Nuria Lopez Vazquez has been carrying out research with women farmers in parts of Myanmar. Alongside a local organisation, Nuria has been collaborating with Danu, Pao, and Taungyo women farmers in Southern Shan State, to document how their everyday lives changed during the country’s adoption of the Sustainable Development Plan between 2017 and 2020. This piece particularly focuses on how agricultural development interventions, including sustainable development initiatives such as UN projects in Myanmar, shape women’s food-growing practices.
Understanding home gardens
Agricultural developments in Myanmar not only influence women’s farming practices but also impact home gardens. This can be seen in how women adjust their home gardening practices based on their activities and developments in farm fields.
In this project, I focus on how life-sustaining practices within and around women’s home gardens are changing and are often at risk due to organic farming initiatives. I do this by emphasising the place-based interdependencies fostered through relationships of care—both among humans and with more-than-human communities, including the soils in home gardens.
Through ethnographic research, I find that collective practices within home gardens embody critical local knowledge on food sovereignty and regenerative food-growing. I further show that home gardens and interdependent caring practices have the potential to enhance and transform agriculture in Myanmar and beyond.
This project would not have materialised without the support of my partner local organisation. Although I cannot name the grassroots organisation I worked with, I want to acknowledge its critical role in this project and its ongoing efforts in food sovereignty in Southern Shan State. Due to the ongoing coup and the persecution of ethnic minorities by the military in Myanmar, I have chosen not to name individuals or organisations here. Ethnic minorities have faced decades of persecution by the military in Myanmar. Land, agriculture, and ethnic minorities are closely intertwined, with land grabbing long being a military practice in the country. However, under the current coup, violence against these communities has escalated rapidly, and the military is now directly committing war crimes against ethnic groups in rural areas.
Militarisation in Myanmar dates back to the British colonial era and emerged as a form of resistance to the violence of the empire. Colonialism in Myanmar never fully ended; it instead transformed into a neoliberal form in which foreign investment capital flows into the pockets of armed actors and organisations in the country. Today, agricultural development projects in Myanmar are deeply intertwined with the capital accumulation practices of the Burmese military. These agricultural changes and transitions are being driven by new networks composed of Western development donors, global financial institutions and investors, and a consolidating Burmese military-private capitalist class.
It is crucial to emphasise that while activists and ethnic minority communities in Myanmar face existential threats from the military, it is Western imperialism that enables militarisation, dispossession, land grabs, and violence—not just in Myanmar, but across much of the Global South.
Home gardens in the agrarian context
Home gardens in Myanmar are jumbled spaces with trees and crops growing at different heights and layers. Women often manage home gardens in Myanmar, which are widely understood as women’s spaces.
In Southern Shan State, women tend to home gardens alongside farm fields. Unlike intensively mono-cultivated farm fields, where productivity often comes at the cost of long working hours, debt loops and deteriorating health, home gardens provide women with mental and physical relief. With no need for costly inputs, they work in collaboration with more-than-human beings—such as soil communities —to cultivate abundant crops. Through home gardening, women practice a form of care deeply interconnected with more-than-human beings, contributing to the regeneration of soil communities.
Composting is one example of this human and more-than-human interconnection in home gardens—an approach that is both community-based and place-specific. Home gardening activities like composting depend on an intricate web of interdependent relationships, relying on trust in the soil’s ability to regenerate itself. This system functions using locally available resources within the community, often incorporating recycled materials such as wastewater, cow manure, and food scraps—including leftover soups—all of which contribute to the distinct soil compositions unique to this place.
Women tending home gardens in their villages do not merely focus on the productivity of soil food web communities and crop harvests; they also engage in sustaining, restoring, and nurturing the soil itself to maintain the ecosystems in which their gardens thrive.
Home garden land is privately owned by families, but seeds, water, crops, and knowledge are collectively owned and shared. This sense of collectivity allows women to practice interdependent care for other community members, both human and more-than-human. Seeds are saved and shared each year, water is communally managed, and crops are shared among families. If a neighbour needs a cabbage for dinner, she can take one from another woman’s garden, and shared meals made with homegrown crops are an everyday occurrence in the village. This collective approach not only enables women to care for their neighbours but also helps restore soil and water systems in the process.
In contrast, farm fields—where water, inputs, and crops are privately managed—are under high pressure, leading to increasing soil degradation. The demands of food markets and traders which require the use of expensive chemical inputs, leave little opportunity to grow food in a way that nurtures the soil, water, and rivers. Nor do they allow farmers to care for their bodies and minds.
Agricultural Sustainable Developments in Myanmar
In Myanmar, as in other countries across the Global South, ethnic minority communities have resisted neoliberal food regimes—often with great determination—by maintaining subsistence and community farming practices, including home gardens. As pointed out by La Via Campesina, when these communities become the targets of neoliberal international development interventions, they often face increasing challenges in sustaining their community-based food-growing practices. While community-based food-growing practices are on the rise in the Global North, ethnic minority communities in the Global South are being pushed away from these practices under the guise of neoliberal agricultural development initiatives.
In 2017, when I first came across the work of my partner organisation, the health of the soils in the Southern Shan State region was rapidly degrading, and the farmers they worked with were increasingly concerned about their farm fields. In conversations, farmers frequently spoke about the lack of choice they had in caring for their land while growing food for the markets.
Soil degradation in Southern Shan State was no secret, and many international development organisations, including the UN, had recently introduced organic farming projects as part of their climate-smart agriculture strategy in Myanmar. These projects offered training to women such as using commercial organic fertilisers and seeds, while using their home gardens as demonstration gardens and disregarding the knowledge and practices in those spaces.
Development practitioners saw healthier soils in home gardens as an opportunity to encourage farmers to transition to organic farming, recognising the challenges that degraded soils in farm fields would pose for such efforts. In that rapidly changing environment, women often shared feelings of an increasing lack of agency and opportunity to care for their soils and communities, despite the promises of organic farming.
What incentives are being provided?
Recent sustainable development initiatives in Shan State have introduced individual incentives to encourage women to cultivate their home gardens. This shift moves away from collective practices and shared resources in favour of growing market-oriented crops, with the promise of empowerment through increased income. These projects promote market-based interventions, such as commercial organic inputs, and commercial organic markets and shift water access from collective wells and resources to individual irrigation techniques.
While these agricultural development projects appear to offer ethnic minority farmers new choices, they are driven by a neoliberal agenda of technological transformation and market integration. In this context of increasing resource privatisation, farmers paradoxically find that their choices are becoming more limited.
Organic farming interventions disregard the fact that farmers already practice food-growing techniques in their home gardens using locally available organic inputs and seeds. Instead, sustainable development programs dismiss this knowledge as traditional and unproductive, offering globalised solutions such as commercial inputs and supermarket-oriented organic crop production—approaches that often fail in local contexts.
Although these interventions are open to farmer feedback, they operate on the assumption that farmers are passive beneficiaries in need of assistance, ignoring the knowledge and skills they already possess. For example, women know how to combat pests using locally available organic techniques, such as multi-cropping and companion planting, while tending to their home gardens.
‘Colonial care’
Uma Narayan (1995), in her analysis of colonial legacies of care, describes colonial care as a system in which the coloniser infantilises the colonised, imposing paternalistic assistance based on narratives of their supposed inferiority. She warns that such care is not limited to past colonisation but persists in modern development practices.
My experience in Myanmar aligns with Narayan’s work. I see this in how sustainable agricultural development practitioners and policymakers often dismiss women’s knowledge of organic farming, instead offering agricultural inputs they deem superior. They also fail to acknowledge how women have already suffered under exploitative market dependencies for commercial inputs and trading markets in farm fields, denying women the opportunity to develop soil care alternatives that work for them.
Through these interventions, organic farming projects contribute to the infantilisation of ethnic minority women, dictating what is best for them while disregarding their lived experiences as farmers—both in home gardens and farm fields. Ultimately, these programs further erode interdependent care by shifting power away from community-based knowledge and practices and towards neoliberal market solutions.
Conclusions
The marginalisation of interdependent care practices, including soil care among women farmers, is rendering alternative food projects such as home gardens less important and capable of transformative change towards more sustainable agriculture in Myanmar. Overall, women’s experiences in home gardens highlight the opportunities that learning from practices of interdependent care offers for promoting sustainable agriculture in Myanmar and beyond. It is only through collective resources and practices—such as seed-saving networks, composting systems, and community-based water management—can interdependent care be sustained, providing support for those oppressed by larger neoliberal structures. However, as long as neoliberalism dominates, these collective practices and the networks of care they sustain remain at risk.
Lastly, as we witness the repeated failure of neoliberal climate solutions, yet another symptom of the violent collapse of the neo-capitalist empire, it is crucial to resist oppressive systems and false solutions. My experience in Myanmar has reinforced the responsibility that we all have to continue caring for one another and nurturing collective spaces for social justice where the well-being of both humans and more-than-humans is centred.
About the author
Nuria Lopez Vazquez ’s tight relationship with food and food growing dates back to their childhood in the Basque Country region. Nuria was born in a family of cooking chefs and peasants, as part of the matriarchal line (at least 4 generations back in their lineage). Experiences around the table, behind the bar, growing and producing their own food and building relationships and cultivating the existing ones were always made through food. Nuria is a feminist researcher, teacher and community organiser and grower.
Nuria’s PhD project “Care and Choices in Sustainable Agricultural Development: Learning from Women’s Home Gardens in Myanmar” examines the potential for a politics of interdependent soil care in the call for a regenerative future. Nuria is also keen on practicing politicised somatics as a tool to engage the body and align with collective values and visions of equity and interdependence, while moving away from embodied states of separation and injustice.
All images are courtesy of the author.