The Age of Communitarian Enterprises:  Rural Women in Kais Saied’s Vision for Alternative Development

There is no dignity for the nation without the dignity of its citizens […] there is no dignity for a man unless his woman’s dignity is preserved” President Kais Saied, Manouba, August 13^th, 2023.

On August 13^th 2023, in commemoration of the 67th anniversary of Tunisia’s Women’s Day, President Kais Saied traveled to Manouba to inaugurate the first women-led Communitarian Enterprise (CE), or sharika ahlia. The CE, dubbed al-Kadihat—Arabic for hardworking women—involved fifty women, predominately landless agricultural laborers [‘Amilat] who embarked on a project to cultivate a 541-hectare tract of land owned by the National Land Office. The goal of the venture, in the President’s words, is “generating wealth and rekindling people’s connection with land.” As one of the founders of the CE articulated, the project emerged from the struggles of the ‘Amilat themselves, who “toil without dignity on private farms for meager wages”—a plight the President acknowledged in asserting that he “chose to celebrate National Women’s Day among the people, the hardworking women who labor for 15 dinars a day.”¹ 

The ceremony on the 13^th—whose attendees included local government representatives, members of rural and feminist civil society, and the women instrumental in founding the CE itself—was charged with emancipatory sloganeering. The rally cry of “breaking free from the chains of servitude and exploitation and towards food sovereignty” adorned posters, and the President asserted that the CEs were to enhance “the capacity of free Tunisian women to innovate and persevere for the achievement of food sovereignty.”² Presented as a solution for endemic rural unemployment, Saied also anchored the CEs initiative to his wider vision of development from below—and to a political project oriented toward ‘correcting the revolutionary path.’ This larger objective was apparent in the language through which the CEs were legally established. Per Decree No. 15 of March 20, 2022, Communitarian Enterprises are founded to “achieve social justice and equitable distribution of wealth through the collective exercise of economic activity from the territorial area in which [people] are settled.”³ Discursively speaking at least, the CEs, like the President’s anti-corruption crusade, are meant to substantiate that which was hoped for in January 2011, but betrayed by the democratic transition.

At first glance, the inauguration of the first women-led CE in Manouba looks to be an (exceedingly rare) instance of a Tunisian politician actually delivering something tangible for the country’s rural women, something beyond vague allusions to gender-responsive development. What is more, the Manouba project is only one amongst many such initiatives being specifically tailored to women at the present moment. A CE has also been planned for Kasserine, for example, where sixty women working on the valorization of prickly pears are to come together in a state-backed cooperative⁴. If at a small scale, these efforts lend some material content to Kais Saied’s new development model. 

It would, at this stage, be premature to pontificate on the long-term viability of the CE initiative, though many critiques have already been leveled⁵. A more pressing task, and the one engaged in this essay, is to unwind the gendered discourse which envelops Tunisia’s women-led Communitarian Enterprises. In delving into the potentialities and limitations immanent to the CE project and examining the ways Saied has linked women-led CEs to the political project of food sovereignty, a sightline into contemporary political, sociological, and developmental realities can be found.

While not explicitly agrarian in focus and intended to operate within a variety of industries, most Tunisia’s CEs have emerged within the agricultural sector. This has allowed proponents to contend that the project could potentially address some of Tunisia’s food supply challenges, particularly shortages in grains, fodder, and other staples that have been conspicuously absent from commercial shelves (and that have contributed to recent public discontent). Beyond anticipated benefits in terms of wealth creation and job opportunities, CEs have also been heralded as a potential solution for addressing ‘the issue of collective land.’ The latter was expressly referenced during the inauguration of a CE in Bni Khiar, the President’s hometown⁶. This discourse has resonated with the landless and land-poor. Before these audiences, the president has underscored the CEs’ potential to alleviate feminized rural impoverishment, citing an example of a woman rural laborer earning 140 TND while collecting herbs for a Communitarian Enterprise in Zaghouen. (It is worth noting that the President has highlighted this particular woman’s good fortunes on a number of occasions, including during televised visits to the Ministry of Agriculture and the Banque Nationale Agricole in September.) 

‘Those that toil without dignity on private farms’: The Promise of Land Access

Tunisia’s agrarian sector is sustained by a largely feminized and informal workforce known, as mentioned, as the ‘Amilat. In the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, the ‘Amilat’s plight became a rallying point for human rights, women’s rights and rural activists of various hues. In number, these women, which include part and full-time ‘family helpers’ and salaried farmhands, count in excess of 500,000: A 2017-2018 survey estimated women agrarian workers at 521,306, though a recent study from the Forum Tunisien pour les Droits Economiques et Sociaux (FTDES) suggests the number may be considerably higher⁷. Overrepresented in the interior regions of the country, the Amilat seldom seek out agricultural day laboring out of personal conviction, attachment to land or even desire to remain in rural spaces. Rather, they do so because the options for employment within their developmentally disadvantaged milieus are scarce. Most of those falling within the category are also burdened with households to support, contend with ailing or absent husbands and fathers, or have spouses employed in equally precarious positions⁸. 

The activist discourse around the issue of the ‘Amilat initially concentrated upon their perilous transportation options, which had resulted in a series of highly publicized calamities⁹. With time, the transportation focus gave way to discussion of the broader workplace abuses faced by these women. Such abuses are manifold, though prominently include low pay—pay lower than the minimum wage defined by the state (and lower than compensation offered to male colleagues)—gender-based violence including sexual assault, and exclusion from social protection systems. At the root of these practices lie a more entrenched form of commercial agrarian extractivism which powers capital accumulation through the exploitation of feminized labor¹⁰. Indeed, with women constituting eighty percent of the national agricultural labor force, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which surplus values extracted from feminized labor are today building fortunes in Tunisian agribusiness sector that seldom trickle down back to the communities in which these laborers are embedded¹¹.      

Amongst the hundreds of thousands of women populating Tunisia’s agrarian economy, less than ten per cent own any agricultural land, as was revealed by the Minister of Social Affairs during the inauguration of the Manouba women-led CE. The attractiveness of CEs to this mass of workers, and of land access more generally, is obvious. Minimally, CE ventures can provide a means for earning a cash-based income and enhancing autonomy. The latter virtue has been highlighted by many rights-based and liberal feminists, and several international financial and development institutions¹². The land made available by the CEs might additionally serve as a buffer against the vulnerabilities of waged employment. Indeed, materialist feminists such as O’Laughlin  urge us to recognize that the value of land extends beyond its wage-generating capacities: It represents a form of social security and a means of ensuring social reproduction—the ensemble of labors and practices that goes into the generation and maintenance of people, households, communities, and life¹³. 

The relevance of O’Laughlin’s point on social reproduction to Tunisia is especially pronounced. Since the 2011 uprisings, state retreat from social provisioning and deteriorating living standards have made the reproduction of communities acutely untenable. The gender-lopsided consequences of the resulting crisis become evident when considering how women, and by extension their labor, bear the brunt of the shocks induced by restructuring and service privatization¹⁴. The most striking manifestation of feminized labor stepping into the void left by the state is evinced in the context of water scarcity. Water shortages have peaked in recent years, prompting the instituting of nationwide—albeit regionally uneven—conservation measures. One immediate effect of these measures has been that households in inland regions, already underserved, have lost access to water for days on end: During fieldwork conducted in July 2023, the hottest month of the year, a group of twelve ‘Amilat on a commercial farm in rural Sidi Bouzid disclosed that they had endured consecutive days without electricity and water. Confronted with such adversity, some women turned to their employers, with whom access to a farm’s well could be negotiated. Unsurprisingly in view of the ‘Amilat’s vulnerable condition, water secured through such means often meant sacrificing the ability to challenge workplace abuses, such as delayed salary payments. For those Amilat lacking even the recourse of a highly dependent relation with an employer, arduous journeys under harsh conditions have become required in order to access water: Indeed, water fetching, a feminized task par excellence and a symptom of intensifying social vulnerability, has resurfaced with increased intensity in the Tunisia of the 2020s¹⁵. Its exacerbation has been hastened by myriad interrelated forces: a multi-year drought, the enclosure and the privatization of the commons, the retreat of the Tunisian state from basic social provisioning, and the web of exploitative social and class relations upon which social reproduction hinges. 

In this context, an obvious question begs asking: Can land access through cooperative organizing address the intertwined issues of class, gender injustice against the backdrop of regionally lopsided development? 

Back to Reality: A pragmatic Approach to Women-led CEs 

The historical record on agrarian and rural cooperatives is mixed. In a big picture sense, advocates of cooperatives underscore the imperative for small farmers to pursue economies of scale to effectively compete with larger producers¹⁶. Conversely, critics argue that the resurgence of cooperatives under current economic conditions, unless challenging agrarian capital interests, is unlikely to resolve but rather encapsulate the inherent contradictions of capitalist production¹⁷, rendering cooperatives yet another mechanism for the integration of peasant small producers into capital-controlled commodity chains.¹⁸ 

Contingent upon local arrangements, of course, cooperatives across the world have yielded divergent material and non-material gains for members and nations alike. In parsing through the causes of all this outcome heterogeneity, a few lessons can be derived—lessons that may inform the outlook for Kais Saied’s CE initiative.  

On gender-mixed cooperatives, existing data suggests that women participants are frequently required to invest more time and energy than their male counterparts, though without deriving proportionally higher returns¹⁹. Studies of women-led cooperatives, alternatively, establish that participants experience structured environments for fostering solidarity, nurturing a sense of community, and strengthening communal bonds with a shared developmental goal.²⁰ This is especially so in environments where migration—both rural-coastal and irregular—is adversely impacting communities in draining human capital and sinking communal morale.²¹ Prospective benefits notwithstanding, studies of women-led cooperatives organized for the primary purpose of supporting wage-generating activities present two caveats. First, while having the potential to rectify gendered hierarchies and enhance the agency of women inside and outside the household, income-centric cooperatives require considerable time before they yield monetary returns.²² This lag effect can be discouraging for participants, particularly those who join with the expectation of swift income boosts (In Tunisia’s case, such expectations have been encouraged by the President’s repeated references to a cooperative member earning 140 TND a day). 

Secondly, income-centric cooperatives also tend to leave the social reproduction question unaddressed, and cooperative members are often unaware of the social benefits that they may accrue beyond income-generation.²³ Where income is the priority, participants’ responsibilities for childcare and other reproductive labors often remain individualized at the household level, thereby forcing women to juggle commodified (productive) and non-commodified (reproductive) labor. 

 A case in point is the experience of Moroccan cooperatives. Though these cooperatives have often been lauded for their role in encouraging women to exit the household, this praise ignores how such exits have been prompted not by a desire to engage in collective work, but rather, by the necessity of pursuing monetary income and expanding livelihood portfolios. This means that whatever agency-boosting effects might be accrued from cooperative work is often met with an intensification of household and extra-household responsibilities.²⁴ Similarly, in a study of 23 Turkish cooperatives, researchers found that the most cited reason for women to drop out of cooperatives is having children or grandchildren.²⁵ Both the Moroccan and Turkish experiences underscore how women’s participation in cooperative organizing has frequently yielded modest to zero positive effects in addressing intra-household inequalities, not the least of which is husbands asserting control over financial gains. In contrast, the Chinese cooperative experience, as elucidated by Hu et al, demonstrates success in instances where cooperatives integrated community services, including childcare, care for the elderly, and the dissemination of cultural practices, as a social foundation for agricultural production. While these structures by no means address all gendered hierarchies, the Chinese approach helped gain community trust and thereby sustain the cooperative experience in the long-term, even in the face of early financial setbacks. At present, the Tunisian CE project has no similar plans for building such social foundations. 

The relative flexibility of cooperative arrangements does have the potential to alleviate the dual burden of women. For this effect to manifest, however, certain conditions must be in place. Critically, these include the proximity of CEs to participants’ households (enabling convenient foot travel) or the availability of reliable transportation. Infrastructure, inclusive of transport systems, is, in fact, crucial to our concerns in two distinct ways: It makes the balancing of commodified and non-commodified labor (slightly) more manageable for women, and it increases the economic viability of the cooperative enterprise.²⁶ This pertains directly to Kais Saied’s CE venture insofar as transportation infrastructure in rural Tunisia remains a major issue.  For women already contending with a gender-skewed integration into the formal economy, the absence of proper roads, dependable transportation options, and other basic logistical networks infrastructural support heighten the likelihood that arrangements for collective agricultural production fail to bear the fruit promised. 

All things considered, then, and while recognizing that concrete results are still years away, the notion that CEs are to contribute to restoring the dignity of the ‘Amilat, as evoked by President Saied, clearly warrants circumspection. Returning to the example of Moroccan cooperatives, one observes an initiative which was successful in attracting the participation of women, but which struggled to provide a clear pathway out of informality, leaving members working in an accident-prone sector to navigate challenges such as the absence of retirement plans and a lack of insurance coverage.²⁷ Tunisian counterparts, in their current form, are unfortunately following a similar trajectory in that they do not address the persistent exclusion of the ‘Amilat from basic social provisioning.During the inauguration of the Manouba CE, one of the participants complained that she, along with several co-participants, had been abruptly dismissed from their previous job and thereby lost their social security benefits. The President responded by emphasizing the broader goal towards which these women are working: “You will now exploit the land and create national wealth”, he told them. Another woman, when tearfully sharing the adverse health repercussions she has suffered from her past work and her current lack of social security, received a kiss on the forehead from the President.

‘Add Women but Don’t Stir’ – Gender Justice as a Precondition for Food Sovereignty

The critiques of Kais Saied’s CE initiative presented thus far have considered deficiencies in infrastructural support, the incapacity of cooperatives to address the contradictions of social reproduction, and exclusion from social provisioning. Such critiques could have just as easily been directed at the decades-spanning efforts of the Groupement Féminin de Développement Agricole (GFDA): Since well before the uprisings of 2011, the GFDA has been bringing rural women together to produce local goods, with the aim of generating income and fostering community development.²⁸ What potentially sets President Saied’s Community Enterprises (CEs) project apart from the GFDA, beyond the structural aspect of state support and facilitated access to nationally-owned land, is his incorporation of the CEs within a larger push for food sovereignty. As the latter constitutes an expressly political objective—and one with gendered implications of great import—it deserves its own unpacking.

Radical modes of cooperative organizing, exemplified by the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), have leveraged democratically organized agricultural production units as a form of resistance against commodified agriculture, addressing the intertwined yet distinct issues of the ‘struggle on the land’ following the ‘struggle for land.’²⁹ Within these alternative visions, the engagement of women is not conceived of as a method to rectify gender-imbalance in economic integration alone, but as a mechanism of dissent towards the very structures that impoverish all peasant producers. This dissent can be directed towards an occupying force as is the case of Palestinian women who have joined agrarian cooperatives as a form of a solidarity economy and a means of reconnecting with and claiming ownership over land.³⁰ This dissent can also be directed towards patriarchal domination that festers even within progressive rural movements from which women, much like the Nicaraguan case, divest to establish their own.³¹ In all these cases, the cooperative structure exists to serve a political purpose: a struggle towards liberation by way of food sovereignty – a vision Saied articulated in his Manouba CE inaugural speech. 

Food sovereignty, as a radical departure from neoliberal agrarian and food policies, emerges as an alternative national development strategy and anti-imperialist political project deeply entwined with the right to self-determination.³² Feminist approaches, alliances, and critiques of food sovereignty as articulated by national development plans and peasant movements recognize women’s emancipation and gender justice as a fundamental prerequisite for, rather than just a pillar of, just agrarian futures.³³ The integration of feminist principles with the project of food sovereignty thus goes beyond achieving numerical parity within agrarian structures, and beyond ensuring women’s participation for the sake of representation. Instead, it signifies a profound reconfiguration and dismantling of patriarchal structures that permeate both conventional and alternative peasant movements. This is a monumental endeavor; it requires, most immediately, feminist pedagogies in popular education³⁴ as well as more long-term projects, foremost among them the collectivization of social reproduction.³⁵ 

While it may seem unfair to judge new projects against standards forged over decades of organizing, numerous nascent and localized peasant movements have drawn valuable insights from exchanges with older transnational counterparts, and vice-versa. This reciprocal learning process is constitutive of any successful grassroots peasant movements. It is factor, moreover, that Saied and his advisors must take far more seriously, lest they risk the reproduction of their aesthetics and not their substance. Indeed, Saied’s CE project, with its double objective of achieving food sovereignty and alleviating feminized poverty, looks to be a classic example of what Conway  terms the “add women – but do not stir” approach.³⁶ This approach recognizes gendered inequalities insofar as they substantiate ideals of food sovereignty but disavows any commitment toward actually disrupting material relations of domination. While it signifies progress for a head of state to celebrate women as partners in national development, Saied’s discourse perpetuates the exploitative myth of the heroic resilience of rural working women.³⁷ In his framing, peasant women are not people whose historical and present material dependence on land has been markedly exploitative, or people who have contentiously endeavored to reclaim the conditions of social reproduction in successive struggles against thirst and water inaccessibility.³⁸ Rather, they are celebrated for an abstracted ability to ‘persevere’ under conditions in which the state is complicit.  

Agrarian futures still to be determined 

It is true that CE participants greeted Kais Saied’s project with great enthusiasm. The title chosen for their venture—kadihat, Arabic for hard-working women—encapsulates not only their genuine pride and eagerness, but the all-too-familiar struggle of the vaguely defined rural woman in the imaginary of the state and its discourse. But if there is anything that the televised and highly choreographed presidential visit to Manouba made evident, it is how little these women are invested in persevering under the current conditions. They demand, in their own pleas to their president, not wishful words but land to work, safe and reliable transportation networks to travel and send goods by, and the security of healthcare and social insurance. These demands make apparent that whatever the CE projects’ merits may be, they will only be realized if they are accompanied by a grassroots development project centred upon peasant women’s self-defined needs and aspirations. Absent this second prong, Saied will only have repackaged existing forms of exploitation with a solidarity economy veneer. Indeed, when Saied’s pledges to an audience of his constituents—“as soon as [people] start working this land and it becomes productive and generates wealth, this will be of benefit to all (and) all of these problems of leaving a job without compensation, or issues of transportation and education [will be addressed]”— he’s tapping into the same well of rural resilience as his predecessors. In so doing, he ties the CEs within webs of exploitative social relations that will in time prove not only fundamentally incongruent with any genuine vision of food sovereignty, but also plant the seeds for further contention in the countryside. 

Notes

1. Présidence Tunisienne, dir. زيارةرئيسالجمهوريةقيسسعيدإلىضيعةبرجالتوميبمعتمديةالبطانمنولايةمنوبة [Visit of the President of the Republic, Kais Saied, to the estate of Borj Toumi in the delegation of Battan, governorate of Manouba]. Mannouba, 2023. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2372418959603966. ↩︎
2. Ibid ↩︎
3. JORT, مرسومعدد 15 لسنة 2022 مؤرّخفي 20 مارس 2022 يتعلقبالشركاتالأهلية. المطبعة الرسمية للجمهورية التونسية, March 21, 2022. ↩︎
4. Ministère de la Famille, de la Femme, de l’Enfance et des Personnes Âgées,“وزارة الأسرة والمرأة تعمل على دعم مشروع تكوين شركة أهلية لتثمين التين الشوكي انضمت إليها إلى حد الآن 62 من نساء وفتيات ولاية القصرين أغلبهن دون سن الأربعين – وزارة الأسرة و المرأة والطفولة وكبار السن   [The Ministry of Family and Women is working to support a project to form a communitarian company to value prickly pears, to which 62 women and girls from Kasserine Province have joined so far, most of whom are under the age of forty.]”, 2023. ↩︎
5. Whether or not Decree 15 of March 2022 is the sole socioeconomic measure hitherto taken by Saied, as some observers have alleged, it is not without its detractors. Perhaps the most scathing critique leveled against the project is one identifying how the CEs grant state officials considerable control over what are meant to be community-led businesses (Mahroug, Moncef. 2023. “Entreprises Communautaires: Cartographie et Bilan.” Nawaat (blog). 2023.). This control stands CEs in stark contrast to the modality of firm envisioned by the Social and Solidarity Economy project—which was ratified and signed into law by Saied in 2020 though never implemented. The decree law is also criticized for the stringent prohibitions it places on CEs when it comes to ‘political activity’ and ‘involvement in political processes’ – terms that are so loosely defined as to imply any form of political expression by the company’s members (Elleuch, Mahdi, and Yassine Nabli. 2022. “Tunisia’s Communitarian Companies: Justice or Domination?” Legal Agenda (blog). June 2, 2022). Just as saliently, it has been denigrated for delays in implementation (Mahroug, Moncef. 2023. “Entreprises Communautaires : Entre Franche Opposition et Soutien Timoré.” Nawaat (blog)..); unspecified financing; overall vagueness, as was charged by the Secretary General of the Tunisia’s largest syndical body ( Hadoui, Khaled. 2022. “جدل في تونس بشأن اعتماد الشركات الأهلية كنموذج للتنمية | خالد هدوي.” صحيفة العرب. 01:00 2022.); and disregard-cum-ignorance for Tunisia’s painful history with cooperative experimentation ( Lazhar, Arbi. 2023. “الازهر العربي – الشركات الاهلية في تونس : من فكرة كولونيالية الى حجر الزاوية في المنوال التنموي للشعبوية.” الحوار المتمدن. 2023.). Some political adversaries have also questioned not only the technical aspects of the CE, but whether the project represents but a political maneuver aimed at appeasing Tunisians grappling with an economic crisis.  ↩︎
6. Sabrine Ahmed, “Faouzi Ben Abderrahmane, ancien ministre de la formation professionnelle et de l’emploi et coordinateur du comité de pilotage pour l’élaboration du projet de loi de l’Économie Sociale et Solidaire, à La Presse : «Les «Charikat Ahlia», des sociétés sous tutelle des autorités politiques !».” La Presse de Tunisie (blog). October 14, 2022.  ↩︎
7. Hayet Attar, “المرأة العاملة في القطاع الفلاحي وسياسات تأبيد الهشاشة أي سبيل للإنقاذ ورد الاعتبار ؟.” [Women Agrarian Workers: Overcoming Marginalization through Policies for Resilience and Dignity Restoration] Tunis: FTDES (2023). ↩︎
8. Ibid: 37. ↩︎
9. Fadil Aliriza, “National Outcry Over Latest Deadly Road Accident of Women Farmhands.” Meshkal (blog). April 30, 2019. ↩︎
10. See, amongst other works: Dhouha Djerbi “Tunisia’s Amilat: Agrarian Crises and the Feminization of Casual Agricultural Work.” In Gender and Agrarian Transitions: Perspectives on Liberation, edited by Dzodzi Tsikata, Paris Yeros, and Archana Prasad. New Delhi: Tulika Books (2024).
    Alia Gana, “Processus de libéralisation et dynamiques de l’emploi des femmes en Tunisie.” Autrepart 43:3 (2007): 57–72. 
    Ossome, Lyn, and Sirisha Naidu, “The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour.” In Labour Questions in the Global South, edited by Praveen Jha, Walter Chambati, and Lyn Ossome, 63–86. Singapore: Springer (2021). 
    Razavi, Shahra, “Engendering the Political Economy of Agrarian Change.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 36:1 (2009): 197–226.  ↩︎
11. Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books (2013). ↩︎
12. World Bank Group, “The Voluntary Guidelines and the World Bank: Increasing Women’s Access to Land, Approaches That Work.” 1. Good Practices Brief. Washington, D.C: World Bank Group (2015).
    Rishi Goyal and Ratna Sahay, “Integrating Gender into the IMF’s Work.” 2023001. Gender Notes. Washington, D.C: International Monetary Fund (2023). ↩︎
13. Bridget O’Laughlin, “Gender Justice, Land and the Agrarian Question in Southern Africa.” In Peasants and Globalization. Routledge (2008). ↩︎
14. OXFAM, “Counting on Women’s Work without Counting Women’s Work: Women’s Unpaid Work in Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Egypt.” OXFAM (2019). ↩︎
15. Youcef Bounab, “‘Living Dead’: Tunisian Villages Suffer Drought, Climate Change.” Yahoo News (December 6, 2023). ↩︎
16. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Peasants and the Art of Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto. Winnipeg, N.S: Fernwood Pub (2013). ↩︎
17. Karin Wedig and Jörg Wiegratz, “Neoliberalism and the Revival of Agricultural Cooperatives: The Case of the Coffee Sector in Uganda”. Journal of Agrarian Change 18:2 (2018): 348–69.  ↩︎
18. Zhanping Hu, Qian Forrest Zhang, and John Donaldson, “Why Do Farmers’ Cooperatives Fail in a Market Economy? Rediscovering Chayanov with the Chinese Experience.” The Journal of Peasant Studies (2022): 1–31. ↩︎
19. Sovanneary Huot, Leif Jensen, Ricky Bates, and David Ader, “Barriers of Women in Acquiring Leadership Positions in Agricultural Cooperatives: The Case of Cambodia”. Rural Sociology 88: 3 (2023): 708–30. ↩︎
20. Wilson Majee and Ann Hoyt, “Cooperatives and Community Development: A Perspective on the Use of Cooperatives in Development.” Journal of Community Practice 19:1 (2011): 48–61. ↩︎
21. Marie-Hélène Schwoob and Mohamed Elloumi, “Rural under-Development and Internal Migration: The Example of Tunisian Agriculture:” In MediTERRA 2018 (English), 167–79. Presses de Sciences Po. ↩︎
22. S Garikipati, “Landless but Not Assetless: Female Agricultural Labour on the Road to Better Status, Evidence from India.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 36:3 (2009): 517–45.
    Bina Agarwal, “Does Group Farming Empower Rural Women? Lessons from India’s Experiments.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 47:4 (2020): 841–72. ↩︎
23. Hilary Ferguson and Thembela Kepe, “Agricultural Cooperatives and Social Empowerment of Women: A Ugandan Case Study.” Development in Practice 21:3 (2011): 421–29. ↩︎
24. Ahmad el Gazzar, Rachid Hasnaoui, and Bouchra Taoufik, “L’entrepreneuriat d’intérêt collectif au service de développement durable au Maroc : cas des coopératives féminines arganières de la province d’Essaouira”. Repères et Perspectives Economiques 2:1 (2018).  ↩︎
25. Meral Ugur-Cinar, Kursat Cinar, Emine Onculer-Yayalar, and Selin Akyuz, “The Political Economy of Women’s Cooperatives in Turkey: A Social Reproduction Perspective.” Gender, Work & Organization 1:22 (2022). ↩︎
26. Steven Kayambazinthu Msosa, “Challenges Facing Women Cooperatives in Accessing Markets for Agricultural Products: A Systematic Literature Review.” International Review of Management and Marketing 12:6 (2022): 37–43. ↩︎
27. Gaëlle Gillot, “Les coopératives, une bonne mauvaise solution à la vulnérabilité des femmes au Maroc ?” Espace populations sociétés. Space populations societies, no 2016:3 (December 2016). ↩︎
28. Nadia Ounalli, Salah Selmi, en Lamia Arfa, “The Promotion of Local Food Products Through the Involvement of Rural Women In the Women’s Groups Of Agricultural Development (Gfda) Oued Sbaihia Case From Zaghouan Governorate, Tunisia”. International Journal of Research & Development 5:3 (2020): 203–10. ↩︎
29. Anthony Pahnke, “Institutionalizing economies of opposition: explaining and evaluating the success of the MST’s cooperatives and agroecological repeasantization”. The Journal of Peasant Studies 42:6 (2015): 1087–1107. ↩︎
30. Rama Youssef, “التعاونيات: بديل قديم جديد للتنمية في فلسطين” [Cooperatives: An Old-New Alternative for Development in Palestine]. Medfeminiswiya (blog): March 04, 2022. ↩︎
31. Valle 2009 as cited in Park, Clara Mi Young, “‘Our Lands Are Our Lives’: Gendered Experiences of Resistance to Land Grabbing in Rural Cambodia.” Feminist Economics 25:4 (2019): 21–44. ↩︎
32. La Via Campesina. 2003. “Food Sovereignty | Explained : Via Campesina”. La Via Campesina – EN. 2003. https://viacampesina.org/en/food-sovereignty/. ↩︎
33. Rita Calvário and Annette Aurélie Desmarais, “The feminist dimensions of food sovereignty: insights from La Via Campesina’s politics”. The Journal of Peasant Studies 50:2 (2023): 640–64. ↩︎
34. Sônia Fátima Schwendler and Lucia Amaranta Thompson, “An Education in Gender and Agroecology in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement.” Gender and Education 29:1 (2017): 100–114. ↩︎
35. Archana Prasad, “Women’s Liberation and the Agrarian Question: Insights from Peasant Movements in India.” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 10:1 (2021): 15–40. ↩︎
36. Janet M Conway, “When food becomes a feminist issue: popular feminism and subaltern agency in the World March of Women”. International Feminist Journal of Politics 20:2 (2018): 188–203. ↩︎
37. Calvário and Desmarais 2023. ↩︎
38. FTDES, “Rapport annuel des mouvements sociaux 2016-2017.” Report: Tunis (2016). ↩︎