WUNRN
Direct Link to Full 36-Page 2012
Report:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Empowering Women in
Agriculture: Rethinking Agricultural Needs and Actions through the Eyes of
Women
The First Global Conference
on Women in Agriculture (GCWA) held in New Delhi (13-15 March 2012) was
organized by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the
Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI), and
was supported by the multistakeholder Global Forum on Agricultural Research
(GFAR) through a new mechanism “Gender in Agriculture Partnership (GAP)”.
This landmark event was built
on two years of intensive partnerships among many organizations within GFAR
including the CGIAR, several UN agencies, and the Regional Fora. The Conference
was attended by 760 participants from 50 countries, including Government
Ministers, World Food Prize laureates, representatives of institutions in
agricultural research, extension and education, gender experts,
non-governmental organizations and farmers’ groups.
These groups responded to the
call for collective action and investment to put the needs of women producers
and consumers, and as householders, at the centre of agricultural thinking and
practice.
Despite women making up
nearly half of the world’s agricultural workforce, they continue to be
unrecognized as farmers, fishers or livestock producers and face widespread
constraints to decision making on basic resources for production, notably
regarding land, and access to productivity-enhancing inputs including credit,
fertilizer, seeds, veterinary drugs and extension.
Furthermore, women often lack
control over their produce. Their ability to produce enough food is further
hampered by the physically exhausting labour and drudgery associated with
agricultural practices and the additional weight of their domestic and
reproductive work that are basic to the viability of household consumption and
health. Moreover, women’s contribution to child health and nutrition is vitally
important and yet often not included in agricultural considerations.
By failing to close the
gender gap, the world is paying dearly. According to a recent FAO report1, if women had the same access to
productive resources as men they could increase their yields by 20-30 per cent.
This would raise total agricultural yields in developing countries between 2.5-
4 per cent and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 100-150
million.
Participants at the GCWA
recognized that, 17 years after the adoption of the 1995 Beijing Declaration
and Platform for Action identifying key obstacles to the advancement of women
in the world, gross inequalities still persist2,
with the declaration’s targets still unmet even today.
National mechanisms for
gender equality continue to face major challenges in implementing their
mandates, particularly due to the lack of political will, political
marginalization of their activities, inadequate resources, and a weak evidence
base and limited capacities for coordination, monitoring, accountability and
insensitivity of agricultural service systems to gender issues. The time for
radical action, through concerted efforts to meet the needs of women, is long
overdue. This conference discussed some of these issues and suggested action
points. The detailed Conference Proceedings are recorded in a complementary
document to this overall synthesis.
1 http://www.fao.org/publications/sofa/en/
2 http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing15/regional_review.html
The Conference was organized
into three main components; a policy forum to identify the gap between policy
reforms aimed at empowering women in agriculture and institutional changes for
capacity building and partnership; six parallel sessions focused on the topics
related to women in agriculture; and three working groups on extension,
education and research priorities to make recommendations for gender sensitive
agenda. In addition, poster resentations were made on diverse topics
under thematic areas and the results and innovations were displayed by
stakeholders particularly the women. The conference also organized an
innovation market place event, showcasing agriculture and rural innovations and
women entrepreneurship. The event also depicted technology-led innovations to
reduce rudgery.
The opening sessions of the
Conference on high-level policy issues highlighted the need for policy reforms,
institutional changes and capacity building to empower women in agriculture.
Such changes are urgently needed to address gender inequalities in the
household, in the ways in which markets (participation and service delivery)
and institutions (formal and informal) work for men and women, in social and
cultural norms, and the way these forces interact with each other and result in
the underperformance of women in agriculture. There was a view that it is
insufficient to perceive women’s roles in terms of agricultural production
alone but considerations of agricultural systems and needs should also be
extended and re-framed to include issues particularly relevant to rural women:
household food and nutrition security (particularly child nutrition), education
particularly at school level, health, value-addition through on–farm and
offfarm activities, improved storage, and increasing efficiencies and product
quality across the value chain (including reduced post-harvest losses). In
addition, the time constraints faced by women across all these activities are
common, as some of the difficulties are associated with land tenure and
titling.
Deliberately linking women,
agriculture and nutrition requires multi-sectoral thinking and action to
address major nutritional deficiencies that continue to hamper children’s
development around the world. Concurrently, it requires institutionalization of
research and extension through joint decision making that involves women
themselves in participatory approaches. This needs to be incorporated during
the initial design which needs to be flexible so that it can be adapted to
build on or address unintended agricultural consequences (positive or
negative). It is complex to intervene in a number of policy areas
simultaneously and actions need to be coherent at local, national, regional and
global levels. Understanding how policies contribute (how are they working and
why) requires evidence to share lessons and to learn about their effectiveness
in different contexts. The efforts to monitor and track these impacts must be
accompanied by appropriate indicators.
The six thematic sessions
focused on: assessing women’s empowerment; agricultural innovations for
reducing drudgery; linking women to markets; women’s roles in household food
security and nutrition; access to productive and household assets, resources
and knowledge, policies and services; and climate change - related risks and
uncertainties. The presentations and discussion in these sessions helped to
identify and set practical contexts and priorities for action for the key areas
in which change is required, collectively highlighting the need for a fundamental
rethinking of agricultural systems, with the needs of rural women producers and
householders at their centre.
Three Working Group sessions
identified the new roles required of agricultural research, extension, and
education to respond to women’s needs in agriculture, and to actively involve
rural women’s representatives in such work. A number of cross-cutting
priorities were identified by the participants across the themes as initial
building blocks for developing a framework for action. Given that gender
inequalities run right through agricultural systems, action is required at all
levels from household and community up to national, regional and international
scales.
Priorities identified through
these discussions were:
• Collective advocacy to raise awareness
of women’s needs in agriculture and ensure their visibility in terms of their
contributions
• Generating the information and
evidence base to show the economic and social impacts and value of addressing
women’s needs in agriculture
• Encouraging collective action and
leadership among women to develop programmes that directly meet women’s needs
and to make the agricultural support systems