Assessment of Women Farmers’ Drudgery in Rice Farming with Climate Change: A Case Study from South India
摘要
Although womenWomen make up most of the agricultural workforce globally, their labour is largely underestimated. The objectives of this chapter are to obtain insight into the women farmersWomen farmers’ drudgeryWomen farmers’ drudgery during farm operations and its health consequences, identify potential risks under climate changeClimate change perspective, and improve understanding to enhance their coping capacities. This work is a part of a participatory research conducted in the Bharathapuzha River basin, in Palakkad, Kerala, a state in IndiaIndia during 2023. Kerala has been experiencing strong climate extremes, especially for the past decades, in the form of floods, droughts, etc. Women farmersWomen farmers perform the most arduous and back-breaking work in the rice farms starting from nursery preparations to sowing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, and storing grains along with duck or fish and livestock rearing. It found that challenges of physical load and drudgery during three crop seasons such as kharif/virippu, rabi/mundakan, or summer/puncha crop season vary based on the varying physical exposures to heavy rainfall, droughts, heat waves, heavy winds, lightning etc. The survey revealed that most of the women farmersWomen farmers had more than twenty years of experience and were exposed to waterborne diseases, skin allergies, heat exhaustion, etc. Mechanization has largely helped to minimize the physical load and exposure to harsh climates, especially during harvesting which was majorly done by womenWomen. Weather early warningsWeather warnings and Agromet Advisories have also helped them to face extremities. It is vital to enhance the quality of life and the well-being of the women farmersWomen farmers through planned adaptive interventions under the scenario of rising climate changeClimate change challenges.