Tajikistan: Hard Life for Rural Women

Following the privatisation of the collective farm on which her family had worked during the Soviet period – in the Rudaki region, near the Tajik capital Dushanbe – Olima Boboeva became the proud owner of three hectares of agricultural land.

Her influence over her property, however, is limited to selecting which vegetables and berries she will grow on a small portion of her own land, in order to feed her own family.

All other decisions are made by the former director of the collective farm. On the bulk of her land, Boboeva is relegated to tending and harvesting the lucrative cotton crop in return for just 300 dollars each year.

Farmland is an important resource in Tajikistan, where three-quarters of the population live outside the major towns and cities, and agriculture accounts for almost a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product.

Access to arable land is made even more crucial by the fact that most of the country is mountainous. But cultural norms and financial barriers mean that women in Tajikistan have little say in the management of this key resource, even though according to official statistics, for every 100 men working on “dehkan” or private farms, there are 127 women.

It is true that across the country, women are well-represented amongst the shareholders in the cooperative farms that have replaced the old collective farms, where each farm worker is granted a plot for his or her own use, but is also expected to work on the cooperative land. According to a state committee set up to coordinate land use, women account for some 53 per cent of all such joint owners.

But not even one in ten of the people actually in charge of the cooperative farms is female. Instead, women are commonly left to carry out low-status manual labour, just as they were during the Soviet period.

Access to such jobs can be a lifeline in a country where around 40 per cent of the population is unemployed. But the work is hard – while male farm workers usually take roles such as operating machinery and carrying out repairs, female workers tend to be landed with the heavier jobs, include hoeing the soil around cotton shoots by hand, in temperatures of up to 45 degrees – a task for which they earn only around six to eight somoni per month, less than three dollars.

Given the opportunity, Tajik women have proven that they are more than capable of running farms. In fact, Tatyana Bozrikova, the director of Panorama, an organisation which recently conducted research into land distribution in Tajikistan, said, “Cooperative dekhkan farms run by women do not work any less productively than those run by men.”

Cultural factors in this traditionally patriarchal society lie behind the fact that, despite their equality under the law, women are less likely than men to find themselves owning land, or being put in charge of a cooperative.

“Because of deeply ingrained customs, and the practice of inheritance through the male line, women only have access to land by being related to a man, such as father or husband,” explains a report by a government programme set up to promote sexual equality.

An additional obstacle, the same report points out, is that “rural women are virtually unaware of their economic rights and their rights to use land.”

Saodat Muminova, who runs a non-government organisation, NGO, called Sitora, told IWPR that farm bosses frequently use deceit or coercion to deprive women of the plots allocated for their personal use, and ignore labour laws and deprive women of their pay for work on the cooperative.

Women’s lack of familiarity with their legal rights is compounded by their sense that they should give way, rather than stand up for themselves and overstep the limitations traditionally placed on their behaviour.

In response to research carried out by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, UNIFEM, many women in Tajikistan expressed concern that their reputation could suffer if they fought to keep their land ownership rights.

Even when women do have the opportunity to manage farms, cultural factors continue to create problems. “Farms run by women have more difficulties than men in getting loans, buying and repairing equipment, and finding specialists,” Bozrikova told IWPR.

The costs of farming can be prohibitive. Just registering a cooperative farm can cost between 300 and 500 dollars, and actually setting up a working farm – including buying seeds, fertiliser and machinery – comes to much more.

A resident of the Rudaki district, who asked to remain anonymous, told IWPR that although she bought her land for 300 dollars five years ago, the same plot would now be worth 1,000 dollars, well beyond the reach of the average single woman.

One solution is to take out a short-term loan. But banks in Tajikistan usually ask to see a business plan before they will part with their money, and rural women are rarely in a position to put together such a document.

Widows from Tajikistan’s civil war – thought to number around 55,000 – find it particularly difficult to take charge of farmland, as do divorcees.

According to local tradition, when a couple divorces, all their property, including the land, passes into the hands of the husband, and while the wife is left with the children whom she may then be unable to support.

In such situations, rural women hardly ever take their case either to court or to the traditional councils for their “mahalla” or neighbourhood, for fear of public disgrace.

Some organisations are working to address such discrimination within Tajikistan’s agriculture industry.

The deputy head of the government’s committee for women’s affairs, Kiymatgul Aliberdieva, told IWPR that many women approach her and her colleagues with problems relating to farmland.

“Unfortunately, we can only provide consultation and conduct seminars, while what they need is material and financial aid,” she said.

Maya Khoshokova, the executive director of Gender and Development, an NGO which provides small loans to female entrepreneurs, said 64 per cent of all its lending goes towards supporting women who own farmland.

She added that they had proved reliable borrowers. “Although women do not always have a good income from working on the land,” she said, “there has not yet been a case when a loan has not been returned.”

But her organisation also comes up against obstacles. One attempt to issue loans to 52 women in southern Tajikistan had to be put on ice when it came to light that only three of them had passports, which are necessary to conduct any official business.

UNIFEM also has a project in Tajikistan which has been working on land rights for rural women for three years now, providing them with free legal consultations and literature about the law.

Viloyat Mirzoeva, who runs the project, said a council has been set up to bring government officials and NGOs together to support UNIFEM’s aims and to work towards fair land reform.

However bad the situation may be now, Mirzoeva noted that it is a marked improvement on the recent past. While only eight per cent of cooperative farms have women as their boss, it’s better than the situation in 1999, when the figure was two per cent.

Valentina Kasymbekova is an IWPR contributor based in Dushanbe.