As agricultural producers, workers, and consumers, women pay a higher price for tariffs

Debates around agricultural tariffs rarely include a woman tending her farm at dawn, a single mother stretching a tight budget at the market, or a female farmhand depending on agricultural wages to survive. But they should.

When agricultural markets are protected through tariffs, women in developing economies bear a disproportionate share of the burden. On the other hand, when those barriers come down, women stand to gain the most. We can now clearly show this, thanks to the new Household Impacts of Trade for Women dataset.

The first harmonized resource of its kind, the Household Impacts of Trade for Women dataset includes survey data from over half a million households across 54 low and lower-middle-income countries, representing roughly 1.8 billion people. The data is disaggregated by sex, household headship, and female demographic composition across 53 agricultural products. Paired with an extended agricultural household model that incorporates gender into welfare measurement — capturing price effects on what households consume, produce, and earn — the data gives researchers and policymakers a tool that gender-blind aggregate trade analysis simply cannot provide.

What the data reveals is striking. Unilateral agricultural tariff liberalization in low-income and lower-middle income economies would generate an average welfare gain of 2.8% of real household income — but gains are not evenly distributed. Female-headed households average 3.2%, compared to 2.8% for male-headed ones. And when looking at the share of women within households, the pattern deepens: those where women make up more than 70% of members gain noticeably more than those where they make up less.

Three economic roles, same impact

Consider the three economic hats women wear simultaneously — and how tariffs work against them on all three fronts.

As producers, tariff protection raises domestic prices, which in principle benefits those who sell into the market. But women in developing countries are less likely than men to own land, control production decisions, or sell agricultural output directly. They also rely more heavily on remittances and household transfers — income sources that do not benefit from tariff-induced price increases. The result is that women capture a smaller share of whatever income gains protectionism delivers on the production side.

As workers, women tend to participate in agricultural labor markets in more precarious and lower-paid ways than men and are rarely formal wage earners even in the agricultural sectors that tariffs most protect. When protection raises wages in those sheltered sectors, those gains flow disproportionately to workers who are already better positioned in the labor market — leaving women with a smaller share of the dividend.

As consumers, women bear the heaviest burden of all. Female-headed households spend a larger share of their budgets on food and basic agricultural goods than male-headed ones. High tariffs on staple crops keep the prices of everyday essentials — grains, oils, pulses — artificially elevated. As net consumers who must buy more than they produce, women effectively pay a higher hidden tax every time they feed their families. It is a cost that is invisible in aggregate trade statistics but very real at the kitchen table.
 

A Framework and Dataset That Fills a Gap

For every budget and income share, the dataset reports nine gender-disaggregated variables — capturing male- and female-headed households, as well as households grouped by female demographic concentration. The framework tracks welfare gains across the full income distribution, showing that on average, female-headed households gain more than male-headed ones at every income percentile.

This kind of sex-disaggregated trade data has historically been absent from policy debates — the new Household Impacts of Trade for Women dataset fills that gap, giving policymakers the tools to ask not just whether trade reform works, but for whom.

Rethinking Agricultural Trade Policy?

Agricultural tariffs are not a neutral instrument. They shape who wins and who loses. Too often, women in developing countries lose the most on all three counts: as producers, as workers, and as consumers.

Distributional outcomes are inherently complex, operating through multiple channels with potentially offsetting impacts, underscoring the need for supportive policies, social safety nets, and complementary investments. Yet the evidence firmly challenges the assumption that agricultural protection serves the most vulnerable.

In reality, it is the most vulnerable — and disproportionately women — who pay the price of agricultural protectionism. Recognizing women in their threefold role is not just good gender policy, it is smart economics.