* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The contribution of rural women to Colombian society is undervalued because it is still not being shown in real statistics, writes Elizabeth Meneses
Elizabeth Meneses del Castillo is a former television reporter from Colombia. She moved to Canada in November 2000, and is currently a communications officer with the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. The opinions expressed are her own.
It’s been four years since I was last in Cali, Colombia, my hometown. Returning home, I see just how much the city has grown, and how much development has increased all around the province of Valle del Cauca. The region makes an important contribution to the local economy through its agricultural industries.
One of the first trips I made when I was back was to visit a house my parents are building in a rural area, one hour from Cali and very close to the town of Santander de Quilichao.
It was there that I met Ligia Criolla, a mother of nine whose long hair remains completely black and shows no sign of whitening at the age of 64. She and her husband, Felix, a construction worker, come from the south of Colombia.
He is building my parents' house while Ligia is cultivating, corn, beans and coffee around the property. She is also planting orange, mango and plantain trees and taking care of a small chicken barn.
Originally from Bueasaquillo in the province of Narino, Ligia comes from a family of farmers. Her father owned a piece of land, and as is common in Colombia, the men are the ones who own the property and basically decide the roles and distribution of work in the family.
Ligia remembers that she and her sisters helped her mother grow potatoes, ulluco and cabbage, but most importantly, they had a domestic role in the house and in transforming those products into meals for the family table.
Her father and brothers were the heads of the family - the ones who would inherit the land, who decided what to grow and how to sell it.
Decades ago, Ligia´s father lost his land and with that the family lost their livelihood. They knew no other way to survive. They moved to the closest city, where she went to elementary school, and soon afterwards got married and became an artisan. But she managed to teach her seven daughters and two boys to love the land and the art of cultivation.
Agriculture is an adventure says Ligia. “Some people make lots of money, others just gain enough to feed themselves, and others have been forced to leave the land and try to survive in the cities.”
From my point of view, despite their hard work, the contribution of rural women to Colombian society is undervalued because it is still not reflected properly in official data.
For example, a 2004 report from the United Nations (U.N.) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) titled "Women in agriculture, environment and rural production" says that participation of rural women in agriculture is underestimated in its statistics.
It says that 31.3 percent of agricultural workers are considered unsalaried family helpers and that their activities on small pieces of land are not reported as formal work. As part of the farmer economy, women are responsible for animal husbandry of cows and other small animal species, the report says.
So rural women do contribute to generating a family income, although they are also responsible for work at home, and the number of rural women in charge has increased notably because of long-running conflict in Colombia, the report says.
The proportion of the economically active female population has been increasing during the past years.
However, in 2006, according to DANE National Statistic Administrative Department of Colombia, just 6.5 percent of rural women are working in agriculture.
I consider this an empty statistic. It doesn't reflect the kind of work that rural women are doing, even according to the FAO report, which cites domestic roles and significant contributions to productive activities as examples of agricultural duties conducted on family land, including cultivating, planting and collecting the harvest.
To me, these are numbers and statistics, but they are not true numbers that really reflect the work of rural women and their participation in the economy. Women who don't have a salary have not been considered in those statistics.
To me, it says that rural women in Colombia do not contribute to either a family’s nor the country’s bottom line -- they are apparently invisible to the economists.
The FAO study was conducted to call attention to the problems and risks that millions of women in Latin America confront on a daily basis, especially women living in rural areas.
But rural women are the survivors of the Colombian conflict-- which has continued among government and guerilla groups since the 1960s -- and have become the heads of families, taking on leadership responsibilities they weren’t allowed before. These situations have made rural women look for ways to be more visible and to push the government to recognize the work they do.
It’s common in the world we live in to hear people complaining about being just a statistic.
The women of rural Colombia are still fighting to have their work factored into the statistics in the first place.
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