Gender and household-level responses to soil degradation in Honduras

In Honduras, the economic and social effects of natural resource decline, poverty, and population pressure, all exacerbated now in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, are directly experienced at the household level. Recent research and policy work on gender and environment raise a number of interesting questions on how and why household labor responses to natural resource decline may be gender differentiated. This article presents results on the gender-disaggregated response to natural resource degradation. Specifically, we investigate whether women's and men's time allocated to corn production responds to changes in soil quality. We also address the issue of whether the gender division of labor is modified as households respond to soil degradation.