WUNRN
Website for Recent Global Conference
on Women in Agriculture:
WOMEN FARMERS OFTEN RESTRICTED BY
POLICIES & PRACTICES
By
Idah Sithole-Niang, 14 March 2012
Rufaro Madakadze, a horticultural scientist
with the
In 1900, there were a mere 1.6 billion
people on our planet. Today, there are seven billion and by 2050 we will be
nine billion. One would expect that with such rapid population growth,
occurring in the midst of soaring food prices and food-related crises, we would
be doing everything we could to increase food security for our most vulnerable
people.
And yet, incredibly, in areas where the
need is the greatest, the opposite often is true. Today, in many developing
countries, home to the majority of the world's 925 million undernourished
people, there is a tangled web of policies and practices that specifically and
sometimes intentionally inhibit a large group of farmers from producing more
food in their fields and pastures. Despite the fact that in many places they
often comprise half or more of the agriculture workforce, these farmers face
restrictions on their ability to buy, sell, or inherit land and livestock. They
often are forbidden from opening savings accounts, borrowing money, or even
selling crops at market.
And what is the basis for these
self-defeating practices? It is the simple fact that these farmers happen to be
women.
For example, the United Nations Children's
Agency (Unicef) estimates
that women in Cameroon are doing 75 percent of the agricultural work, yet own
less than 10 percent of the farmland. And the situation is much the same in
This type of agriculture inequity affects
more than just women. It is handicapping entire regions. The UN Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO)
estimates that leveling the plowing field for women could increase total
agriculture output in developing countries by 2.5 to four percent and reduce
the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent-that's 100 to 150
million people. Put another way, gender bias in agriculture is condemning
millions of boys and girls to growing up hungry, a condition that routinely
leads to a life of poor health and poverty.
There is, thankfully, a growing recognition
that these discriminatory practices have to end.
This week a dream team of World Food
Prize laureates, government ministers, farmers, agriculture researchers,
gender experts and community development organizations will be in New Delhi,
India for the first ever Global
Conference on Women in Agriculture. It is sponsored by the Global Forum on
Agricultural Research (GFAR), along with the Indian Council of Agricultural
Research (ICAR) and the Asian-Pacific Association of Agricultural
Research Institutions (APAARI).
The goal of the conference is to focus on
the many ways in which equalizing the status of the woman farmer is critical to
reducing poverty in the developing world and ensuring food production keeps
pace with population growth. Conference participants see gender equity in
agriculture as particularly important given that investors, donor governments,
philanthropic organizations and developing countries themselves are pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into agriculture-oriented development efforts.
But in many cases they are doing so without properly assessing the importance
of women to their success.
Countries in sub-Saharan
A recent report from the International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) warns that given their long-standing lack of land
rights, these land deals-which involve millions of hectares-threaten to further
marginalize women farmers and thus undermine efforts to improve food security
in Africa.
Western countries eager to assist
agriculture-oriented poverty reduction efforts also need to rethink their
common assumptions of gender roles in food security: the man as food producer
(the farmer beside his tractor or horse) and the woman as food preparer, making
nutritional choices and managing the children.
Today, in much of the world, when the
family sits down to dinner at night, the woman has not just cooked the food.
She also has likely planted, harvested, milked or butchered what's on the table.
Idah Sithole-Niang is an associate
professor at the University of Zimbabwe, and Steering Committee chair of the
African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) program.