Despite having to postpone the meeting due to a hartal, a fair number of members came, eager to listen to our guest speaker, Ms. Bui Thi Lan, FAO Representative.

Ms. Lan is very committed to the participation of women in agriculture. She comes from Vietnam, where it is the women who are most active in agriculture. She also has fond memories of herself and her siblings being raised by her grandmother, who supported the family through market gardening. In the year she has been Bangladesh, she has traveled extensively to observe the situation in the rural areas, particularly with regards to women.

It is not possible to make a generalization about Bangladeshi women in agriculture, since the situation varies among different geographical areas and peoples. Women in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are extremely active in their livelihoods, accompanied by a self-confidence and a positive outlook to life that comes with this power. And in some areas, it is among the slightly less poor where women work the longest and the hardest. And it may be their own work which is making the difference in the family livelihood.

In many areas though, it is the men who plough and take care of the rice fields. As a listener pointed out, this is probably because many women are not expected to step out of the family compound. Between household chores, home gardening, fish ponds and raising small livestock and threshing/hulling rice, she may do more work than the man but her work remains hidden to the outside world. Women’s participation in society still remains rather limited in the rural areas despite great progress made in Dhaka, and with women entering the cash economy (i.e., as garment workers).

The difficulties of women-headed households in Bangladesh are considerable. Lan noted that in Viet Nam, women household heads have gradually become accepted, due to the war situation in the past years. Many single Vietnamese women may have or adopt a child as an investment to the future. As part of its programme in Bangladesh, FAO has been providing guidelines to integrate gender in agricultural participation.

Lan also strongly feels that more women in Bangladesh should be encouraged to get involved in agriculture. She has so far met only a handful of women civil servants in agriculture, including a very dynamic head of a horticultural institution near Dhaka.

She also expressed some doubts on the efficacy of limiting women’s issues to one ministry (e.g. for women’s rights). Often such a ministry may not have the power or the financial means to carry out many activities.

Although small, Lan hopes that the contributions of FAO and other UN organizations can act as catalysts so that the Government takes further initiatives to incorporate women’s concerns into the mainstream planning and policy-making processes.

As a woman working in Bangladesh, she feels that her gender has been more of an advantage than not She is often able to make appointments with high-level officials which might not necessarily be possible if she had been male. Most of her counterparts have been extremely receptive of her views and have supported her activities.

Finally, A brasssmith from Dhamrai had contacted UNWA expressing an interest to show his wares, and he brought along many nice statues and brassware, old and new, for members to look at.