Australia – Understanding the “local” and “global”: intersections engendering change for women in family farming in Australia

Agricultural restructuring in Australia continues as a result of multiple and intersecting challenges. These include declining terms of trade, globalization and its impacts on agricultural markets, ongoing structural adjustment pressures, changing technologies and reduced access to irrigation water, as well as ongoing drought and other weather events that suggest climate changes are escalating and permanent (Gray and Lawrence 2001; Alston and Whittenbury 2012; Smith and Pritchard 2014; Pritchard 2000). Yet, while family farming remains the dominant unit of production in Australian agriculture (Productivity Commission 2005; Commonwealth of Australia2014), in recent decades structural adjustments have resulted in a reduction in the number of farmers in Australia: “Over the 30 years to 2011, the number of farmers declined by 106,200 (40%), equating to an average of 294 fewer farmers every month over that period” (Australian Bureau of Statistics2012, 1). Nonetheless, family farming remains critical to the organization and embodiment of social and gendered roles and responsibilities that support commodity production in an evolving neoliberal economy.