Gender Norms in the Food Systems of Three Countries

One can look at the activities in the economies of the world, and especially of food systems, in terms of two complementary categories: activities that primarily contribute to the production economy and activities that contribute mainly to the reproduction economy. While the production economy refers to all goods and services that are sold and bought, and contributes directly to the GDP, the reproduction economy refers to all activities which sustain people and range from care to art and education (Bakker 2007; Ume et al., 2022). While some activities may contribute to both economies, most can be clearly attributed to one of the two spheres and often differ in their objectives.

In the context of food systems, reproductive activities include ensuring that there is a meal on the table, that there is food to eat in the rural areas. Growing food to ensure food security of households and communities can be analyzed as a problem in the reproduction economy. The production economy also plays a big role in food systems and consists of activities that produce commodities for sale, often mainly outside the region of production. The aim of the production economy is to create income, which can be accumulated and invested in more resources and inputs, eventually allowing more production and thus more income.

The current gender roles dominating the world since Europe’s colonization of other world regions associated activities of the production economy primarily with men and activities of the reproduction economy primarily with women. Gender roles are not necessarily negative; they can complement each other, resulting in thriving societies. Problems arise when power differences emerge where reproduction and production activities compete for resources. More powerful actors will be able to mobilize resources for their activities more easily, potentially constraining the activities of the less powerful. In these gendered contexts, this is equivalent to men appropriating resources for the productive economy also needed by women for reproductive activities.

In our view, the production economy is currently valued more highly in politics and society than the reproduction economy. Production actors – usually men or states – are more powerful and appropriate resources to fulfil their objective. Women and other actors of the reproduction economy end up with less resources to fulfil their aim of feeding their families and communities. The problem of food security in rural areas often results from practices and policy tools maintaining such gender norms to appropriate productive resources and redirect them from the reproduction economy towards the production economy. In other words, gendered norms and institutions can structurally take away resources from actors who have an interest in addressing food security and allocate them to actors or modes of farming which aim to produce commodities and contribute to the GDP.

This article illustrates this process with three examples from two continents. The third example shows how women and other actors interested in food production for consumption overcome these structural dynamics through the use of agroecological practices.

Sorghum versus Maize in Kenya

In villages at the foot of Mount Elgon in Kenya, women are responsible for feeding the family. They grow crops on land they access through their husbands, who own the land. Men are responsible for earning and providing cash for the families. They engage in activities within the production economy ranging from their own agricultural production to taking up employment . The main commodity crop in that region is maize, which men produce primarily to earn cash. Sorghum is also cultivated, mainly by women.

In a focus group discussion the first author conducted in 2019 during the closing workshop of the Mt Elgon Project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, women farmers qualified sorghum as a strong food that nourishes them better than maize. They grow sorghum mostly for their children’s and their own consumption, while they also grow some maize to feed their husbands, who consider it the better food. Should land become scarce, women might need to reduce the area they cultivate or the amount of work they can use for their own activities, and resources would be transferred to production activities.

Because sorghum requires more processing from field to plate and is not preferred by men, sorghum cultivation seems to persist only as a niche economic activity. The dominance of maize can thus be explained by the power differential between the activities of production by men and those of reproduction by women. This dominance can have an impact on the nutrition of the family because maize is less drought resistant and contains less nutrients than sorghum.

Machismo and land in Northern Colombia

Gender roles are extremely entrenched in Colombia, following the colonial period, to the extent that it is very rare for women to be farmers. At the same time, here, too, women are responsible for feeding and caring for the family. In Montes de Maria, Northern Colombia, women formed several groups and adopted agroecological farming practices. The group that Kathleen Marún Uparela in the first author’s research team is currently engaged with even managed to secure tenure to land for their collective with the support of a foreign NGO (1). The objective of the women is to produce food, primarily to feed their families, but also the surrounding communities by selling surpluses on the local market, thereby securing income for investing in education and better nutrition (e.g., school fees or investment in a fridge).

While this initiative has been on-going for more than a decade, their farming activities are still not accepted by men and the surrounding farming community. According to local gender norms, “women do not belong” on fields. In addition, men delegitimize the women as farmers by disputing that agroecology is a good way of farming, pointing to the messy and “dirty” agroecological fields of the women as compared to their hedges, pest- and weed-free conventional fields.

The gender norms eventually legitimize that men farmers reject women farmers and their alternative practices. Since the formation of the group, men have attacked the use of agricultural land by the women in multiple violent ways including invasion of the land, theft of harvests, and even physical and sexual violence. This can be interpreted as men trying to keep control over production resources and processes, to the detriment of women’s nutrition, of nature, and of feeding of their families and communities.

Agroecological food system in Nigeria

Food production in Nigeria has substantially increased over the last decades without improving food security in rural areas (Ume, C. O., 2023). The policies put in place by the government oriented agricultural production in rural areas towards the production of commodities, notably to feed urban consumers and to create wealth. For instance, existing policies tie the provision of subsidized agricultural inputs or the access to land to the production of commodities. State agricultural extension offices tend to center their communication on men farmers and promote conventional farming methods relying on state-delivered inputs and seeds for commodity crops. Thus, the state and its policies actively organize agricultural production and direct resources primarily to the production economy, ignoring the role farming should play in the reproduction economy.

As the example of the agroecology group Chukwuma Ume investigated for his PhD under the supervision of the first author in Okigwe, Southeastern Nigeria, demonstrates, these policies have made it difficult for women to fulfill their role, given that they bear the responsibility of feeding the families while men are responsible for providing cash. With no control over cash in the household, women have little access to conventional inputs. Women also must contribute work on their spouse's fields, and they rely on their husbands to provide them with land for their own agricultural production. In that context, a group of today more than 100 farmers, predominantly women, have come together, initially supported by a student from the University of Coventry, UK (Emanea et al., 2018).

The first leverage point for these women to improve food production and nutrition for themselves and their families was the introduction of agroecological techniques. These include no-till practices and intercropping techniques combining repelling and attracting plants to control pests and diseases.

These practices have enabled women to produce intensively without access to cash. The women farmers were able to bypass paying for tilling services, a task culturally reserved for men. They also did not need to purchase phytosanitary products. Operating as a group offered the second leverage point by enabling the sharing of seeds and land as well as fostering the sale of surpluses to the local market, decreasing their dependence on (male) middlemen. As a consequence, food and nutrition security was significantly improved in the agroecological group as compared to the control group of conventional farmers (Ume et al., 2023) and participating women reported a much better intra- and interhousehold status and recognition, which at the household level in some cases enabled women to access more resources for their agricultural production (Ume et al., 2025).

Agroecological practices offered a way out of the constraints imposed by the patriarchal structure of the production economy so that women managed to work again within the reproduction economy. That explains why women’s groups are often associated with agroecological movements.

Conclusions

Our three examples emphasize the competition that exists between the productive and the reproductive spheres of our economies. Actors in these two different spheres compete for land, input, knowledge, and labor. As the separation of tasks between reproductive and productive economy is gendered, we observe a competition between men and women over the control of resources. Gender norms strengthen and maintain constraints on the utilization and appropriation of resources by women. This is powerfully illustrated in the three cases, in which women want to produce nutritious food for themselves and for their community but are deprived of productive resources to do so by institutions based on gender norms.

Yet, gender roles are not bad per se; they allocate labor to complementary activities, which can be beneficial. However, the power differential between men and women tends to lead to the reallocation of productive resources – land, female labor, and other inputs – to the production economy, at the expense of the reproduction economy. This puts the capacity of society to provide reproductive services and food security in specific rural contexts at risk. As long as society allocates reproduction resources to production activities, rural food security may be endangered.

States and societies should start valuing reproductive activities and attribute more value to that part of the economy that women sustain as marginal actors. Such a rebalancing of priorities could shift power relations among genders and increase the resources attributed to the female-associated reproduction economy. The Nigerian example points to one possible way out by developing a parallel system of utilizing resources, such as the agroecological food system. More generally, we must strive for more egalitarian societies valuing both reproduction and production economies for the sake of food security, but also of all human and non-human beings and their future.

Dr. Stéphanie Domptail  is a researcher in human-nature relations in socioecological systems of agriculture at the Department of Agricultural Policy and Market Research at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Kopp directs the working group for Global Trade and Nutrition and is acting director of the Department of Agricultural Policy and Market Research at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen.

The authors warmly acknowledge the work of Chukwuma Ume and Katleen Marún Uparela for their theses in Nigeria and Colombia respectively, and Jeninah Karungi, as well as Gracia Glas for her organization of the Mt Elgon final workshop and fieldwork in Kenya.

Footnote

_{(1) The name and the location of the group, as well as the name of the NGO are not mentioned here to protect the women. The information is known to the editors.}

References:

Projects:

_{Enhanced Livelihoods and Natural Resource  Management under Accelerated Climate Change (ELNAC)}

_{Social Lab for Knowledge Equity (SCLaKE)}

Publications: 

_{Kadhikwa S., Bollig M., Domptail S. (2026) Pan-ontological institutional bricolage? The urgent need for a dialogue between state and customary authorities in Namibian conservancies. Land Use Policy 161: 107887. doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107887}

 _{Gomez-Mateus A.M., Nuppenau E.A., Domptail S.E. (2025). Nexus of Land, Water, Food, and Well- Being: The Case of Oil Palm Workers in Colombia. Land Degradation & Development, 2025; 0:1–19. doi.org/10.1002/ldr.70264.}

_{Ume, C., Wahlen, S., Nuppenau, E.-A., & Domptail, S. (2025). Women smallholders build an agroecology food system: The construction of empowerment and food sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2025.2462760.}

_{Kocovic De Santo M. and Domptail S.E. (Edts) (2023). Degrowth Decolonization and Development. When Culture Meets the Environment. Springer Nature}