Women in Agriculture

In developed world like the United States that invented cooperative extension services the gender disparity may not be an issue; but it is serious issues in developing countries like Nigeria. Most of the affirmative 30% women in socio-economic-political life are still in principle rather than practice. The same scenario applies to agriculture where women basically form over 90% of the workforce in planting, weeding, harvesting, processing, storage and marketing; yet are marginal groups when it comes to access to basic literacy, agricultural inputs, credit facilities, insurance. They are also highly loaded with domestic work like baby making, baby housekeeping, house chores like cooking, washing, sanitation, husbanding, and attending to domestic needs of immediate and nuclei families. More than 90% of house-helps in all nook and crannies of Nigeria are women. Due to culture and tradition, most of them are not expected to come out during the daytime or exclusively permitted to crawl out at night or to do so both at day and night fully covered from head to toe and sometimes never to mingle themselves with men as in Northern, Nigeria or never to talk or come publicly to air their opinion like in eastern Nigeria. In some areas women are treated like commodities or private good like in eastern Nigeria where their husbands can decide on what to do to them once the bride price has been paid by the man; while in the western part of Nigeria women are treated like public goods where you can marry as many as you can and drop them at any time in what is popularly called "concubine."It is also a pity that women are malnourished and go hungry working in the farms while they are the main producers of the food, since the husbands ration the food to them and their children, especially in rural communities. In some cases the men use ruler and cups to measure the tubers of yam cut-off or given to their wives and children to check the cases of their wives or children coming to pilfer the commodity. In terms of agricultural extension services, this is purely exclusive to some few elites, or their men counterpart that can bribe their way through corrupt government officials, who invariably convert agricultural inputs or subsidies meant for the farmers to their private purse. Most agricultural extension services or programmes especially in southeastern Nigeria is more of "show and tell"; with more seriousness in western and northern Nigeria where FADAMA and irrigation programmes coupled with farm mechanisation has turned farmers around. Anyway, to their domineering male counterpart. In eastern Nigeria where people believe more in survival of the fittest akin for capitalist economies typical of the Igbos. To them, agricultural extension services is meant for tribes that previously depended on hoe for survival like Abakaliki Kingdom; while the Onitsha-Nnewi-Awka Kingdom believe only on money, import and export, backwarding and forwarding and loaded ships in high seas coming from China, Taiwan, Germany, Japan, UK, USA and other first world countries. To eastern Nigerians, agricultural extension services are for "tie-in-the neck," hungry, angry, poor, dejected, rejected and ever protesting and murmuring civil servants that depend on less than one dollar a day for survival of family of ten people, including the hungry and angry wives we are addressing in this book.We cannot expect World Bank, Food and Agricultural Organisation, United Nations Development Programme and other International, and National Stakeholders to continue to spoon-feed us like a baby for eternity in the a land flowing with milk and honey. Natural resources of immense magnitude everywhere, and we are busy chasing rats. A man who chases rats when his house is on fire is an insane man. Nigeria and Nigerians (women, men, children) cannot afford to be insane at over 55 years of independence.Any nation that does not shift from slavery and colonial mentality like China and India is doomed