The invisibility of women’s work: the economics of local and global bullshit””

I have watched women in many parts of the world following herds of animals to scoop up steaming dung in their bare hands, placing it in woven baskets which they then hoist onto their heads and carry. The loads they bend for, lift, and carry are very heavy, and the work is very tiring. In the context of the lives of these women, access to dung is a matter of daily survival. In addition to providing fertilizer, it is a primary source of cooking fuel and is also used as a building material and plaster. When used as organic manure, the dung must be dried for several months and then carried to the households' farming plots. These are seldom contiguous, and may be several kilometres from the household. I recall images of women walking bare-footed along rough narrow paths on the sides of steep hills, for example, in Indonesia or Nepal. Entire days are spent carrying on their heads baskets full of fertilizer for the small family plots before ploughing. In many places in the developing world, livestock are held in a small enclosure immediately next to the home, since the pressure on land use means that, with a few seasonal and agro-ecological exceptions, fewer livestock are allowed to wander freely or are herded. Gathering fodder for the animals and then bringing them water become more arduous tasks for women and children, with longer and longer walks. At least the dung is closer to the household. In parts of Africa and Asia, dung is also used as a basic material for building construction, maintenance, and decoration. Adobe houses are covered with a mixture of mud, dung, and straw and replastered several times a year. The mixture is spread by hand, and only women do this work. In some villages, the plaster is mixed with coloured pigments, and spectacular decorative patterns often adorn the outside of the houses. As a result of forest depletion, women increasingly need dung to burn as an alternative to wood fuel. After collection, they mix it with straw and water and make it into flat cakes. Then it is dried, usually in the sun, and the women need to turn each cake several times in this process before it is dry enough for storing. Making dung cakes can take up to two hours a day and, when the cakes are stacked, there is the further process of thatching and sealing the pile to keep out the rain. Making dung cakes to be used as fuel appears to me to be an entire manufacturing process, with clear inputs and outputs of an economic nature. In mining or gas extraction, for example, paid workers harvest the primary resource. Machines transport it to processing plants. The raw material is refined, the product manufactured. It is sold, then consumed. The traditional economic model is followed: workers process raw materials for the market. This counts. But when dung, the non-product," is carried as a "service" by "housewives," to sustain land, dwellings, and households, then, according to the economic model, nothing happens. There is no economic activity. But dungwork is only women's work, so it is a safe assumption that in the official definitions of productive work it will be invisible. The area of human activity generally excluded from economic measurement is household activities, the products of which are seldom or never marketed, i.e. the unpaid services of housewives and other family members, household maintenance, subsistence agriculture performed by children or "housewives," voluntary work, and reproductive work: most of the work that most of the people do most of the time. Growth" figures register "market" activities, i.e. cash-generating activities, whatever the nature of that activity and regardless of its legal status. In New Zealand, companies dry dung products and sell them in pelletized form for the home gardener. The process is called manufacturing. The results are marketed. The workers are paid. When the rural women of the developing world recycle dung, nothing in the process, the production, or the labour has an economic value. The value of this most primary of all forms of production, and its links with women's unp id work, raise crucial policy questions which have seldom, if ever, been contemplated by the arbiters of what does and does not count. As a consequence, much of the rhetoric intended to ensure continuing exclusion of these activities, and large amounts of women's other work, from measurement is made on the basis that all this has little or no effect on most micro and all macro economic activity. Yet the consequences for micro and macro policy planning are immense. While dung can be a replacement fuel for scarce wood, and therefore ease the rate of deforestation, this use is a major loss in terms of soil conservation and fertility. For example, it is estimated that in Nepal eight million tonnes of dung are now burnt each year, equivalent to one million tonnes of foregone grain production (World Bank)."