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Achieving food security

Gender and Food Security

Food security can be a major concern for people who are incapable of or denied access to participating in labor, either formal, informal, or agricultural. Gender inequality is a major cause and effect of hunger and poverty. The U.N. estimates that 60 percent of the world’s chronically hungry people are women and girls, 98% of which live in developing nations.^{[1] [2]} When women have an income, substantial evidence indicates that the income is more likely to be spent on food and children’s needs. Women are generally responsible for food selection and preparation and for the care and feeding of children.^[3] Women play many roles in land use, production, processing, distribution, market access, trade, and food availability. They often work as unpaid, contributing family workers, or self-employed producers, on and off-farm employees, entrepreneurs, traders, providers of services, and caretakers of children and the elderly. ^[4] Women farmers represent more than a quarter of the world’s population, comprising on average, 43 percent of the agricultural workforce in developing countries, ranging from 20 percent in Latin America to 50 percent in Eastern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, women have less access than men to agricultural assets, inputs and services. Analysts suggest that if women have the same access to productive resources as men, women could boost yield by 20-30 percent; raising the overall agricultural output in developing countries by two and a half to four percent. This gain in production could lessen the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17 percent.^[4]

The United States Agency for International Development program, Feed the Future, quotes on their website that “Women’s contributions to agricultural production often go unrecognized. Despite their significant role as agricultural producers, women’s access to land and other key productive resources can be limited, and they rarely have legal control over the land they farm. Reducing gender inequality and recognizing the contribution of women to agriculture is critical to achieving global food security—there is consistent and compelling evidence that when the status of women is improved, agricultural productivity increases, poverty is reduced, and nutrition improves.”^[4]

Barriers to Gendered Food Security

While varying by region, women face social and economic barriers to achieving personal and household food security. A comprehension of the gendered dimensions of food insecurity, which includes family size, household obligations, access to wage-labor, and the social constrictions on land use, productivity and intake, render individuals more capable of making educated decisions regarding their own health and that of their household. Improvement in food security strategies by individuals and households allows more time and resources to be directed towards improving economic situations, through investments in better means of production, further education, other quality of life measures, which can improve the status of communities.

Land rights and inheritance

Women may have temporary or illegal use of land, but their ability to own or inherit land is restricted in much of the developing world. Even in countries where women are legally permitted to own land, such as Uganda, research from Women’s Land Link Africa shows that cultural customs have excluded them from obtaining land ownership.^[5] Globally, women own less than 20% of agricultural land.^[6]

Division of unpaid labor and time constraints

Particularly in rural areas, the use of women’s time in agriculture is often constrained by obligations such as fetching water and wood, preparing meals for their families, cleaning, and tending to children and livestock. For example, in Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia women expend most of their energy on load-carrying activities involving transport of fuel-wood, water, and grain for grinding.^[7]

Climate change can also present additional challenges to women’s time availability, due to deforestation, pollution, changes in irrigation and rain patters, and the depletion of natural resources. A gender-based assessment of roles and practices in maintaining crop production and household resources such as fuel and water is recommended in order to understand the social and environmental factors surrounding mens' and womens' work. ^[8]

The gendered division of labor in agriculture has been known to create unequal household power dynamics, responsibilities, and benefits from agriculture.

Crop types

As producers, women are sometimes relegated to the production of subsistence crops on marginal land. In comparison, men tend to produce cash crops on land nearer to the home or marketplace for ease of access. The distance between a woman’s home, crops, and the nearest marketplace can pose logistical problems in transportation, and create another type of time constraint. The use of cash cropping by men and subsistence agriculture by women tends to increase men’s bargaining power relative to women’s. According to L. Muthoni Wanyeki, the author of Women and Land in Africa: Culture, Religion, and Realizing Women’s Rights, "Control over food crops and poultry or goats (and benefits derived from surpluses of food crops and small farm animals) tend to rest with women. However, control over the type of cash crop and livestock (and benefits derived therefrom) tended to rest with men, even where women had made an exceptional and direct contribution to the labour involved." ^[9]

Access to credit, technology, education, markets, and government services.=

Women also have limited access to rural extension services and technology.^[10] Womens’ success in food security in most countries revolves around their access to equal resources as men, including the rights to land ownership,^[11]unequal wages,^[11] unequal access to credit, technology, education, markets, and government services. The right to food can be hindered by problems such as increased demand, price volatility, climate change characterized by land degradation and water scarcity, competition for land, urbanization, and increased poverty and vulnerability. ^[11] Individual decisions regarding livelihoods, family planning, migration, agricultural production and political participation, can have varying outcomes regarding food security which have repercussions beyond the individual's control.

Gender and Global Food Security Policy

Proposed Policies

Speaking on Sept. 19th, 2011 at a U.N. General Assembly event highlighting women and agriculture, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said “When we liberate the economic potential of women, we elevate the economic performance of communities, nations, and the world.”^[12]

A collaborative report by the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development in 2009 concluded that several major policy decisions could be implemented in order to improve food security from a feminist perspective. These policy suggestions include:

• tariffs ^[13]
• subsidies ^[14]
• special safeguard mechanisms
• food stocks
• commodity exchange regulations ^[15]
• regulating trade with transnational corporations
• restricting monopolies ^[16]
• social welfare ^[17]
• research
• innovation in food production and food security strategies

Various governments are implementing programs, such as cash transfers, employment guarantees and land titling, that target women.^[4] Many small-scale, women-centered, agricultural cooperatives have emerged in developing countries to fulfill these needs by pooling resources, establishing economies of scale, and creating greater collective bargaining power for resources, land rights, and market access. One such urban agriculture project is Abalimi Bezekhaya, in Cape Town, South Africa, which provides training, manure, set-up and maintenance of an irrigation system, and R150 ($15 USD) to each participant. Most of the participants are women, according to Liziwe Stofile, who trains new farmers,“The reason that women take over most of the community gardens is because they want to take vegetables home to feed their children. The men only want to make money.”^[4]

Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index

In order to improve the status of women in agriculture, improve nutrition and decrease poverty, USAID created an index to study women’s empowerment in agriculture.

The "Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index" (WEAI) is the first measure to directly capture women's empowerment and inclusion levels in the agricultural sector. The index considers five factors to be indicative of women’s overall empowerment in the agricultural sector:

• Decisions over agricultural production

• Power over productive resources such as land and livestock

• Decisions over income

• Leadership in the community

• Time use.

Women are considered empowered if they score adequately in at least four of the five components. The index functions at the country or regional level, working with individually-based data of men and women in the same households.^[18] Gender-sensitive indexes such as WEAI are intended to aid governments, scholars, and organizations to make informed and educated decisions regarding food and gender policy in regionally specific agendas. Gender consciousness in policy making may lead to decisions to support women’s individual or cooperative agricultural endeavors, reform land laws, reduce market restrictions, allow for greater access to the international market, or provide targeted training and inputs.

References