The Journal of Peasant Studies
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjps20
Agricultural and land commercialization – feminist
and rights perspectives
Elisabeth Prügl, Fenneke Reysoo & Dzodzi Tsikata
To cite this article: Elisabeth Prügl, Fenneke Reysoo & Dzodzi Tsikata (2021) Agricultural and
land commercialization – feminist and rights perspectives, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 48:7,
1419-1438, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2021.1974843
To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2021.1974843
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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
2021, VOL. 48, NO. 7, 1419–1438
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2021.1974843
FORUM ON COMMERCIALIZING AGRICULTURE/REORGANIZING
GENDER
Agricultural and land commercialization – feminist and rights
perspectives
Elisabeth Prügl a, Fenneke Reysooa and Dzodzi Tsikatab
aGender Centre, Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland; bInstitute of African Studies, University of Ghana,
Accra, Ghana
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The article introduces the Forum on Commercializing Agriculture/ Agricultural
Reorganizing Gender, which reports findings from DEMETER commercialisation; land
project, a collaboration of scholars from Cambodia, Ghana and commercialisation; gender;
Switzerland. The project examines how agriculture and food right to food; Cambodia;
security policies have advanced or hindered gender equality and Ghana
the right to food; analyzes the role of human rights-based
accountability mechanisms in this; and maps gendered changes
in livelihoods in situated contexts. We offer a literature review on
governance of the international food system from a gender and
rights perspective, and on the gendered political economy of
agrarian change. We relate the contributions of the Forum to
existing literature and preview their findings.
The commercialization of agriculture has accelerated in the twenty-first century, integrat-
ing farmers in the South ever more tightly into market economies, including global value
chains, and driving forward the commodification of farmland and rural labor. It has found
its most problematic expression in the wave of land grabs in Africa, Asia and Latin
America. Neoliberal economic policies have been a major driver of these transactions, pri-
vileging the rights of investors and entrepreneurs to operate in ‘free’markets in the name
of development. They have seeded a new wave of commercialization, further integrating
food production and consumption into global markets and creating, for the first time in
history, a global market in which farmland is becoming increasingly financialized and thus
internationally tradable.
What are the impacts of these developments for global food security? An international
regime complex governs food security and combines often contradictory neoliberal ideas
about how to organize food production and distribution with rights-based understandings
(Margulis 2013). It relies, on the one hand, on economic orthodoxies promoted by the
Bretton Woods institutions that celebrate the power of abstract market forces to encourage
commercialization. On the other hand, it has opened up to rights perspectives that
CONTACT Elisabeth Prügl elisabeth.pruegl@graduateinstitute.ch
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
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1420 E. PRÜGL ET AL.
emphasize states’ obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the right to food while comply-
ing with human rights principles, including participation, accountability, non-discrimi-
nation, transparency, human dignity, empowerment and the rule of law (Golay and
Büschi 2012). These sometimes-contradictory commitments guide policies aimed at achiev-
ing food security. To put it simply, the market-based approach that relies on commerciali-
zation tends to see the problem as one of the availability of food and expects trickle-down
effects of job creation through investments in agro-industrial production. In contrast, the
rights approach sees the problem in existing power relations and as a matter of distribution
(Saab 2019). International definitions have combined these approaches to suggest that
food security is a matter of both availability and accessibility, recognizing that increasingly,
wages are needed to purchase food. They have added to this the notion of food adequacy
to bring into view nutritional content and cultural values.
The idea of the right to food builds on these definitions. It has gained traction in
international debates, in part because of the creation of a Special Rapporteur on the
Right to Food in 2000. Legal activists and scholars had identified codifications of
such a right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 25), the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (article 11), as well as in several sec-
torial or regional instruments and national constitutions (Ziegler et al. 2011; Golay 2011;
Bourke Martignoni 2019). It has been defined in the General Comment No. 12 of the UN
Committee of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as the right of everyone to have
‘physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procure-
ment’ (CESCR 1999, paragraph 6). Interpreting the right to food through the lens of
human dignity, the first UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler,
has underlined that it is the right of every human being to feed oneself and one’s
family with dignity (Human Rights Council, 7th Session 2008). This right can be attained
by ensuring everyone’s access to productive resources, including land, as well as access
to labor or social assistance schemes (Human Rights Council, 25th Session 2014; Bourke
Martignoni 2019).
The right to food approach resonates with efforts to integrate gender equality goals
into the international governance of food security. Rural women and gender equality
figure in human rights discourses, including on the right to food. Various instruments,
including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Econ-
omic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, link gender equality to the right to food. Moreover,
gender equality has become a policy priority at the United Nations as gender consider-
ations have been mainstreamed into other policy goals. The UN’s agenda for sustainable
development, adopted in 2015 and setting goals for 2030, recognizes that achieving the
goal of eliminating hunger requires paying attention to women’s nutritional needs and
their role in small-scale farming. The Rome agencies (FAO, WFP, IFAD) and the World
Bank, all have established gender strategies and mainstreamed gender into their strategic
planning cycles. The suggestion that gender equality is both a matter of rights and econ-
omic efficiency has become an international mantra.
These developments encourage us to explore the impacts of agriculture and land com-
mercialization on food security from the dual perspectives of gender equality and the
right to food. For the past six years, the DEMETER project has explored the links
between commercialization and food security in case communities in Cambodia and
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1421
Ghana.1 It has critically examined how agriculture and food security policies have contrib-
uted to advancing gender equality and the right to food; analyzed the role of human
rights-based accountability mechanisms in realizing these rights; and mapped gendered
changes in livelihoods in the two countries.
The four articles of this JPS Forum report some findings from the project. Combining
scholarship frommultiple disciplines, including political economy, development economics,
political science, anthropology, law, agronomy, and gender studies, they address different
aspects of the topic and employ different methods. One takes a top-down perspective,
showing the distinctive ways in which international policy discourse is gendered (Prügl
and Joshi, forthcoming). A second compares legal realities in Cambodia and Ghana in
order to demonstrate that a comprehensive realization of the right to food needs a feminist
methodology (Bourke Martignoni 2021). The remaining two articles explore gendered live-
lihood impacts of land and agricultural commercialization in our case communities. Gironde
et al. (2021) document how a rapid transition to commercial agriculture in Cambodia has
made family farmers more dependent on cash to access food, which affects food security
outcomes along the lines of sex, class, ethnicity and seasonality. Dzanku et al. (2021)
show how long-term processes of land and agricultural commercialization are gendered
in meanings and highlights outcomes in different districts in Ghana.
In this introduction, we situate these articles in two ways. First, we introduce our two
case countries, Cambodia and Ghana, and provide an overview of the methodologies
employed in the DEMETER project. Second, we offer a literature review that summarizes
existing understandings. We discuss how international development policies are gendered,
how gender equality and the right to food have been integrated into such policies, and how
international policies and human rights are translated into local contexts and support local
activism. We also discuss evidence of the gendered socio-economic realities brought about
by land and agriculture commercialization, including its impact on food security. We bring
the insights and findings of the project into conversation with this literature.
Neoliberal commercialization in Cambodia and Ghana
Cambodia and Ghana share the fact that their governments at the beginning of the 1990s
entered a path of democratization combined with economic liberalization, embracing the
neoliberal orthodoxy that agriculture would flourish through the promotion of free
market principles, entrepreneurship and private land ownership. For governments in
both countries, agricultural development is a priority and both have in place policies to
encourage large-scale production.
For Cambodia, the shift towards economic liberalization coincided with the end of
turmoil following the Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s and a subsequent civil war
in the 1980s. The 1993 elections under UN supervision brought to power a government
intent on building a free-market economy while strengthening its control over land and
natural resources to leverage political power. Today, Cambodia is a key site of rapid agri-
culture and land commercialization. Supported by international development institutions,
1DEMETER is an acronym for Droits et Egalité pour une Meilleure Economie de la Terre. It is a research partnership of
scholars from Cambodia, Ghana, and Switzerland and is funded under the Swiss Programme for Research on Global
Issues for Development (r4d program). See project website at https://r4d-demeter.info/.
1422 E. PRÜGL ET AL.
national policymakers have approached agricultural development mostly from a macro-
economic perspective seeking to foster growth. Land policies have entailed a concessions
system, which has attracted domestic and foreign capital (especially from Vietnam and
Japan) and generated investments in large-scale rice production and irrigation schemes
in lowland provinces and around the Great Lake, and in rubber plantations in Ratanakiri
and Kampong Thom. It also has invited massive commercial logging and fostered the
internal migration of Khmer farmers in search of land. Although the 2001 Land Law
included a social land concessions clause intended to alleviate rural landlessness and
poverty, economic land concessions have led to the more or less violent expulsion of indi-
genous non-Khmer populations and smallholder farmers with insecure titles, together
with a vast loss of access to forests and communal lands (Gironde and Ramirez 2019; Cam-
bodia Human Development Report 2007). Land concessions also have served to enrich
political and military elites as the government shored up its power through patronage
and built the basis for an increasingly authoritarian regime. Commercialization in Cambo-
dia thus is synonymous with human rights violations, land grabs, (domestic and foreign)
investment, massive deforestation, the introduction of cash crops, and a growing need for
cash for commercial crop inputs, investments and food (Gironde, Golay, and Messerli
2015; Reysoo and Suon 2017).
Unlike in Cambodia, in Ghana the return to democracy in 1993, after years of populist
andmilitary rule, entailed nomajor shift in economic policies. Rather, the transformed Rawl-
ings government remained true to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy that had informed
its structural adjustment policies in the 1980s. With a strong export-oriented sector since
colonial times, involving in particular the production of cocoa, Ghana’s agriculture has
long been deeply integrated in international markets. Its free market policies have garnered
it extensive support from international development actors since the 1980s, and its devel-
opment policies, including in the food and agriculture sector, have focused on strengthen-
ing the private sector as the key engine of growth. A multi-year, internationally funded land
administration project (LAP) was put in place starting in 2011, geared towards establishing a
regulatory framework and promoting land titling and registration in order to determine
land boundaries, strengthen land markets and increase land security. Today, small-scale
farming continues to dominate agriculture, but there are also well-developed systems of
contract farming, plantations and medium sized farming. There is clear evidence of devel-
opment processes putting pressure on land across the country, of changing land tenure,
and of increasing land sales even in the less-commercialized North. Customary authorities
have been integrated into land administration, and they largely control land tenure with
sometimes detrimental effects for women (Whitehead and Tsikata 2003). While land
grabs are less extensive than in Cambodia, peasant dispossession has a long history invol-
ving transnational corporations acquiring land for large-scale plantations and mining and
logging concessions from the state (Dzanku et al. 2021). There are also reports of chiefs
using their prerogative as custodians of the land to sell large tracts, including the
commons (Lanz, Gerber, and Haller 2018; Tsikata and Yaro 2014; Boamah 2014).
Despite the rights violations engendered by commercialization processes, both
countries have made commitments to the right to food and gender equality, and are
parties to the relevant UN Conventions, including the International Covenant on Econ-
omic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Dis-
crimination Against Women and its Optional Protocol, and both voted in favor of the
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1423
adoption of the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the rights of peasants and other
people working in rural areas in 2018. Cambodia’s constitution provides that these trea-
ties supersede domestic law and should be fully implemented (article 31). However,
reviews of Cambodia’s commitments by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human
Rights Situation in Cambodia and by the relevant treaty bodies have found violations
of women’s rights and the rights of vulnerable groups in the context of large-scale
land acquisitions (Human Rights Council, 21st Session. 2012), and there are numerous
ongoing cases of land disputes. Cambodia has implemented legal reform on gender
rights and a land titling program that sets up joint titles, but there are severe deficits in
implementation (Baaz, Lilja, and Östlund 2017).
In Ghana, gender equality is guaranteed in the constitution, and the Supreme Court has
confirmed that the right to food is protected by constitutional provisions, even if implicitly.
Ghana has ratified the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and its Women’s Pro-
tocol, which recognizes women’s right to food and the obligation to ensure gender equality.
The country also has a national human rights institution – the Commission onHuman Rights
and Administrative Justice, which has a broad mandate to protect human rights, including
the right to food and gender equality. Ghana underwent its first Universal Periodic Review at
the Human Rights Council in 2008 where NGOs submitted a report raising concerns that the
expansion of mining operations and the related deployment of the military and police to
the mining areas has led to human rights violations, including violations of the right to
food (FIAN and WACAM 2008). More recently, NGOs have criticized the Ghanaian media
for spearheading a campaign against water pollution and environmental degradation
that has targeted small-scale mining, while large-scale mining receives tax and other incen-
tives. They argue that this amounts to a violation of the rights of artisanal miners and dis-
plays double standards in favor of large-scale mining and chiefs (Abdulai 2017).
The intensity of agricultural and land commercialization and the recognition of the
right to food and gender equality in the two countries make them particularly interesting
cases for study. So are the differences between them, which allow us to explore the
varying ways in which hegemonic logics are translated. These pertain, in particular, to
the pace of commercialization, which has stretched over decades in Ghana while proceed-
ing at an astonishingly rapid speed in post-conflict Cambodia; to the size of landholdings,
with small-scale farming continuing to dominate in Ghana while large-scale economic
land concessions account for half of farmland in Cambodia today; and to the political con-
texts of a strengthening democracy in Ghana juxtaposed to strengthening authoritarian-
ism in Cambodia. Cambodia thus has a frontier character, with investments in farmland
and agriculture taking the form of fortune hunting, facilitated by high levels of political
corruption. In contrast, Ghana has established a Westminster-style democracy that nego-
tiates legal pluralism and the significant influence of (public and private) international
development actors. Building on colonial structures of export-oriented agriculture, it
has sought to further commercialize smallholder production and develop large-scale
plantations and contract farming in parallel.
Demeter research methodology
Commercialization is the concept that anchors our project. In the literature on agricultural
development, commercial agriculture signifies the opposite of subsistence production,
1424 E. PRÜGL ET AL.
indicating the creation of divisions of labor and the insertion of production and distri-
bution into market economies (Braun and Kennedy 1994). Commercialization is also a his-
torical process of the gradual expansion of markets that has taken different forms in
different historical periods. Following Marxist thought, it builds on the on-going commo-
dification of goods, labor, land and nature. With Polanyi and others (Polanyi 1944; Block
and Somers 2014), we approach markets as institutions created through policies. With
feminist political economists, we recognize markets as ruled by gender hierarchical
social norms (Prügl 2008; Elson 1999).
In order to gauge the different shapes and trajectories of commercialization, we
selected four districts in Ghana and six communes in Cambodia. In Ghana, the two
Southern districts of Asunafo North and Kwaebibirem are more prosperous, ecologically
more endowed, and more commercialized than the two in the North (Garu-Tempane and
East Gonja), which are poorer, dryer, and less commercialized.2 While land scarcity has
developed in both regions, it is particularly pronounced in the South. Ghana thus lends
itself well to geographical comparisons. In contrast, the rapid pace of commercialization
in Cambodia invites comparisons over time. We picked two communes each in the pro-
vinces of Kampong Thom (Krayea and Boeung Lvea), Kratie (Pi Thnou and Srae Char), and
Ratanakiri (Lom Choir and Malik), the latter two inhabited by a significant number of indi-
genous peoples. These provinces have seen massive investments in economic land con-
cessions, which have profoundly transformed local livelihoods.
The specificity of the project lay in the fact that it brought legal and policy approaches
to bear on an understanding of situated economic developments and their impacts on
food security. Accordingly, we pursued two distinctive lines of inquiry. First, we asked,
what gendered changes in livelihoods arise from contemporary processes of agriculture
and land commercialization, and how do these changes affect food security? Second, we
explored the roles of international policies and legal discourse in these processes, includ-
ing on the one hand policies of economic liberalization and on the other hand the pro-
motion of gender equality and the right to food. We thus entered the topic of food
security from different disciplinary starting points in the hope of creating a mosaic of
insight.
Data collection involved a mix of methods from the social sciences and law, including
most importantly, semi-structured and expert interviews, surveys, document and legal
analysis. The semi-structured interviews targeted women and men of various ages and
ethnic origins in our case communities. Expert interviews involved legal experts, policy-
makers, civil society organizations, national, sub-national and local authorities. We also
conducted a household survey in our case communities in 2016, which we repeated in
a reduced form in 2019. The questionnaires were administered to both women and
men, and included breakdowns by gender, ethnicity and age. In addition to livelihood
data and gauges of nutritional status, the questionnaires included questions on access
to authorities, knowledge of laws, and satisfaction with local institutions. For the legal
and policy analyses, we compiled a database of relevant international, national, and
2Ghana’s North-South economic divide, which is an effect of colonial and post-colonial policies that neglected northern
Ghana and created a labor reserve for the cocoa plantations, mines and industries in the South, is reflected in the high
levels of labor out-migration from Northern to Southern Ghana. The North-South divide is also reflected in differences
in crops - cocoa, oil palm, rubber and coconut grown on relatively larger farms in Southern Ghana, and food crops-
cereals, legumes and cassava grown commercially on smaller tracts of land in Northern Ghana.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1425
local policy documents, laws and legal decisions. We also tracked debates on the right to
food and gender equality in UN bodies.
Our livelihoods analysis is both deductive and inductive, drawing insights from our
multiple databases. The transcriptions of the semi-structured interviews were coded in
the qualitative data-analysis software NVivo in order to infer empirically grounded cat-
egories and themes. The household surveys were analyzed with descriptive statistics
and multivariate regressions. Policy and legal studies involved coding of interview data
and documents, and analyzing for content and for discursive patterns.
Gender, rights and commercialization: the state of the art
An extensive, multi-disciplinary literature exists interrogating agrarian transitions, globa-
lization, and development from a gender and rights perspective. Our reading of this litera-
ture is informed by the different directions of inquiry we pursue in the DEMETER project.
First, we examine literature on development policies, the right to food, and the effort to
mainstream gender into such policies. This literature provides insight into international
governance, its implementation and translation into local contexts, and into activism
around the right to food. Second, we provide an overview of the literature documenting
the gendered socio-economic realities and livelihood changes that have paralleled such
policies and laws, with a particular focus on food security outcomes.
Governing commercialization/governing gender
Feminist scholarship has consistently documented that gender-blind development pol-
icies have hurt women. Efforts of ‘modernization’ have generated highly unequal out-
comes, as have the neoliberal economic policies that replaced them (Tsikata and Kerr
2000; Whitehead and Lockwood 1999; Kabeer 1994). In the area of agriculture, the
removal of production subsidies, the privatization of the marketing of agricultural pro-
ducts, and the privileging of cash crops over food crops, all have been detrimental to
groups disadvantaged in their access to capital and other productive resources – in par-
ticular women, migrants, and youth (Tsikata and Amanor-Wilks 2009; Whitehead 2008;
Gladwin 1991).
A key problem is that the orthodox economic theories that have informed these pol-
icies are blatantly gender-blind: They conceptualize households as harmonious and fail to
recognize women’s reproductive labor (Folbre 1986; Elson 1995; Razavi 2009). Women
continue to be responsible for much of the reproductive work, which reduces their mobi-
lity, their ability to market their produce, and increases their time poverty and labor
deficits. When policies disregard issues of social reproduction or address them separately,
they ignore linkages to and trade-offs against food security resulting from women’s
unpaid care work and time poverty (Kerr 2012).
Gender-blind policies focusing on the creation of land markets have had similarly
adverse effects (Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997). An orthodox tool to facilitate land commerciali-
zation has been the provision of titles; but gender-blind or biased land titling programs
often have ended up curtailing women’s access to land, especially upon divorce or
widowhood. The more-recent revaluing of customary land management as an efficient
basis for land markets has often allowed for a deepening of discrimination against
1426 E. PRÜGL ET AL.
women both as members of land holding groups and as potential buyers of land interests
(Tsikata 2009). Land grabbing is equally not gender neutral. Levien (2017) shows that,
although the impacts of dispossession are locally varied, they are overwhelmingly nega-
tive for women, affecting in particular gender divisions of labor. Our case study of Cam-
bodia confirms that in the wake of land commercialization, women have fewer job
opportunities than men and often become dependent on male income earning
(Gironde et al. 2021).
If twentieth century agriculture and development policies were largely gender-blind,
international organizations today recognize the importance of considering gender
relations in agriculture and food security policies. Projects seeking to address the role
of ‘women in development’ and ‘gender in development’ have given way to a main-
streaming of gender considerations into the core missions of organizations (Prügl
2016). And as gender approaches have also been integrated into scholarship, a body of
professional expertise increasingly accompanies such organizational mainstreaming
(Kunz and Prügl 2019). This has on the one hand given visibility to the problem of
gender inequality, but on the other hand, it has raised critique of gender being co-
opted into existing paradigms, including paradigms of commercialization. The ‘smart
economics’ approach of the World Bank, in particular, has come to inform the way in
which gender is understood in development interventions. It subordinates gender equal-
ity to gains in economic efficiency and instrumentalizes women for economic growth,
food security, and other development outcomes. Women are approached as rational
economic actors who must be fit into a capitalist economy without changing the struc-
tural inequalities intrinsic in this economy (Esquivel 2017; Calkin 2015; Roberts and Soe-
derberg 2012). Such policy discourse in addition constructs certain monolithic – and thus
somewhat mythical – identities of rural women, including those of the productive farmer
and the vulnerable provider identified by Prügl and Joshi (forthcoming).
In contrast, the right to food approach puts equality at the center, making it an end of
its own, not simply a means to achieve food security or fighting hunger. The UN’s Special
Rapporteurs on the Right to Food have discussed ‘the structural, cultural, legal, economic
and ecological barriers that women face in their enjoyment of the right to food’ (Human
Rights Council, 22nd Session 2012; Human Rights Council, 31st Session 2015, 1). But the
integration of gender into the right to food encounters similar problems as its integration
into development policies and programs. Bourke Martignoni (2019) highlights in particu-
lar the tendency of right to food discourse to associate ‘the rural woman’ with food inse-
curity and to locate gender inequality in local customs while ignoring the way it operates
in macroeconomic logics. In her study of two initiatives to establish principles for respon-
sible investment in agriculture, one led by the World Bank and one by the World Council
on Food Security (CFS), Collins (2018) both agrees and disagrees with this assessment. On
the one hand, she criticizes the principles for presuming that it is desirable to incorporate
women into existing logics of financialization. On the other hand she suggests that they
underestimate potential tensions between the recognition of customary rights and the
promotion of gender equality, nor do they take into account socio-cultural norms that
shape the gender division of labor and the under-representation of women in political
bodies.
Whether or not local norms receive excessive or not enough recognition in inter-
national documents, international policies often falter in the politics of implementation.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1427
There is a rich literature in development studies describing the vagaries of implemen-
tation (Mosse 2005; Cornwall, Harrison, and Whitehead 2007); and in socio-legal studies
describing the politics of translating international norms into situated contexts
(Zwingel 2012; Merry 2006). Agricultural development programs have to negotiate and
often take advantage of existing political hierarchies and patriarchal governance struc-
tures, which may foil efforts to advance gender equality. In the private agricultural invest-
ment scheme in Ghana described by Lanz, Prügl, and Gerber (2020), chiefs and their
families were able to capture benefits from accompanying corporate social responsibility
programs that were to empower women. Male patronage networks also can derail the
intent of gender mainstreaming. Thus, in South-East Asia, gender-mainstreamed
fisheries management policies inadvertently reinforced traditionally male-dominated net-
works of patronage (Resurreccion 2008). And in the contentious politics of land commer-
cialization in Cambodia, resources are distributed through party-based clientelism, which
also circumscribes mechanisms for conflict resolution (Joshi 2020).
Against such obstacles, a right to food approach promises a politics of accountability. It
brings into view states’ legal obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the right to food
without discrimination (CESCR 1999; 2001; Mechlem 2004; De Haen 2005; Ziegler et al.
2011; Human Rights Council, 25th Session 2014). It also helps equalize power relations
within and between societies. In the words of De Haen, a ‘rights-based approach shifts
the focus from state benevolence to greater equality in power relations. Under a right-
to-food framework, those who would otherwise be constrained to suffering the conse-
quences of inappropriate policies are promoted to rights holders, allowing them to
demand a voice in policy formulation, to hold their governments accountable for nega-
tive actions and omissions and, thereby, to motivate them to act’ (De Haen 2005, xxii,
emphases added). Policies, such as commercialization, would then be measured against
their acceptance by and usefulness for rights-holders.
Not surprisingly, the promotion and protection of human rights is viewed by many
agrarian social movements as a core component in their strategies for socio-economic,
political and legal change. Surveying a range of countries Monsalve Suárez (2013, 251)
shows that using the human rights framework has had impacts ranging from
the empowerment of oppressed groups to stand up for their rights, decreasing violence in
land conflicts, changing the way conflicts over resources are framed, opening up space for
policy dialogue centred on people’s lives, fighting against agrarian legislation biased in
favour of corporate interests and formulating alternative legal frameworks.
Other studies have revealed the empowering potential of the right to food in concrete
cases, such as in the Fame Zero program in Brazil (Graziano Da Silva, Del Grossi, and de
França 2011).
As these studies show, the effectiveness of the right to food stems not only from its
codification in laws and constitutions, but requires framing conditions that allow it to
emerge as a practice. Bourke-Martignoni (2021) addresses such conditions as she devel-
ops a feminist methodology for assessing the right to food. These combine an emphasis
on women’s agency and participation with the existence of legal and justice systems that
promote economic, social and cultural rights, and of political and economic institutions
that recognize the negative impact of extractivism and value egalitarian outcomes. Mon-
salve Suarez complements these conditions from a bottom-up perspective, and explores
1428 E. PRÜGL ET AL.
what is necessary for the poor to be able to use human rights frameworks effectively. She
recognizes the need to combine legal and political strategies, litigation and advocacy,
among other enabling factors, such as awareness and resources (Monsalve Suárez
2013, 248–49). Baaz, Lilja, and Östlund (2017) add an additional element, which is the
embedding of rights in hegemonic discourses. They argue that the implementation of
law ‘is always carried out by individuals, acting through certain subject positions,’ and
as a result ‘hegemonic discourses will invariably affect the interpretation and outcome
of the law’ (Baaz, Lilja, and Östlund 2017, 225). This is why stereotypical constructions
of women as farmers, nurturers or victims matter – they are part of discourses that
come to inform policies and activism in a particular way.
Policies and legal discourses enable and give shape to processes of commercialization.
As shown, such policies have gone from gender-biased and gender-blind to gender-sen-
sitive and sometimes rights-based. Yet gender has remained troublesome as it has been
co-opted into projects of commercialization and become a focus of contestation. How
ideas of rights and gender equality come to shape these processes depends on the
way activists take them up and on the way policies are implemented. The literature on
feminist political economy and food security studies offer insights on such politics and
its effects.
Feminist political economy and food security studies
Feminist political economy and food security studies theorize and answer questions
about the gendered impacts of land and agricultural commercialization in situated con-
texts. This literature is vast, engaging evidence from multiple disciplines. From the per-
spective of the DEMETER project it is useful to differentiate between the rapid
commercialization described in the land grabbing literature (which speaks to our research
sites in Cambodia) and the longer processes of agricultural commercialization since the
colonial period (which speaks to our research sites in Ghana).
Based on existing scholarship on the gendered nature of land rights and agrarian pro-
duction systems, some commentary on land grabbing acknowledged likely gendered
impacts and implications early on (Kachika 2010; Borras and Franco 2010; Cotula et al.
2009). Feminist agrarian scholars drew attention to the way pre-existing gender inequal-
ities shaped the stakes of those affected, compared women’s and men’s responses to dis-
possession, and highlighted their differential ability to take up the opportunities opened
up (Behrman, Meinzen-Dick, and Quisumbing 2012; Tsikata and Yaro 2014; Daley and
Pallas 2014; Park and White 2017; Chu 2011; Izumi 2007; Julia and White 2012; Mutopo
and Chiweshe 2014; Doss, Summerfield, and Tsikata 2014). That early literature revealed
a pattern of land dispossession without adequate compensation, which was gendered in
its effects. Employment opportunities created by agricultural investments were transient,
insecure and mainly directed at men, and few women were able to take advantage of the
opportunities for share contracts. Instead, women lost the resources they derived in the
past from harvesting the commons, while enjoying mostly ancillary benefits provided
through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, which were mainly targeted at
their domestic activities and at their children (Tsikata and Yaro 2014; Daley and Pallas
2014; Behrman, Meinzen-Dick, and Quisumbing 2012; Piacenza 2012; Julia and White
2012).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1429
Another reported effect was the increase in women’s workloads. In Cambodia for
example, the agricultural wage work in areas impacted by ELCs was associated with
more work for women, generating time poverty with potentially negative consequences
for food security (Ironside 2009; Maffii 2009; Paramita 2013). In upland rice systems, when
farmers reduced fallows due to pressure to raise production, weeds frequently increased,
and gender roles were re-inscribed as middle-aged women performed more weeding or
applied weedicides, while men and younger women migrated (Pierce Colfer 2013).
Similar effects are reported from Ethiopia, where large-scale land transactions resulted in
increased labor time for women (Hajjar et al. 2019). Other effects pertain to gender divisions
of labor changing as a result of land loss. Thus, in his historically and geographically wide-
ranging comparative review of the effects of land dispossession on women, Levien (2017)
illustrates how changes in the gender division of labor linked to land commercialization
were invariably disadvantageous to women, though this differed by class and caste.
Critical engagement with the land grabbing literature resulted in calls for a second
generation of studies that would pay attention to longer term processes of land and
agrarian commercialization (Oya 2013; Edelman 2013; Moyo, Yeros, and Jha 2012),
attend to labor questions (Li 2011) and pay more consistent attention to the gendered
nature of agrarian transformation. In this vein, recent studies have broadened the discus-
sion from the dispossession of smallholder farmers to processes that have locked them
into global agricultural value chains as plantation workers, contract farmers, and small
and medium scale farmers producing for export markets. They show that the outcomes
of commercialization policies differ depending on local contexts and investment prac-
tices. And although commercialization seems to increase household incomes in the
aggregate, it also generates considerable inequality and new vulnerabilities as it
expands patriarchal norms and ways of doing that favor men and boys (Hall, Scoones,
and Tsikata 2017; Park and White 2017; Park and Maffii 2017; Gironde et al. 2021).
Feminist political economy approaches inform this newer literature and provide it con-
cepts and framings. They have over several decades drawn attention to the ‘the pervasive-
ness of gender relations and their interconnections with broader processes of social
change’ (Razavi 2009, 197) in agrarian social relations, institutions, and movements.
With regard to the global South, they have shown that with commercialization and the
associated class differentiation, ‘women’s independent farming came under increasing
pressure, while many men were able to solidify their command over land, labour, and
capital resources’ (Razavi 2009, 203). The gender differentiated access to and control
over resources of all kinds, including land, labor, capital, technologies and institutions,
has reproduced gender inequalities since the colonial period (Tsikata 2016; Razavi
2003; Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997; Deere and Leon 2001; Agarwal 1994). Feminist political
ecology approaches, which stress the gender and environment nexus, have widened
this discussion in inviting us to think of land beyond its productive capacity and bring
into view the dynamic relationship between gender, the environment and other
aspects of social and cultural life (Nightingale 2006). In our project, we encountered
how land is caught up in understandings of community and belonging and is a source
of power and security under certain conditions. Land loss thus has not only economic
impacts, but also threatens peoples’ status and sense of security.
Intra-household relations of production and reproduction are a crucial aspect of the
gendered impacts of commercialization (Naidu and Ossome 2016; Elson 1998). As men’s
1430 E. PRÜGL ET AL.
subsistence labor becomes wage labor or is incorporated into value chains, this has
entailed a ‘productive deprivation’ of women. Their labor gets displaced and new
gender divisions of labor emerge (Harriss-White 2005). Women’s labor remains unre-
munerated, loses value, and becomes readily available as a low-cost input into projects
of commercialization. Thus, studies of export-oriented agriculture have shown that
investment schemes typically have created a low-paid, often seasonal, and disproportio-
nately female labor force, although differentiated by other status positions (Sulle and
Dancer 2019; Bigler et al. 2017; Barndt 2008; Barrientos et al. 1999). Moreover, gendered
inequalities, in intersection with other status positions, have facilitated the extraction of
surplus value from agriculture, establishing ‘chains of exploitation’ with rural women at
the bottom and companies at the top (Luna 2019; Maffii 2009; Prasad 2016). Research
has concluded that a combination of pre-existing gender inequalities, women’s lack
of power to exercise rights, and the gender blindness and biases of projects are respon-
sible for the poor livelihood outcomes and gendered impacts of commercial agriculture
projects (Behrman, Meinzen-Dick, and Quisumbing 2012; Daley and Park 2012; Mutopo
2011; Izumi 2007).
In our study, we expand on this line of questioning to encompass (a) the nexus
between land and labor relations, and (b) the interface between productive and reproduc-
tive labor. On these questions, certain insights of the feminist political economy literature
have been particularly useful. First, it has highlighted how land titling, considered in neo-
liberal policy circles as a prerequisite for creating land markets, has led to women losing
access to land (Razavi 2003; Agarwal 1994; Deere and León 1987). It has also cautioned
that land rights alone are not sufficient for women to flourish in the context of markets
that institutionalize unequal gender relations (Razavi 2007). Second, feminist political
economists have brought into view the changing character of social reproduction in con-
texts of commercialization when hitherto non-market transactions become subject to
market principles (Bhattacharya 2017; Razavi 2009; Fraser 2016). They have thus shifted
the focus so that the starting point of political economy is not surplus production but
care and the production of life. This also highlights food and nutrition security as critical
aspects of social reproduction.
Our studies take up the important debate about whether agricultural commercializa-
tion and land dispossessions accompanied by the introduction of wage work improve
or adversely affect the food security of smallholder households, and how gendered div-
isions of productive and reproductive labor affect food security outcomes (Quisumbing
et al. 1998). Our Ghana study joins other emerging literature that finds little improvement
in nutritional outcomes as a result of commercialization (Carletto, Corral, and Guelfi 2017).
Indeed, it diagnoses situations of ‘over-commercialization’ characterized by distress sales
necessary to combat hunger (Dzanku et al. 2021).
The literature thus raises doubts over the postulated relationship between commercia-
lization and food security. Both pathways, that of food production and that of earning off-
farm income, emerge as problematic for women, with land loss and seasonal food
shortages on the one hand and new dependencies on men’s income on the other, as
major obstacles. While contexts and intersectional inequalities matter, unfettered land
and agricultural commercialization seems to benefit especially those without care respon-
sibilities and with access to power and resources. We explore these issues in the articles of
this Forum.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1431
Introducing the four articles
The four articles included in this Forum address the governance of the international food
system on the one hand, and the political economies of agrarian change in Cambodia and
Ghana on the other.
Prügl and Joshi examine food security discourse in international organizations at the
intersection of neoliberal productivism and a commitment to gender equality. They criti-
cally analyze documents that have been developed in international organizations as part
of a mandate of gender mainstreaming. They argue that the gender expertise reflected
in these documents produces political effects when it imagines the identities of rural
women, defines what their problems are, and suggests respective solutions. The analysis
reveals two distinctive constructions of women’s identities in food security discourse –
the productive female farmer and the caring woman food securer. Different problem
definitions and solutions emerge from these constructions: while the woman farmer
needs to get access to resources and an adjustment of institutional incentives, the vulner-
able food securer needs protection, but also political participation. The paper demonstrates
that international discourses includemultiple and sometimes contradictory understandings
of gender, and argues that they provide a terrain for contesting neoliberal hegemony.
The second article approaches the governance of gender and commercialization from a
human rights perspective and moves the focus to the national levels of Cambodia and
Ghana. Joanna Bourke Martignoni considers how a feminist methodology that foregrounds
the right to food and inter-related human rights might be used to identify the inequalities
engendered in rural communities through forms of neoliberal agricultural development.
Such a methodology requires that attention be paid to power relations at various scales,
from the household and community to national and global economic, political, social and
legal institutions. It also necessitates an examination of the intersections of various systems
of oppression grounded in gender, social class, caste, ethnicity, age, geographical location
and ability. Applying this approach to Cambodia andGhana, the article illustrates how relations
of power are dynamic and vary over time and across place. It also brings into relief themultiple,
sometimes surprising and contradictory ways in which agency might be exercised by rights
holders. Bourke Martignoni argues for going beyond the traditional technical focus of many
food security and rural development projects, which tend to depoliticize and co-opt struggles
for equality while leaving oppressive institutions and structures largely untouched.
The two subsequent articles shift the focus and look at the effects of land and agricul-
tural commercialization on food security in the contexts of Cambodia and Ghana. The first
article, on the livelihood implications of large-scale land acquisitions in Cambodia
(Gironde et al.) examines the applicability of earlier literature, which found that women
were more negatively affected by large-scale land acquisitions than men. It finds that
in the aftermath of commercialization, men spent less time on traditional tasks, such as
forest clearing and hunting, and their farm work became easier because of the use of
new technologies. In contrast, women’s workload became heavier because of the need
for more weeding, their increased participation in wage work, and the more demanding
nature of reproductive activities, such as finding fuel wood for cooking. The time and
income scarcity engendered by the re-organization of their livelihoods had an adverse
effect on household diets. The study concludes that gender relations and identities are
re-signified as a result of the changes in the agro-food system and large-scale land
1432 E. PRÜGL ET AL.
acquisitions. The need for cash to buy food has created new vulnerabilities that should
make us wary of the food security implications of agricultural commercialization.
Whereas the Cambodia article traces the effects of commercialization over time, the
Ghana study takes advantage of geographical differences to capture variations in
degrees of commercialization. Commercialization rates were much higher for Southern
Ghana, compared with the North. There also was a significant difference between
female and male farmers: while the total value of crops sold was higher for men,
women sold a larger portion of the crops they produced. This apparently contradictory
result was due to higher levels of distress sales among women, particularly in Northern
Ghana. Thus, female commercialization in the North was driven more by necessity than
by accumulation, and therefore could be described as ‘distress push’ commercialization.
The article also finds that on average farm households experienced food shortages for at
least one third of the year in spite of high rates of commercialization. It cautions against
relying exclusively on food markets for attaining farm household food security in contexts
prone to distress sales. The study concludes that over-commercialization hurts food secur-
ity in the absence of off-farm livelihood diversification and efficient food markets.
In sum, agrarian transitions based on accelerated land commercialization appear to
repeat the deeply gendered processes identified already in the women and development
literature of the 1980s. The full theorization of how gender intersects with multiple axes of
inequalities is still work in progress. Our research contributes to this by examining the inter-
sections of gender with class, age and ethnicity in the agrarian transformation associated
with large-scale land acquisitions and in long-term processes of agricultural commercializa-
tion in different economic and geographical contexts. The case studies of Cambodia and
Ghana caution us against expecting an unproblematic association of commercialization
with food security. Volatility of prices and income insecurities, over-commercialization
and distress sales are realities for people living contemporary transitions in rural areas.
A human rights methodology brings into view the power relations that suffuse commer-
cialization processes, the rights violations they may engender, and the multiple dimensions
that food security policies need to consider. Gender-mainstreaming and rights-based policies
have begun to address these dimensions. They have the potential to recognize the vulnerabil-
ities, pathologies, and injustices that result from entrusting food security to unfettered com-
mercialization and to advance more just and inclusive processes and outcomes.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
Research leading to this publication has been supported by a grant from the Swiss Programme for
Research on Global Issues for Development co-funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation and the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 400540].
ORCID
Elisabeth Prügl http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4363-3540
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 1433
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Elisabeth Prügl is Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. Her research and
teaching focus on feminist International Relations, in particular gender politics in international gov-
ernance. She is the responsible applicant of DEMETER project on land and agricultural commercia-
lization, funded by the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d).
Fenneke Reysoo is an anthropologist, gender expert committed to combating social injustice. Her
current research focuses on the intersectional and gendered impact of agriculture and land com-
mercialization from a right to food perspective (Cambodia, Switzerland). She is an emeritus
senior lecturer and former research director of the Gender Center at the Graduate Institute of Inter-
national and Development Studies (Geneva).
Dzodzi Tsikata is Professor of Development Sociology and Director of the Institute of African Studies
(IAS) at the University of Ghana. Her research and publications in the last 30 years have been in the
areas of gender and development policies and practices; agrarian change and rural livelihoods; the
labor relations of the informal economy and social policy.