This paper explores the role of women empowerment and labour on enabling farmers to cross two hurdles: adopt and intensify soil fertility management (SFM), coming after six decades of SFM research that disseminated several technologies. Despite the assertion that productivity gains cannot be realized unless drivers of soil degradation are addressed, SFM usage is low. We collected data from a systematically drawn random sample of 238 farmers, representing 30% of farming households in five villages in Malawi's Rift Valley escarpments and analysed using a double-hurdle model. Descriptive results show that 90% of the respondents used inorganic fertilizers, 72% planted legumes and 57% applied organic manure. The empirical analysis shows that one percentage point increase in dependency ratio reduces probability to apply organic amendments by 0.4 percentage points and erodes the positive influence of increasing labour on application of inorganic fertilizer. As women become increasingly empowered in decision-making, there are significant trade-offs: a percentage point increase in women empowerment in agriculture index (WEAI) potentially leads to a one-third percentage point increase in the area allocated to legumes but reduces the amount of organic manure applied with higher elasticity of two percentage points. Considering the trade-offs, sustainable intensification could be achieved by harnessing the positive influences while concurrently reducing the negative ones over a decision space. Notably, addressing the negative effect associated with women empowerment on manuring could unlock potentials for integrated SFM as women are already engaged in legume cropping.

中文翻译：

---

赋予妇女权力和劳动依存关系在马拉维采用综合土壤肥力管理中的作用

本文探讨了赋予妇女权力和劳动力在使农民能够跨越两个障碍方面的作用：采用和加强土壤肥力管理（SFM），这是经过六十年的SFM研究传播了多种技术之后的结果。尽管有人断言除非解决土壤退化的驱动因素，否则无法实现生产率的提高，但可持续森林管理的使用率很低。我们从系统抽取的238位农民的随机样本中收集了数据，这些农民代表了马拉维纵谷悬崖上五个村庄的30％的农户，并使用双障碍模型进行了分析。描述性结果显示，90％的受访者使用无机肥料，72％的种植豆类和57％的有机肥料。实证分析表明，抚养比增加1个百分点会使有机修正的应用可能性降低0。4个百分点，侵蚀了增加劳动对无机肥料施用的积极影响。随着妇女在决策中日益增强的权能，存在着重大的权衡取舍：提高妇女的农业权能指数（WEAI）一个百分点可能导致分配给豆类的面积增加三分之一个百分点，但数量减少施用的有机肥料具有两个百分点的较高弹性。考虑到权衡取舍，可以通过利用积极影响，同时在决策空间内减少负面影响，来实现可持续集约化。值得注意的是，由于妇女已经在从事豆类作物的种植，解决与赋予妇女权力对粪便相关的负面影响可能释放出综合可持续森林管理的潜力。