Women Cotton Farmers Report

A recent study by PBS researcher Patricia Zambrano about the role of gender in adopting transgenic crops was featured in a SciDevNet article by Lisbeth Fog. This trailblazing study of cotton farmers in Colombia, which has been growing transgenic cotton since 2003, found that women and men adopt these crops for different reasons. For example, women appear to prefer insect-resistant varieties over conventional ones mainly because these transgenic varieties can reduce the number of male laborers that women would need to hire to spray pesticides, a task solely performed by men in Colombia. Read the report here.