WUNRN
Please read 3 Parts of this WUNRN
release on Women & the Food Crisis.
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Women produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries and are responsible for half of the world's food production, yet their key role as food producers and providers and their critical contribution to household food security is only now becoming recognized.
FAO studies confirm that while women are the mainstay of small-scale agriculture, farm labour force and day-to-day family subsistence, they have more difficulties than men in gaining access to resources such as land and credit and productivity enhancing inputs and services.
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Women
Are an Important Part of the Solution to the Global Food Crisis.
In
this declaration, peasent organizations, and organizations of rural and
indigenous women, feminists organizations and other women's networks concerned
with overcoming poverty and reaching gender equality report that the current
food crisis is the result of the failure of the structural and macroeconomic
policies implemented during the last 30 years...You can sign on to the
declaration.
Women respond to the Food Crisis: We are part of the solution
During the last months, the whole world has been suffering the crisis in food price. According to recent figures today 1.4 billion persons live under the new poverty line of USD 1.25, and the majority of these are women and girls. Some 850 million persons around the world suffer from hunger and 820 of those 850 million live in developing countries, areas that are likely to be more affected by climate change. These figures are linked to the rise in food price because world provision of cereals in 2007 was 420 million tons, a historical minimum since 1983. According to an OECD report, a third of the rise in agriculture prices foreseen for the next nine years is caused by biofuels.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 50 million people still haven’t got access to adequate food. Child malnutrition, with is negative biological, social and economic effects, is currently affecting more than 9 million children and the achievements in the fight against poverty and indigence are in risk due to lack of food. The problem of poverty and hunger in the region is related to worth wealth distribution and land concentration in the world. This results from the neoliberal economic policies of extreme privatization and reduction of national investment imposed by the international financial institutions This situation has had more relevance in Haiti, Argentina, Peru and Mexico and the UN agencies in the region foresee a 5% rise in food prices that will increase indigence in almost one point.
According to FAO, “Latin America and the Caribbean have a 31% surplus in food resources. The region’s problem of hunger is therefore not one of production but, rather, one of access to food” . Beyond economic trends, climatic or protectionist factors that have an important impact on the current crisis, the main problem of this food crisis is the lack of access to land and properties and consequently to food, particularly among rural and indigenous women and household heads.
This situation is worsened when neutral policies are implemented that underestimate and ignore the role and contribution of rural and indigenous women in food production and through development strategies that have no gender perspective, with a negative impact on women’s living conditions and their possibilities of contributing to food production and rural, local and regional development
Food crisis and the rise of prices can bring unpredictable political consequences. If prices continue rising, 10 million more people are in risk of becoming poor and a similar number of poor people could increase.
In view of this situation, we, peasant organizations, and organizations of rural and indigenous women, feminists organizations and other women’s networks concerned with overcoming poverty and reaching gender equality report that the current food crisis is the result of the failure of the structural and macroeconomic policies implemented during the last 30 years under the leadership of the international financial institutions (IMF, WB, IDB and the WTO). In Latin America and the Caribbean these policies have in brief:
Through the above-mentioned actions they have contributed to worsening the difficult living conditions of millions of peasants, and, particularly, for the most vulnerable groups: women, indigenous women and boys and girls.
The immediate solution to this crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean can be developed through short and medium term actions, we cannot let the solution for the long term because it will be too late.
We call for the following urgent actions in the short term:
We call for the following actions in the medium term:
Signatures (as of September 19, 2008)
Action Aid
AWID
Feminist Task Force, GCAP
Gender and Education Office (GEO) from ICAE
For any questions and to add your signature, please write to ana@icae.org.uy
Please indicate if you will like to add your name/ the name of your organisation.
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http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/foodcrisis.php
There are at
least four ways in which biofuels contribute to rising food prices:
Firstly,
there is the additional demand for grains (and estimated 100 million tonnes in
2007) and vegetable oil, which is growing at a much faster rate than the global
demand for food or animal feed.
Secondly,
the competition between food and fuel effectively pushes up food prices if oil
prices rise, beyond the level which could be explained by rising energy/input
costs. The 2007 OECD report “Biofuels: Is the cure worse than the disease”
warned: Any diversion of land from food or feed production to production of energy
biomass will influence food prices from the start, as both compete for the same
inputs.”
Thirdly,
food sovereignty is being further undermined and land on which communities in
the global South depend for their livelihood is being turned over to agrofuel
plantations – involving both food crops and non-food crops. The Indian
government, for example, is planning to convert 11 million hectares of what are
mainly community lands to jatropha plantations, threatening the livelihoods and
food sovereignty of pastoralists, small farmers, indigenous peoples and forest
communities, Fertile land in many other countries, including Tanzania and Ghana
being appropriated for jatropha.
Finally,
agrofuel production and investment are increasing the control of a small number
of agribusiness companies, now in partnership with energy companies and joint
venture enterprises over food production and food prices, and encouraging even
greater speculative investment and profits.
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