Time Ni Hota Hai: time poverty and food security in the Kumaon hills, India.

This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub-Himalayan North India community, and argues that socio-spatial policies and practices naturalize a discourse that places women in a position where they are responsible for an inequitable share of both productive and reproductive labor. As a result, women are often unable to properly perform FNS practices. Paradoxically, insecurity increases when there is more agricultural labor and thus less time for food preparation, a notion itself that is productive of anxiety and further compounds poor FNS practices. NGO and government programs implicitly reinscribe these gendered labor burdens through exclusively targeting women, educating them to be ‘better’ housewives and mothers. While simple solutions and an educative approach were the dominant activities, these organizations also constitute the home as a delimiting social space for development and seek to empower women through livelihood diversification and employment activities. While these programs provide women new spaces with which to forge social relations and develop different sets of knowledge outside the home, without a renegotiation of household labor burdens, these novel commitments oftentimes exacerbate women’s existing workloads at home. This analysis suggests that while FNS programs and policies might sometimes lend short-term relief to FNS, the greatest threat to FNS comes from the ways that the home spaces of women and their household work are devalued through development practices. This results in a lack of gendered labor time to adequately prepare food, thereby contradicting the policies’ stated objectives of reducing food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]