Most of Nepal‘s agriculture is undertaken by women, but research tailored to their needs is lacking. “We need new technologies that can reduce the drudgery for them,” said Devendra Gauchan, agricultural economist and chief of the socioeconomics and agri-research policy division at the Nepal Agricultural Research Council (Narc).

Agriculture supports the livelihood of more than 60% of the rural population in Nepal, but most farmers, regardless of gender, stick to the manual practices that have been common for centuries, and seldom use mechanical equipment.

Women have traditionally been involved in agriculture, but the scale and range of their responsibilities has increased. “Feminisation has been rapidly enhanced in recent years due to the massive migration … from rural areas, mostly of men,” said Gauchan.

Around nine in every 10 people who have left the country – whether permanently or temporarily – are men, according to the most recent census in 2011 (pdf).

A survey by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 2010 revealed that around 3% of households headed by women used mechanical equipment, compared with 8% of those headed by men.

“The demands of women and men are different and we need to consider that in agriculture research,” said Shreeram Neopane, executive director of local initiatives at Biodiversity, Research and Development, an NGO based in Pokhara, about 200km (124 miles) west of the capital, Kathmandu.

The Institute for Integrated Development Studies (pdf), a thinktank in Kathmandu, recently noted that agricultural research and training could cut poverty, “if it generates and disseminates technologies, which are specifically targeted at the problems of poor farmers, including women farmers, who, because of the gender division of labour, have different technology needs from men”.

Such research should focus on inventing small equipment and machines that would mechanise farming, from sowing to harvesting and post-harvest processing, suggested Dhruva Joshy, former executive director of Narc.

For example, the traditional way of husking finger millet, a small staple grain, with a pestle and mortar is labour-intensive and time-consuming, and a dehusking machine could significantly save time and energy, said Bhag Mal, a consultant to the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions in Bangkok, Thailand.

Researchers need to keep in mind the different aspects of agricultural production that are of particular concern to women, said Neopane. In choosing rice varieties, for example, men care more about increasing yield and production, while women also consider taste, smell and the ease of threshing and cooking. Recognising the needs of women could result in a “higher rate of uptake of a technology, and more benefit from the technology for the family”.

Although women would benefit most from a boost in agriculture research, Gauchan pointed out that few researchers in Nepal are women – in 2009 only 10% of public agriculture researchers were women, up just 1% from 2003, according to the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (pdf) and Narc in 2011.

The FAO (pdf) found that 98% of the total female labour force were engaged in agriculture in 2010, while the UN Environment Programme noted that women performed six times as much agriculture work as men.

Despite contributing 35% to the national gross domestic product, investment in agriculture (pdf) accounted for just 2% of the government’s 2009 budget, with less than 0.2% going to research.

Rural women in Nepal are less educated than men, with only about one year of formal schooling each on average, according to an analysis by the FAO in 2010 (pdf). The success of any new invention therefore depends on the empowerment of women, and on their training and access to information, said Gauchan.

“Even if new technologies arrive, they do not reach many places. Only the smarter women have access, but women living in rural corners do not,” said Radha Nepal, a farmer and chairwoman of the community maize seed production committee in a village in Palpa district, in the southern Terai region bordering India.

“If women’s knowledge was enhanced – if manure, seed and pesticide were made available, with the necessary tools – then women could do all the agriculture work themselves.”

Recent calculations of the economic value of nature and ecosystem services have caused many environmentalists to react negatively. They point to the risk of a progressive “privatisation” and “commodification” of nature, and argue that society should appreciate the intrinsic values of nature – nature for its own sake. Putting a ‘price on nature’ will create more enclosures whereby the public benefits derived from ecosystems will be seized by corporations and other private interests.

The new discourse about “natural capital” is seen by some as another step towards the degradation of the biosphere. George Monbiot wrote is such terms this week. He argued:

Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by comparison to other investments. If we allow the discussion to shift from values to value – from love to greed – we cede the natural world to the forces wrecking it.

But to paint such a one-sided picture is a dangerous game. For decades campaigners have fought for the protection of nature for its own sake, and while there has been notable progress (seen for example in the rapid increase in protected areas worldwide, which will hopefully continue irrespective of purely economic evaluations), the overall trends have not been encouraging.

The destruction of unprotected forests, loss of soils, depletion of aquifers, extinction of animals and plants and plunder of the oceans has continued apace. It seems that the moral argument has gained insufficient traction, and that in the absence of new frames continuing population and economic growth will cause more damage.

One source of hope comes from the growing realisation that nature is essential for economic development. The message is clear: without nature the economy is nothing. That penny is beginning to drop in various important places, and could soon lead to a new era of policy-making. One in which ecology and economics go hand in hand, but only if we have the tools to build bridges between these worlds that are so alien to each other. And that is where the economic valuation of nature can come in.

By appreciating that nature is vital for economics, and has measurable tangible financial values, it is possible to get the attention of people who have at best hitherto regarded nature a supplier of resources, or worse still an economically costly distraction that gets in the way of economic ‘growth’. Making the moral case in the face of such beliefs won’t work. If, on the other hand, such scepticism can be met with economically compelling logic, then we might get a bit further.

There are of course ecological values (like beauty and the very fact that things exist) that sometimes cannot be assigned financial values, and should be protected by the law, policy and public backing rather than through markets.

There are certainly dangers that come with financial values being attached to natural systems. These might be seen in how countries choose to reflect the value of ecosystems (like forests) that indigenous people rely on and have ancestral rights over (or should do). Those dangers need to be managed with regulations and other safeguards when, for example, those same forests are deemed as financially valuable in supplying a distant city with water, and when managing that water affect the rights of the people in the forest. There are risks but just outcomes can be secured.

While I am alarmed at how some environmentalists reject the economic valuation of nature, I am more alarmed still at how such a position can appear similar to those with deeply sceptical views about whether we should protect the environment in the first place. Nigel Lawson, the arch climate change denier, is like many environmentalists dead against putting financial values on nature. He knows well that if this happens then economics would have to change in fundamental ways requiring new government policies, changes to how capital is invested and shifts in consumption patterns. By campaigning against the valuation of ecosystem services, some campaigners could inadvertently strengthen the hand of those who believe nature has little or no value, moral, economic or otherwise.

And it seems to me there is not a choice here. I have spent the past 25 years campaigning for nature for its own sake, because it is beautiful, because it should exist for its own reasons and because we have no right to destroy it. I have found that not everyone agrees with that though, and while I am trying to convince them, more forests are cleared, oceans polluted and greenhouse gases released.

We could carry on like this, with ideological purity preserved (on all sides), or we could open a new discourse, one that requires the sceptics to meaningfully engage, and on the field where future environmental battles will be won and lost – the field of economics. After all, it is not most environmentalists who have misunderstood the realities that come with ‘growth’ a finite Earth, but most economists.

• Tony Juniper’s book on the value of ecosystems for economies, What has Nature ever done for us? will be published in January