The aim of this chapter is to provide a general overview of this study. In particular, the chapter deals with the reasons w hy I chose to focus on women and farming. The following key issues are, therefore, addresse the research problem, research objectives and the rationale for designing a study on women, food production and sugarcane farming.
This study set out to analyse the cumulative effect of sugarcane farming on the role of women in food production in Bokoli location. In designing this study, the economic model was found to be useful in ordering and analyzing the data. This model stipulates that women in Bokoli location are engrossed in a wide range of activities. These activities include all agricultural processes such as cash crop and food crop production, processing, storage and marketing. This clearly indicates that women in Bokoli location are engaged in all facets of the food procurement system, ranging from land clearing, land preparation to planting, harvesting and distribution of food crops. In addition, the women actively participate in all domestic tasks which include fetching water from long distances, milling grain, gathering wood, child-bearing and child-nurturing. These activities are usually carried out betwixt and between the main agricultural activities. Similarly, the domestic tasks constantly demanding women's attention interrupt the main agricultural activities which they may be involved in at a particular time. Hence, the economic model informs us that women are involved in a wide range of activities which constitute remunerative economic production. Since these women are the central performers, it is through such activities that we can define their positions in their marital dyads as well as in the wider Bukusu Society.
All agricultural and domestic activities in Bokoli location are today being carried out in a pseudo-modern Socio-cultural context. In this context, the Bukusu family system is very authoritative and women are mere pawns in the game of patriarchy and kinship relationships. The Bukusu customary norms segments and discriminates against widowed and divorced women, and indeed all women, by disinheriting and depriving them of their economic rights (Dwyer and Bruce 1988). In addition, present employment preferences of the capitalist economy tend to confine these women "at home to assume full responsibility for farm management" (Gisbert et al. 1992:3). The same employment trend confines women in marginal roles in their marital dyads and in the Bukusu society. Therefore, this pseudo-modern setting provides an excellent opportunity to research on issues of women, food crop production and cash cropping. The broader empirical goal of this study is, therefore, to gauge the impacts of the processes of socio-cultural change and modernization on the status of women in Bukusu society today.
The area chosen for research was Bokoli location, Webuye division, Bungoma District (Maps 1 and 2). Bokoli location was ideal for my research focus since it is similar in many respects to other locations in Bungoma District. Specifically, in Bokoli location many households still rely heavily on subsistence farming for their livelihoods and survival. However, the type of subsistence farming undertaken in Bokoli location today is radically different from that of the past. This is because in the agrarian past farming was a mode of life. Today, it has been transformed into a form of income to complement cash cropping and off-the farm incomes. It is considered here that both cash cropping and off-farm incomes have been responsible for modifying traditional attitudes and ideology toward traditional farming practices in Bukusu society in Bokoli location. These three modes of sustenance have, nonetheless, been mutually reinforcing each other over time without bringing major complications to the households. However, in recent times, commercial farming and in particular sugarcane farming has begun to bring about certain developments that have now led to very acute tensions between commercial farming and subsistence agriculture. One very serious outcome has been the subsequent overloading and overburdening of women with all sorts of farm responsibilities. The second serious consequence has been the fact that as more and more land is lost to cash crops, many women are forced to move to marginal, unproductive lands on which to produce food crops the products from which are not enough to provide adequate food security (Russo et al. 1989; Dey 1988; FAO 1985, 1988). Some women have even entirely lost access to such marginal and unproductive land thus propelling member of entire households into an existence of hunger and poverty.
The men in Bokoli location are constantly out-migrating to various urban centres within the Nation state of Kenya thus leaving a majority of their women behind. Even in cases where there have been seasonal out-migrations to commercial and urban centres within the district itself, it is the men who have been predominant. The particular attraction within the district to warrant male out-migration has been the need to provide cheap migrant labour on sugarcane farms as well as the search for salaried employment. In this particular scenario, the need to focus on women takes on an added significance. This is because women being the majority in Bokoli location are providing the bulk of the labour needed in both subsistence and commercial agriculture. This, in itself, means that the role of women in the production of food for their households has been adversely transformed.
Cash crops were first introduced in Bungoma district by the colonial administration in the 1920's. The first cash crop to be introduced was flat white maize (Zea mays). Today, hybrid maize which was originally introduced in Bungoma District in the 1960's, is the staple subsistence crop of Babukusu. The commercial farming of coffee began in the 1940's while the cultivation of tobacco and sugarcane farming started in the 1970's. Other cash crops which are cultivated today on a small scale include pyrethrum and tea. In addition, commercial manufacturing of paper and pulp products is extensively carried out in the district. All these activities have increased the commercialisation and industrialisation of the district and as such they have caused drastic effects on the traditional Bukusu social and economic life, especially the subsistence mode of farming.
Of all the cash crops that are cultivated in the district today, none has led to a significant number of social and economic changes in many households as has the sugarcane crop. This crop is made to compete with food crops for land allocation, time, money, labour and farm inputs. In a majority of cases, farmers devote much more of their energies, time and money on sugarcane farming at the expense of food crops. Ironically, there have been serious and perennial delays in harvesting the sugarcane crop when it reaches maturity. This intimates that the sugarcane crop ties up land for long periods of time without indemnifying farmers in any profitable way. A very serious outcome of such delays is farmers' failure to receive their payments. Even after delivering the cane, farmers are usually never paid on time. This is an aspect of the cane crop that has created the "web of poverty" in many households in Bokoli location. The term poverty is not my own heuristic device conveniently adopted in this study to give a false description of the people in Bokoli location. This is because informants themselves frequently defined their own socio-economic status as an epitome of poverty. In effect, the emerging picture shows that many families cannot even dream of a meaningful livelihood from sugarcane growing. This is a lack of a significant subsistence which has transposed into exacerbated poverty levels, migration, wage labour and off-farm incomes for members of households for survival. Indeed, many families in Bokoli location have now forcibly been propelled into impoverished and marginalised socio-eocnomic status by factors beyond their own immediate control.
Today, in Bokoli location, there has also been a radical shift in the original concept of agriculture. In the agrarian past, agriculture was a means of subsistence where both women and men grew their local staple crops using an exclusively subsistence technology. The produce was then controlled by both sexes, although women had the prerogative in the distribution of the major proportion of the produce and surplus. Nowadays, many of the traditional staple crops as well as the newly-derived ones are all grown as a means of earning money based on wage labour and modern technologies. Additionally, the agrarian economy has been transformed into a male-dominated monetary and national economy in which cash crops are grown for "outside" sale while women provide an asymmetrical share of the required labour. One serious consequence has been that the previous prerogative of women controlling the major portion of the produce and surplus has been lost entirely to men. Therefore, this study attempts to document the extent to which the prerogative of women in controlling the family produce has been eroded. Since the Bokoli location is an ideal locale for research on issues now confronting women in areas of agricultural transformation, the result of this study should apply throughout Bungoma District (Gisbert et al. 1992).
The main objectives of this study are as follows:
1. To look into the roles of women in both food production and sugarcane farming;
2. To see how women cope with the socio-economic constraints caused by the imposition of sugarcane farming; and
3. To determine the constraints and choices of commercial and subsistence farming on the status of women.
This study is based on the fact that there is the monoculture of the sugarcane crop in Bokoli location today. This monoculture has in turn involved a total modification of traditional attitudes toward the production of food corps. However, the study recognizes that there are several key elements which remain unaltered. For instance, the household in Bokoli location is still the basic unit of subsistence production and women are the major players. Therefore, the underlying assumption, and the first important rationale, for this study is the recognition that the great majority of food producers in Bokoli location are women. Furthermore, any transformation of agriculture has direct consequences (both negative and positive) on women, their dependents, and food production. This, I believe, is worthy of empirical anthropological investigation.
The second rationale is the recognition that today in Bokoli location, the farm on which women work is no longer an isolated unit of subsistence production. Rather, the farm is the beginning of a long chain in commercial agriculture. This chain is in turn shaped by forces operating at the regional, national, and international levels and women are the vital link in this chain with its world-wide configurations.
