WUNRN
GLOBAL NUTRITION FOR GROWTH COMPACT
SUMMARY
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SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON THE RIGHT TO
FOOD REPORT TO THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL 2013
Women's Rights & The Right to Food
Direct Link to Full 20-Page Report:
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2012 GLOBAL HUNGER INDEX REPORT
International Food Policy Research
Institute
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BATTLE AGAINST HUNGER LOST WITHOUT
GENDER EMPOWERMENT
Women
working in their vegetable gardens at the Capanda Agroindustrial Pole in
- When
the United Nations launched its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) back in
2001, two of its primary objectives were to halve extreme poverty and hunger by
2015 and promote gender empowerment worldwide.
But
the links between the two remain unhinged, warns Danielle Nierenberg,
co-founder of Food Tank, a food think tank “focused on feeding the world
better”.
"Unfortunately, women typically
lack access to land, credit, markets, inputs, education, and extension
services." -- Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank
Asked about the relationship
between the two, she told IPS: “Without improving gender equity and women’s
empowerment, it will be impossible to improve food security.”
She pointed out that women make
up at least 43 percent of the global labour force working in agriculture; and
in some countries in sub-Saharan
“Unfortunately, women typically
lack access to land, credit, markets, inputs, education, and extension
services, making their role in food production much harder than it has to be,”
she said.
Nierenberg said recent findings
from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) suggest that if women had the
same access to productive resources as men, yields would increase by 20-30
percent, helping raise agricultural output in developing countries and reducing
the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17 percent.
“The MDGs on gender equity and
food security need to be more intertwined because we can’t have one without the
other,” she said.
“I hope when the new set of
Sustainable Development Goals (under the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda)
are announced, food security will also include women’s empowerment,” said
Nierenberg, who is an expert on issues relating to sustainable agriculture and
food.
Asked about the upcoming world
food security conference in
“I think they would be remiss
in not discussing the importance of women in agriculture,” she added.
Among the substantive policy
matters to be discussed at the upcoming conference is FAO’s gender policy and
the U.N. system-wide Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment
(SWAP).
Launching FAO’s flagship annual
report Tuesday, Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said while the world
has registered some progress on hunger, there was a still a long way to go.
“FAO’s message is that we must
strive for nothing less than the eradication of hunger and malnutrition,” he
said.
The report points out that
while some 870 million people (out of a global population of seven billion)
remained hungry in 2010-2012, this was just a fraction of the billions of
people whose health, well-being and lives were blighted by malnutrition.
The social and economic costs
of malnutrition are “unconscionably high”, amounting to perhaps 3.5 trillion
dollars per year, or 500 dollars per person globally, says the FAO director-general.
In a report to the Human Rights
Council last December, Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the
Right to Food, underlined the range of human rights instruments, including the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which
guaranteed the right to food “without discrimination”.
But despite these requirements,
he noted, discrimination against women remains pervasive in all spheres of
life, resulting from laws that are themselves discriminatory.
The report singled out unequal
access to productive resources such as land and to economic opportunities such
as decent wage employment; unequal bargaining position within the household;
gendered division of labour within households; and women’s marginalisation from
decision-making spheres at all levels.
“A successful strategy for
strengthening the rights of women in support of the realization of the right to
food requires a whole-of-government approach, coordinated across various
ministries, including those responsible for health, education, employment,
social affairs and agriculture,” the report said.
Asked if eradication of poverty
and hunger can be resolved without empowering women, Nierenberg told IPS:
“Absolutely, not.”
She said until women have the
same access to resources as men, “our efforts to alleviate hunger and poverty
will be stymied.”
She said De Schutter has
clearly outlined how lack of women’s empowerment is directly related to food
insecurity.
“Improving food security and
women’s rights have to go hand in hand to make sure that women, children, men,
and whole communities and countries are well-nourished and improving their
incomes,” Nierenberg said.
She said women are the key to
food security and investing in their role as food producers and providers of
food will be crucial to helping reduce hunger and improving nutrition.
“And we need to recognise
women’s multiple roles – not just as producers and providers, but that they’re
also business women who need to make a fair wage, they’re innovators sharing
their knowledge with others in their communities, and they’re stewards of the
land who deserve to be recognised for the ecosystem services they provide that
have long-ranging benefits,” she added.