing women from attending. Participants at Mulugunzinho in Rio Grande do Norte describe men refusing childcare when women leave for meetings. Missing a meeting is then more than a shortage of confidence or interest: participation depends on whether necessary work can be shared without punishment.

The article does not present only defeat. Didi, a farmer in Montes Claros, describes gaining respect and changes in domestic work with her husband and children. Other accounts describe the recognition made possible by comparing experiences rather than treating inequality as private inadequacy. These are participants’ assessments, not proof that documentation alone caused the changes. They nevertheless show why making knowledge collectively can matter for negotiating an identity as a farmer rather than a helper.

The authors explicitly resist treating women’s ecological knowledge as innate. Skills in food, seeds and care develop through social positions and repeated responsibilities; recognizing them should require men and other generations to learn and share them. Otherwise, praise can turn expertise into another obligation. The article’s demand is not merely to add women’s contribution to an account while leaving them to perform it all, but to connect economic and political autonomy with a changed sexual division of labor.

The later oral histories of Sem Terra women in Paraná sharpen this tension: income can expand while additional production erodes organizing time. They concern another fieldwork design and cannot be added to the 56 experiences as one dataset. Hirata and Kergoat’s analysis, cited by the article, helps distinguish recognizing a task from changing its position in a hierarchy. Read together, the works ask whether recognition returns time and authority to women, or simply gives a more flattering name to an unchanged burden.