Economic contribution of rural women's home production activities in a rainfed lowland rice farming systems environment.
1995
Luis J.S.
Activity involvement of male and female heads in both landholder and landless households include on-farm, off-farm, non-farm, livestock/swine, domestic, reproductive, social, leisure and other combined activities. The FDS [food diversity score] shows that majority of the landholders have high FDS compared to the landless. Wet season data on time allocation and food consumption were analyzed for both households, but productivity analysis considered only the landholders. A two step regression was employed in the analysis in estimating the production function. First, an estimations of the FDS model showed that the coefficients of the independent variables are positive and significant: namely, average time spend by male and female heads in home production activities. The predicted value of FDS was outputted and the model has a significant F-value. Second, the estimation of the production function, which shows that labor from family male, family female and outside sources, rate of nitrogen application and the predicted value of FDS directly and significantly influence yield. Of the labor input, female labor input is highly significant that a one percent increase in female labor increases yield by 53 percent. The inclusion of FDS as a variable in the production function shifted the intercept upwards if the FDS is high and downward if FDS is low. Results showed that from the average production function the intercept shifted by 0.0059 with FDS=12.01. This means that 5.9 kilograms is added to output for a unit increase in FDS. The corresponding value of the production function after including FDS is 3.48 tons/ha compared to 3.13 on the average production function. The study was able to present an analytical procedure on how to capture the unvalued time women contribute to household output and demonstrated the relevance of the home production activities of women to farm productivity.
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