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FIAN is an international membership based organisation. FIAN's institutional members are its national and regional sections which are legal entities in their own right and have their own membership and elected decision-making bodies.

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Women's Right to Food in Guatemala

CEDAW Alternative Report to UN CEDAW Committee on Review of GUATEMALA

02-02-2009

On the occasion of the 43rd session of the UN Committee on the Elimination of  Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), FIAN International has prepared a written submission on the Right to Food of Rural and Indigenous Women in Guatemala, which is one of the due reporting countries. The report will be reviewed by CEDAW tomorrow, February 3, 2009.    

Read the submission in English
Read the submission in Spanish

Summary

The world food crisis has worsened the food and nutrition situation for women. Of the 923 million hungry people worldwide about 60 % are women. The discrimination of women in families means that they are the last to eat or that they eat less nutritious food.  All this and the tendency to save on food costs in times of crisis regarding quantity and quality leads to an increase in malnutrition and morbidity in general,  but affects even worse pregnant and lactating women and children.

FIAN International, as organization defending the Right to Food for more than 20 years acknowledges that women represent a disproportionately high percentage of disadvantaged, poor, undernourished and hungry sectors of society, as is also the case in Guatemala. In this country poverty and extreme poverty are found mainly in rural areas, where 60 % of the country's population lives, of which 61 % is indigenous. The situation of rural women of Guatemala is marked by a high load of domestic and agricultural work and in this context by the lack of access to reproductive sources like land and other economic resources to feed themselves and thereby be able to exercise their Right to Food.

As Guatemala is State Party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which enshrines the Right to Food amongst others, the State is obliged to take steps to progressively achieve the full realization of the right to adequate food.  The General Comment 12 of this Treaty in particular points out that "The Right to Adequate Food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement."

FIAN would like to point out that so far government programs in Guatemala so far (for example FONTIERRAS) have not improved the above mentioned situation. The fact that some women have become co-proprietors of land does not lead to a general empowerment of women and to a greater ability to exercise their Right to Food. It also does not obliterate the fact that there is a general lack of access to land for rural and indigenous women and of their participation in cooperative councils, peasant committees, representations, official institutions and non-governmental organizations.

FIAN International therefore would like to present the following questions and recommendation:

-Does the proposed new Law of Rural Development consider the inclusion of women in all aspects, especially the subject of land property and also their access to credits, formation, education etc?
-Does the Government of Guatemala plan new programs which will facilitate the access to land and to reproductive resources for women in a way independent from the concept "household head"?
-Does the Government of Guatemala intend to reform Article 139 of the Labour Law (employment of rural women as labourers) which, even though it is supposed to protect these women, in the past has been misused by employers for salary dumping by declaring these women to be assistant workers?

Finally, FIAN International would like to ask CEDAW to adopt a general recommendation with regard to the Right to Food in an integrated way for women, including the different dimensions of this Right which should consider the diversity of women and their differences in food and nutritional necessities. In this context FIAN would like to recommend that member States like Guatemala introduce monitoring methods with regard to the Right to Food, with special focus on women, applying the FAO Voluntary Guidelines as a tool to monitor state actions against hunger.





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