Abstract

This study explores the contradictions which arise between global market driven development and the lived reality of Malawi's rural women with respect to the critical elements of peasant life which are usually defined as land, labour and social regime. Policy makers and planners design programmes and projects to integrate the peasantry into the free market economy which emphasizes productivity, technology and cash returns. On the other hand, peasant farmers, particularly women, with their primordial responsibility for domestic reproduction, are faced with the need to feed their families and provide social supports not available through the market system. Poor women have little or no influence over the impact of the application of administrative policies which produce strain on the subsistence system, with which the population must cope by calling on the social regime which sustains them, albeit inadequately in the face of a restructured economy.