Unequal Fields amplifies the voices of rural women across Southeast Asia, exposing how landlessness, poverty wages, unsafe work, climate impacts, toxic pesticides, and the pandemic continue to deny them justice and protection. The report calls on governments to guarantee rural women’s rights, dignity, and equality.
“Now I get tired easily,” shares Ms. Hueang Namixay, a 36-year-old woman farmer from Laos, who suffered from pesticide poisoning. A lowland farmer, Hueang has been using the herbicide glyphosate in her four-hectare farm in Namhom Village in Kham District, Xiengkhuang Province, for 17 years to grow maize. She was aware of the perils of […]
““My family was trapped in poverty,” shares Laryer Law, a 27-year-old farmer who previously worked knitting Moung patterns. Facing job insecurity, she earned between 300,000 to 500,000 kips a month. At roughly USD14 to USD24, it was not enough for her family to live on. Like Laryer, Seephan Phengkamma experienced poverty, and would need help […]
Nimkala Chauhan is living in Kapilvastu Municipality Ward No. 12, Vithuva. She is from marginalized community in terms of economic condition. She has 2 sons, 1 daughter, 2 mother/father-in-law, her husband and herself altogether 7 people are living in her family. In order to fulfill their basic needs, she had taken 5 kattha (0.169 hectare) […]
A study on women workers from selected plantations in the country revealed certain critical issues that need urgent attention. The study comprised a questionnaire survey, blood sampling for plasma pseudo cholinesterase enzyme and self-health monitoring cards ori which respondents recorded their daily symptoms of pesticide exposure. This ensured the participation of women in the monitoring […]
Victims Without Voice portrays women pesticide sprayers in the Malaysian plantations. They are the victims without a voice – victims of the society’s indifference, and focus of this book, pesticide poisonings. This book attempts to document the hazards of pesticide use in Malaysian plantation. The book examines briefly why women are particularly vulnerable to pesticide […]
