There is a wide consensus that women cook and, in most cases, prepare food. Women also tend to shop or procure the food for eating in the home, which in some cases means growing it in kitchen gardens or keeping small livestock for milk and eggs, for example.
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In other cases, it means saving some food from produce that they sell as traders. It can also mean that, when drought or economic crisis hits, women feel the pinch most, as they have to find some way to provide for their families, and this can lead them to organise collectively.
Regional examples can be cited. The "glass of milk" programme where Latin American women organised to address urban hunger and disease highlights social movements and organisations that have emerged from this association of women and food supply in Latin America.
The same applies to Asia, for example, the domestic stove improvement programmes in India (Barrig, 1991; Sarin, 1991). Thus in most societies, even where little or no food is produced within the household, women may be major actors in facilitating domestic food supply because of what Tripp calls the "moral economy" within which their work is located (Tripp, 1997).
The strong association of women with subsistence production and the implications for economic development has been recognised for more than thirty years (Boserup 1970). Numerous academic studies have addressed this issue regarding specifically urban areas, including a special issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization in 1991 and the International Research Seminar on Gender, Urbanisation and Environment held in 1994 (Lee-Smith, 1994).
It is important to recognise the distinction of women's association with domestic food supply, as opposed to men's roles in households as income earners or "breadwinners" when collecting and analysing data on women's roles in food production, including in urban agriculture.
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AKHAND PRATAP SINGH
