WUNRN
WOMEN NEWS NETWORK
June 12, 2008...1:56 pm
Harvesting a Field
of Their Own –Woman’s Right to Food in the Global Food Crisis
Lys Anzia - Women News Network - WNN
World Food
Programme delivers food to Haitian women - Image: Peter Casier /UNWFP
The fight for women against hunger and malnutrition isn’t getting any easier.
Rising food prices and lower food assistance programs worldwide are causing the ability to help women and their families reach the lowest levels of output since 1961.
As food prices increase, the biggest losers are the ones who “have not.”
Global women suffering under severe poverty are often cut short in receiving food allotments worldwide as they try to feed their children and themselves.
The women of Haiti’s Port-Au-Prince are in their own battle against hunger. With 80% of the Haitian population below the poverty line, women are the section of the population that have been hit the hardest. Recent riots in Haiti, protesting the shortage of food, prove crisis levels of desperation and hunger has begun to seep deep into the community at Port-Au-Prince.
To help the situation, the women of Haiti have tried to come up with a solution to the, as yet, unsolved problems of food shortage. Mud cakes or cookies, made from the yellow clay of Haiti’s central plateau region are the recent answer for many of Port-Au-Prince’s poverty stricken women. Providing the cheapest food available, the cakes are made palatable by adding salt, flavoring and shortening.
These cookies are made by women in an attempt to replace the dwindling and often expensive supply of rice in Haiti. They have now become a common staple for many Haitian families caught in the cycle of poverty and malnutrition.
But the cookies come with a hidden price. Eating the cookies up to three times a day may eventually harm the health of both women and their families, as bellies are filled and bodies go unnourished. While the cookies are filling, this dirt is not what it seems. Some of the clay that is trucked in from the outer regions of Hinche may in fact be hazardous. Not to mention, the soil itself has little food value.
While the cookies are consumed regularly to stave off daily hunger, a woman and her children may be exposed to dangerous heavy metals or parasites from the soil used to make the cookies.
Studies of the sites where the clay is harvested to make the cookies does need more assessment. On soil safety Dr. Gerald N. Callahan, with the Department of Microbiology, Pathology and Immunology at Colorado State University states in the report, “Eating Dirt,” that, “Dirt can pose a health threat, especially near sites of industrial contamination.”
“Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it,” said Executive Director of Health Ministry in Haiti, Gabriel Thimothee.
The mud cookies
of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti
Today, worldwide food shortage is at an all time high in many countries. As food production goes down, crisis proportions of hunger related disease and death is rising at an alarming rate. Since 1996, international food production and distribution has lessened steadily. As a result, hunger among women and their families has risen proportionately and steadily each year for the last 12 yrs.
Humanitarian Air Service flights for the UN World Food Programme to Darfur, Sudan in June 2008 have, also, just been cut as the fees for flying delivery helicopters increase. Nearly two-thirds of the 77 million dollar budget for food assistance programs in crisis locations worldwide has been unfunded to date. This leaves many women at the very bottom of a sinking program, with a diminishing chance to receive any aid for food.
Women suffering in the wake of this global disaster are specific victims of an ever increasing danger. The danger of long-term excruciating, unsolved one-way starvation.
While hunger itself is not gender specific, many victims of hunger are caught in the denial of food based on their gender. Out of 854 million people who do not get enough food to eat, 70% are women. This means that close to 598 million global women live today with daily lives of hunger.
Shortages of water or contamination of water, along with lowered crop production, also contributes greatly to food production decreases. Natural disasters, too, are destroying crops as hurricanes increase in one area and droughts affect another region. The effects of carbon based fuels on climate change, too, are altering the ability for food production to maintain previous levels.
As the availability of imported foods from global markets declines, food sources that are more scarce are being made available only to the most prosperous industrialized nations. The production of non-petroleum, ethanol based, fuels has also begun to divert the current world stash of corn and other grains - all staples in diets across the world.
In Mexico, corn tortillas are a standard staple of the diet. Up to ten tortillas are eaten each day by many in Mexico. As the food crisis reaches all corners of the world, women of Mexico, who once paid 30 US cents per corn tortilla, are now paying close to double that figure to supply themselves and family with food. This places women suffering at the lowest level of poverty in Mexico to go completely without one of the most important food sources in their diet.
Tortilla shop in
La Noria, Mexico - Image Mathew Hickey 2008
On the scale of problems arising from food scarcity, girl toddlers and infants have separate conditions that make food shortage often more severe in their case.
Under tragic circumstances of neglect and abandonment based on gender, many girl-children worldwide are often held back from receiving their due share. Often the dwindling supply of family food is kept from the girls as their male siblings receive a larger quantity of any food available. Many times the males in the family also receive the higher quality of food.
It is common in many areas of rural Central India for girl-children to often be the last ones fed. Mothers, too, often feed themselves last after all their children have eaten, as they try to feed their children first on what little food is available. As children receive less and less food due to the worldwide shortage, mothers attempting to feed their children, many times, receive no food.
In trying to understand the main causes for global food shortage, can we find a way to help solve the problems of world hunger and its backlash against women? The history of the decline in food production and solutions to improving food distribution and safety can all be found in the public record.
Use of pesticides, new agrochemicals and biotechnological seeds has produced a devastating effect on women and their families worldwide. According to a 2003 Environmental Health Perspectives report by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Science on the effects on women on the use of increasing pesticides with crops states, “Hormonal changes in puberty and menopause increase a women’s risk of autoimmune diseases linked to pollution.”
Pesticides on food crops create greater exposure, especially for women in global rural areas, that reach levels that are often too high and too toxic. Chemicals used to treat the soil or dust on crops has been proven to have harmful effects on the reproductive system of women. Children under 12 yrs of age are especially vulnerable to pesticide poisoning coming from farmers clothing and/or from food crops.
“Hunger and diminished access to health services, including reproductive health care, are also taking a heavy toll on women, adolescents, and other vulnerable groups across Southern Africa,” said UNFPA Zimbabwe Representative, Etta Tadesse, in 2003.
In rural Zimbabwe, malnutrition due to food shortage makes pregnant mothers much more likely to experience miscarriage, infection and other reproductive failures. Without food availability or safety, women are placed at health risks unequal to women living in the industrialized world.
In 2007, two years after the onset of the severe food crisis in Niger, Maimou Issoufou from the village of Sanam, died before delivering her second twin. Even though she received help to get to the nearest hospital as soon as possible by the assistance of two members from MercyCorps, Maimou could not survive.
Hunger had caused Maimou’s body to become so weak she did not have the strength to deliver her second baby. Because of this, Maimou and her second twin died on the way to the hospital in Filingué.
By MercyCorps last estimate, 10% of Niger’s 12 million people are under-nourished.
Women at the
food bazaar Null, India - Image Akshay 2008
The UN World Food Programme estimates that 50% of all pregnant women in developing countries are suffering from food related deficiencies that can be fatal. Iron deficiency has been indicated as a cause of death for 315 million global women who have died during childbirth. Instead of food scarcity, pregnant women need an even greater supply of food during pregnancy, supplying more nutrients, to keep themselves and their developing baby well and alive.
In 2006, approximately 4,000 “crop widows” were created in Andhra Pradesh, India as cotton farmers killed themselves in record numbers due to the severe pressures of debt and crop failures. Cotton has not been the only crop to cause women to lose their husbands to suicide. Farmers growing food crops like soy, onions, sugarcane, groundnuts, spices and grapes have also committed suicide in India in record numbers, leaving their wives to pick up the pieces.
In the small state of Kerala, as many as 150 grape farmers committed suicide in 2007 as farmers succumbed to lost crops and rising bank debt.
Hardships for many other farmers in India has created desperate measures. Bad weather along with the rising costs of fertilizer and equipment have caused farmers to face incredible losses. Even the new bioengineered seeds, which came with the promise to create more bug resistant crops, ended up creating fields that have not been able to re-seed automatically.
India’s National Crime Records Bureau, 2002 - 2007, now estimates that the sucides of farmers has created, at the smallest count, - 87,567 widows.
Because of these deaths, a new generation of women farmers has now been forced to take over fields with soil that is heavy with bank loans. The crisis has left crop widows in a state of great emergency and change.
These widows face extra hardships as legal sanctions in India give them no rights to their husbands land. If this isn’t hard enough, many crop widows have tried to take on the full responsibility of the debt loans left to them by their husbands. Without legal rights or legal recourse in gaining the land, many widows end up, during this process, with an eldest son or brother-in-law who often legally takes over ownership of the debt-ridden property.
Owning only 1% of the land in Sub-Saharan Africa, women farmers provide 80% of the foodsource today for the Sub-Saharan region. A region where 43% of the population lives on less than $1 USD per day. As women work in all aspects of food production from field to market they are cut short on government assistance. Women farmers in the Sub-Saharan regions receive only 10% of agricultural credits given to small farmers and only 7% of farm extension services.
“In sub-Saharan Africa - and this is equally true of other regions with the persistence of hunger - women bear full responsibility for the key issues in ending hunger: family health, nutrition, sanitation, education, and increasingly, family income. Yet women are denied - and systematically denied - the information, education and freedom of action they need to fulfill these responsibilities,” said Joan Holmes, of The Hunger Project, at the 2003 Policy Forum: Women’s Leadership and the Future of Africa.
What women need today is a “field of their own,” said award winning Indian
scholar on women and agriculture, Ms. Bina Agarwal, Professor of Economics at
the Institute of Economic Growth at Delhi University.
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Click
Website Link and Scroll Down to Film Segment:http://womennewsnetwork.net:80/2008/06/12/globalwomenreport800/
This short film shows the production of mud cookies by women in
Port-Au-Prince, Haiti 2007. Women suffering under severe shortages of food are
now using the cookies as a major food source for themselves and their families.
_________________________________
For more information on the world food
shortage:
Food Policy Report No. 18
The World Food Situation - Dec 2007
New Driving Forces and Required Actions
by Joachim von Braun
Link to:
The International Food Policy Research Institute
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Sources for this article
include the UN-WFP, US National Institute of Environmental Health Science,
UNHRC - Human Rights Council, Global Fund for Women, UN Special Rapporteur -
Jean Ziegler, National Geographic, The Hunger Project, Radio Netherlands
Worldwide, Center for Disease Control, US Central Intelligence Agency country
reports, NGO Committee on the Status of Women 2007, PBS news, MercyCorps, CSE –
Pollution Monitoring Laboratory, UNFPA, The Institute of Science in Society –
ISIS and MaximsNews Network.
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©2008 WNN - Women News Network
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