I do not like tomatoes. I eat them anyway because I love what they do to my body. A mirror is the same kind of object. You may not like what it shows you, but you look anyway.
My Kenyan friend tells me tomato and onion are the base of any soup here. Anything with tomato and onion, she says, is enough to taste good. I argue with her. I am Caribbean. In my kitchen the base is “Epis”. Garlic, scallion, parsley, thyme, hot pepper, sometimes bell pepper, you name it, ground together before anything else touches the pot. Tomato is a guest in “epis”. Not a host.
My West African friend would not even let us finish the argument. She would walk in with five more ingredients and laugh at both of us.
So we disagree. And yet whether the tomato is the base of the broth, a guest in the epis, or one note in a five-ingredient harmony, the tomato is in the pot. We are eating it.
That is the first thing to notice about tomatoes. They are everywhere. In African kitchens, in Caribbean kitchens, in the meals of people who like them and people who do not. They are one of the most universal ingredients in our food systems and one of the most quietly political.
Following the tomato
If you want to understand food systems, follow a tomato from the field to the plate. The whole story is there.
Move down the chain. Aggregators arrive at the farmgate. They are mostly men. They have the capital to buy in bulk, the trucks to transport, and the relationships with wholesalers that keep the chain moving. A 2022 gender assessment of Uganda’s tomato value chain found that men dominated all the roles that required capital and mobility.
Move further. Wholesale markets are male spaces. The men negotiate the loads, set the day’s price, and decide how much fruit makes it to the next node. The women who grew the tomato are not in this room.
Now move to the consumer end. The market women come back into view. They sit behind small pyramids of fruit and sell by the cup. Recent research in Zambia confirms what anyone who has walked an African market already knows. Women dominate retail tomato trading. Men dominate the production and transport that feed it.
So the chain is shaped at every node. The shape is not the same at every step. The labour clusters where women are. The capital clusters where men are.
From the other side of the ocean
I grew up watching the same chain from the other side of an ocean.
In Haiti the woman who carries the tomato has a name. She is the ‘‘Madan Sara’’. She buys directly from farmers, often providing them with pre-harvest credit out of her own pocket. She transports the produce across crumbling roads, sometimes through gang-controlled territory. She sells it in the markets of Port-au-Prince. The Government of Haiti estimates more than 100,000 women do this work and describes them as "heroines of the Haitian economy." They are the spine of the internal food economy, linking some 700,000 small farms to urban consumers.
In Haiti women dominate aggregation, transport, and middlewoman roles as well as retail. The chain is female from end to end. You might think that means Haitian women have captured the food economy. You would be wrong.
Madan Sara work without legal protection, without credit from formal institutions, and increasingly without physical safety. Research documents widespread gender-based violence against them in markets and on the roads. The Bank of the Republic of Haiti calls their role indispensable. The state offers them almost nothing in return. They carry the system. The system does not carry them.
So the comparison is not Haiti has it figured out and Africa does not. In East and Southern Africa men dominate the capital-heavy nodes and women carry the labour. In Haiti women carry both the labour and the capital, and the cost of that double load is violence, exhaustion, and constant risk. Different chain shapes. Same outcome.
Numerical presence is not benefit capture. Anywhere.
A women’s crop and a men’s crop
The pattern that matters is not the label on the crop. It is what happens when the crop becomes commercial.
Researchers have documented this across countries and crops for decades. When tomato is grown for the household, women tend to hold it. When the same crop enters a commercial chain, men tend to capture the income from it. The labour does not move. The income does.
I have seen this in my own work. As a gender advisor on food security programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I sat with women who described doing the planting, the weeding, the harvest, and the carrying to market, and then handing the money over to their husbands before it ever reached their own pockets. In Nigeria, on a different program, the men put the question on the table themselves. Some of them told me, with discomfort, that this is the culture.
This is the part that program designers consistently miss.
In subsistence settings tomato is coded female. It is grown around the homestead. The income, when there is income, comes through women. As soon as a buyer shows up and the price rises, the crop reorganises. Men negotiate the sale. Men sign the contract. Men hold the receipt.
Researchers who study agricultural commercialisation in sub-Saharan Africa have documented this pattern repeatedly. Intra-household control over assets and income often shifts from women to men once a crop becomes commercial. It was found that the productivity gap between men and women farmers is not about skill. It is about unequal access to land, technology, inputs, and extension.
This is the thing I want practitioners to sit with. A woman can be present in a value chain at every visible node and still not benefit from it. Numerical presence is not benefit capture.
Why market design matters
There is another finding from Tanzanian food systems research that has changed how I review program concepts.
A 2021 study of rice marketplaces in Kyela, in south-western Tanzania, compared an older, informal market with a newer, government-initiated one in the same region. The older marketplace offered women more room to negotiate their own terms. The newer, more formal marketplace reinforced the hierarchies that the informal one allowed women to bend.
The study is about rice, not tomato. The pattern is not crop-specific. It tells us something about what formalization does in food systems, and the same logic shows up in tomato value chain studies across Uganda, Zambia, and Tanzania. It also shows up in the Madan Sara story. The Haitian state has tried for decades to formalize the market women. Each attempt has tended to extract more from them and offer less in return.
Formality is not the same as equity.
I think about this often when I review food systems proposals. The donor logic is clean. Move smallholders out of informal markets into formalized, regulated, traceable, climate-smart markets. The assumption is that formalization lifts everyone. The evidence says it lifts the people who can already meet the formal entry criteria. Those people are usually men with capital, registration, and connections.
A platform is equitable only when women can enter it, govern it, set its rules, and access its credit on the same terms as men. Most platforms do not pass that test.
The hidden cost of a high-spray crop
There is one more layer that the literature is starting to surface.
Tomato is a high-pesticide crop. The pest load is heavy. The chemical load on the people who grow it is heavier.
A 2025 study of 584 farmers examine how risk perceptions of pesticides influence pest management decisions among men, women, youth, and non-youth farmers in five regions of Uganda. Women and youth were the most constrained. The barriers were cost, weak advisory services, and gendered decision-making in the household. Men decide what to spray. Men buy it. Men apply it. Women carry the consequences forward through field work, harvest, and the food on the family plate.
Pesticide exposure on tomato is a health equity issue. Women of reproductive age are exposed to organophosphates through fields they tend, harvests they handle, and food they eat from the same plot. The exposure is not evenly distributed. Neither is the decision-making, the protective equipment, the training, or the information.
A food systems program that talks about tomato should name this exposure and act on it.
Why I call it a mirror crop
Disaggregation. Where men and women sit in the chain, doing what task, at what rate of return per hour. The question is not how many women are in tomato. The question is where they are concentrated and on what terms.
Power. Who decides what to plant, who holds the income, who carries the risk. The gap between presence and decision-making is usually large.
Theory of change alignment. Whether the program assumes that bringing women into a chain creates benefit. The evidence says it does not. Women are already in tomato. The constraint is not participation. The constraint is credit, storage, transport, and the rules of the platform they trade on.
Equity of platform design. Whether the markets, cooperatives, and digital platforms a program is building actually allow women to enter and benefit. Formality is not equity.
Sense-making. How women themselves frame their relationship to the crop. In some places they call it theirs. In others they speak of it as borrowed work. In Haiti they have a bird’s name and a national reputation and still no protection. These framings tell you what is negotiable and what is not.
You do not need to like the crop to take it seriously. I do not like tomatoes. I take them very seriously.
What this means for the work
For practitioners designing or evaluating food systems programs, I would offer three habits.
- Pick one crop and trace it carefully before you generalize. The chains differ. The patterns differ. A maize finding does not transfer cleanly to a tomato program. The labour profile, the seasonality, the perishability, and the spray load all change the calculus. And a finding from one country, even from one region of one country, does not automatically translate to another. Trace before you transfer.
- Disaggregate beyond sex. Age, marital status, land tenure, and migration status reshape who benefits from a value chain. A young unmarried woman trading tomato in a peri-urban market is not in the same position as a married mother growing the same crop on her husband’s land. A Madan Sara on the road from Artibonite is not in the same position as a Nairobi market vendor or a smallholder in Mbeya. Treating them as the same category produces a program that serves none of them.
- Stop asking whether women are in the chain. Ask where the income lands, who decides, and what the cost is to women’s health, safety, and time. Those questions produce different programs than the participation question does.
I will keep eating tomatoes I do not love.
I will keep arguing with my Kenyan friend about the base of soup. I will keep losing the argument to my West African friend with her five ingredients. The pot will keep simmering in kitchens across this continent and across the Caribbean and into the diaspora.
And I will keep watching the tomato. Because if I understand what happens to it between the field and my plate, I understand something important about who carries the work in this food system and who carries the value out.
Is it important to trace what looks ordinary ? Yes. Until it tells us something that is not.
Further reading
Mayamba, A., Mutuku, B., Ayuya, O.I., Kansiime, M., Bateman, M., Phelps, S., et al. (2025). “Gendered risk perceptions and structural barriers to sustainable pest management: evidence from Uganda’s tomato value chain.” Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 9, 1656739. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2025.1656739/full
Taimolo, L., Mwamba, F.K., Mphande, J., et al. (2026). “Socioeconomic dynamics of tomato trading and the challenges facing small-scale traders in Chinsali District, Zambia.” Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 10, 1742778. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1742778/full
Hadebe, G.P. & Msuya, C.P. (2016). “Gender roles in the tomato value chain: A case study of Kilolo District and Dodoma Municipality in Tanzania.” South African Journal of Agricultural Extension, 44(2), 13–24. https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajae/article/view/138536
FSD Uganda (2022). Rapid Gender Assessment of the Horticulture and Dairy Value Chains in Uganda. Findings summarised in: Naseera, L. & Birungi, L. (2023). “Women’s financial inclusion key in tomato value chain.” Daily Monitor, 4 August 2023. https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/commentary/women-s-financial-inclusion-key-tomato-value-chain-4325616
Orr, A., Tsusaka, T.W. et al. (2016). “What do we mean by ‘women’s crops’?” CGIAR Policies, Institutions, and Markets. https://pim.cgiar.org/2016/03/24/what-do-we-mean-by-womens-crops/
Doss, C.R. (2002). “Men’s Crops? Women’s Crops? The Gender Patterns of Cropping in Ghana.” World Development, 30(11), 1987–2000. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X02001092
Fischer, E. & Qaim, M. (2012). “Gender, agricultural commercialization, and collective action in Kenya.” Food Security, 4(3), 441–453. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12571-012-0199-7
Tafere, K. & Wineman, A. (2025). “Gender and Agricultural Commercialization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Three Panel Surveys.” Working paper drawing on World Bank LSMS-ISA panel data from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Tanzania. https://arxiv.org/html/2509.19556
Ilomo, M., Rutashobya, L.K., Ishengoma, E.K., Pettersson, K. & Bergman Lodin, J. (2021). “Doing and undoing gender in rice business and marketplaces in Tanzania.” Cogent Social Sciences, 7(1). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2021.1934981
Schwartz, T. (2024). “The Haitian Market System.” Schwartz Research Group. https://timothyschwartzhaiti.com/the-haitian-market-system/
World Bank (2023). “Women in the Haitian Labor Market: Rodeline’s Story.” Feature, 13 November 2023. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2023/11/13/overview-of-women-in-the-haitian-labor-market-rodeline-s-story
Narcius, A. (2025). “Haiti’s Madan Sara fight for survival as insecurity threatens the engine of Haiti’s informal economy.” The Haitian Times, 21 March 2025. https://haitiantimes.com/2025/03/21/haiti-madan-sara-insecurity/
The Haitian Times (2025). “Haiti’s women’s rights fight in freefall: violence, displacement and the collapse of advocacy.” 9 March 2025. https://haitiantimes.com/2025/03/09/haiti-women-rights-fight-in-freefall/
Hossein, C.S. (2015). “Black women in the marketplace: everyday gender-based risks against Haiti’s madan saras (women traders).” Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 9(2), 36–50. https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/workorgalaboglob.9.2.0036
Dupain, E. (2021). Madan Sara. Feature documentary on the market women of Haiti. https://www.madansarafilm.com.