Development as Freedom (34 page)

The particular case of the most socially advanced state in India, viz., Kerala, is also worth noting here, because of its particular success in fertility reduction based on women’s agency. While the total fertility rate for India as a whole is still higher than 3.0, that rate in Kerala has now fallen well below the “replacement level” (around 2.0, roughly speaking two children per couple) to 1.7, which is also considerably lower than China’s fertility rate of 1.9. Kerala’s high level of female education has been particularly influential in bringing about a precipitate decline in birthrate. Since female agency and literacy are important also in the reduction of mortality rates, that is another—more indirect—route through which women’s agency (including female literacy) may have helped to reduce birthrates, since there is some evidence that a reduction of death rates, especially of children, tends to contribute to the reduction of fertility rates. Kerala has also had other favorable features for women’s empowerment and agency, including a greater recognition of women’s property rights for a substantial and influential part of the community.
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There will be an opportunity to further probe these connections, along with other possible causal linkages, in the
next chapter
.

There is plenty of evidence that when women get the opportunities that are typically the preserve of men, they are no less successful in making use of these facilities that men have claimed to be their own over the centuries. The opportunities at the highest political levels happen to have come to women, in many developing countries, only in rather special circumstances—often related to the demise of their
more established husbands or fathers—but the chances have been invariably seized with much vigor. While the recent history of the role of women in top leadership positions in Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Burma or Indonesia may be very well recognized, there is a need to pay more attention to the part that women have been able to play—given the opportunity—at diverse levels of political activities and social initiatives.
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The impact of women’s activities on social life can be similarly extensive. Sometimes the roles are well known and well anticipated or are becoming so (the impact of women’s education on the reduction of fertility rates—already discussed—is a good example of that). However, there are also other connections that call for greater investigation and analysis. One of the more interesting hypotheses concerns the relation between men’s influence and the prevalence of violent crimes. The fact that most of the violent crimes in the world are committed by men is well recognized, but there are possible causal influences that have not yet received the attention they may deserve.

An interesting statistical finding in India relates to extensive interdistrict contrasts that show a strong—and statistically very significant—relation between the female-male ratio in the population and the scarcity of violent crimes. Indeed, the inverse connection between murder rates and the female-male ratio in the population has been observed by many researchers, and there have been alternative explanations of the causal processes involved.
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Some have looked for causal explanations running from the incidence of violent crimes leading to a greater preference for sons (taken to be better equipped to encounter a violent society), whereas others have seen it running from a larger presence of women (less inclined toward violence) to a consequently lower rate of crime.
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There can also be some third factor that relates both to violent crime and to the male dominance of the sex ratio. There are many issues to be sorted out here, but the importance of gender and the influence of women’s agency vis-à-vis men’s are hard to overlook under any of the alternative explanations.

If we turn now to economic activities, women’s participation can also make a big difference. One reason for the relatively low participation of women in day-to-day economic affairs in many countries is
a relative lack of access to economic resources. The ownership of land and capital in the developing countries has tended to be very heavily biased in favor of the male members of the family. It is typically much harder for a woman to start a business enterprise, even of a very modest size, given the lack of collateral resources.

And yet there is plenty of evidence that whenever social arrangements depart from the standard practice of male ownership, women can seize business and economic initiative with much success. It is also clear that the result of women’s participation is not merely to generate income for women, but also to provide the social benefits that come from women’s enhanced status and independence (including the reduction of mortality and fertility rates, just discussed). The economic participation of women is, thus, both a reward on its own (with associated reduction of gender bias in the treatment of women in family decisions), and a major influence for social change in general.

The remarkable success of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is a good example of this. That visionary microcredit movement, led by Muhammad Yunus, has consistently aimed at removing the disadvantage from which women suffer, because of discriminatory treatment in the rural credit market, by making a special effort to provide credit to women borrowers. The result has been a very high proportion of women among the customers of the Grameen Bank. The remarkable record of that bank in having a very high rate of repayment (reported to be close to 98 percent) is not unrelated to the way women have responded to the opportunities offered to them and to the prospects of ensuring the continuation of such arrangements.
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Also in Bangladesh, similar emphasis has been placed on women’s participation by BRAC, led by another visionary leader, Fazle Hasan Abed.
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These and other economic and social movements in Bangladesh have done a lot not merely to raise the “deal” that women get, but also—through the greater agency of women—to bring about other major changes in the society. For example, the sharp decline in fertility rate that has occurred in Bangladesh in recent years seems to have clear connections with the increasingly higher involvement of women in social and economic affairs, in addition to much greater availability of family planning facilities, even in rural Bangladesh.
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Another area in which women’s involvement in economic affairs
varies is that of agricultural activities related to land ownership. There too the economic opportunities that women get can have a decisive influence on the working of the economy and the related social arrangements. Indeed, “a field of one’s own” (as Bina Agarwal calls it) can be a major influence on women’s initiative and involvement, with far-reaching effects on the balance of economic and social power between women and men.
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Similar issues arise in understanding women’s role in environmental developments, particularly in conserving natural resources (such as trees), with a particular linkage to women’s life and work.
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Indeed, the empowerment of women is one of the central issues in the process of development for many countries in the world today. The factors involved include women’s education, their ownership pattern, their employment opportunities and the workings of the labor market.
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But going beyond these rather “classic” variables, they include also the nature of the employment arrangements, attitudes of the family and of the society at large toward women’s economic activities, and the economic and social circumstances that encourage or resist change in these attitudes.
³³
As Naila Kabeer’s illuminating study of the work and economic involvement of Bangladeshi women in Dhaka and London brings out, the continuation of, or break from, past arrangements is strongly influenced by the exact economic and social relations that operate in the local environments.
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The changing agency of women is one of the major mediators of economic and social change, and its determination as well as consequences closely relate to many of the central features of the development process.
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The focus on the agency role of women has a direct bearing on women’s well-being, but its reach goes well beyond that. In this chapter, I have tried to explore the distinction between—and interrelations of—agency and well-being, and then have gone on to illustrate the reach and power of women’s agency, particularly in two specific fields: (1) in promoting child survival and (2) in helping to reduce fertility rates. Both these matters have general developmental interest that goes well beyond the pursuit specifically of female well-being,
though—as we have seen—female well-being is also directly involved and has a crucial intermediating role in enhancing these general achievements.

The same applies to many other areas of economic, political and social action, varying from rural credit and economic activities, on the one hand, to political agitation and social debates, on the other.
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The extensive reach of women’s agency is one of the more neglected areas of development studies, and most urgently in need of correction. Nothing, arguably, is as important today in the political economy of development as an adequate recognition of political, economic and social participation and leadership of women. This is indeed a crucial aspect of “development as freedom.”

The contemporary age is not short of terrible and nasty happenings, but the persistence of extensive hunger in a world of unprecedented prosperity is surely one of the worst. Famines visit many countries with astonishing severity—“fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell” (to borrow John Milton’s words). In addition, massive endemic hunger causes great misery in many parts of the world—debilitating hundreds of millions and killing a sizable proportion of them with statistical regularity. What makes this widespread hunger even more of a tragedy is the way we have come to accept and tolerate it as an integral part of the modern world, as if it is a tragedy that is essentially unpreventable (in the way ancient Greek tragedies were).

I have already argued against judging the nature and severity of the problems of hunger, undernourishment, and famine by concentrating on food output only. However, food output must be
one
of the variables that can, inter alia, influence the prevalence of hunger. Even the price at which food can be bought by the consumers will be affected by the size of the food output. Furthermore, when we consider food problems at the global level (rather than at the national or local level), there is obviously no opportunity of getting food from “outside” the economy. For these reasons, the often aired fear that food production per head is falling in the world cannot be dismissed out of hand.

But is the fear justified? Is the world food output falling behind world population in what is seen as a “race” between the two? The fear that this is precisely what is happening, or that it will soon happen, has had remarkable staying power despite relatively little evidence in its favor. Malthus, for example, anticipated two centuries ago that food production was losing the race and that terrible disasters would result from the consequent imbalance in “the proportion between the natural increase of population and food.” He was quite convinced, in his late-eighteenth-century world, that “the period when the number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived.”
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However, since the time when Malthus first published his famous
Essay on Population
in 1798, the world population has grown nearly six times, and yet food output and consumption per head are very considerably higher now than in Malthus’s time, and this has occurred along with an unprecedented increase in general living standards.

However, the fact that Malthus was badly mistaken in his diagnosis of overpopulation at his time (with less than a billion people around) and in his prognosis about the terrible consequences of population growth does not establish that all fears about population growth at all times must be similarly erroneous. But what about the present? Is food production really losing the race with population growth? Table 9.1 presents the indices of food production per head (based on statistics from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) for the world as a whole as well as for some of the major regions in terms of three-year averages (to avoid being misled by year-to-year fluctuations), with the average for 1979–1981 serving as the base of the index (100); index values are given up to 1996–1997. (Adding the 1998 figures does not alter the basic picture.) Not only is there no real decline in world food production per head (quite the contrary), but also the largest per capita increases have come in the more densely populated areas of the third world (in particular, China, India and the rest of Asia).