Gender, control, and crop choice in northern Mozambique

Women play an important role in the agricultural production process in developing countries, yet their role in making decisions about what to grow and implications for household welfare remains poorly understood. In this article, I study women's empowerment in northern Mozambique as it relates to agriculture, considering in particular the factors associated with women managing the plots that they nominally control. Women control about 30% of the plots in the data, but only manage about 70% of those plots. Using a unique panel data set, I find that women are more likely to manage plots when households have had historic access to off-farm labor, typically completed by men. When women manage plots, they tend to grow crops with less complicated production techniques and are less likely to grow the main area cash crop. However, conditional on historic access to off-farm labor their farm incomes are the same as among men.