Cutting down trees: women, nutrition and agricultural change in the northern province of Zambia, 1920-1986
Moore, H.; Vaughan, M.
African Affairs 86(345): 523-540
1987
ISSN/ISBN: 0001-9909 PMID: 11616458 DOI: 10.2307/722668Document Number: 392276
The paper describes ways in which the problems of shortages of food and poor nutrition have been viewed by governments and development planners in Zambia from the colonial period to the present day, and discusses how their perceptions of food problems and the solutions they proposed to them were, and still are, governed by their attitudes to the agricultural production system. Problems of nutrition and food supply are located within a long-term historical perspective as a way of deconstructing some of the myths which have grown up around the citemene ('slash and burn') agricultural system in northern Zambia. This is achieved through a focus on women's labour which highlights previously ignored aspects of agricultural production. This focus is regarded as essential to any explanation for the prevalence of malnutrition, both past and present. It is concluded that the poverty of female headed households may well be more closely related to their inability to generate cash income than simply to the absence of male labour.