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Achieving food security

Gender and Food Security

Food insecurity tends to disproportionately affect people who are incapable of or denied access to participating in labor, either agricultural, formal, or informal. Gender inequality is a major cause and effect of hunger and poverty. The U.N. estimates that 60 percent of the world’s chronically hungry people are women and girls, 98% of which live in developing nations. When women have an income, substantial evidence indicates that the income is more likely to be spent on food and children’s needs. Women are generally responsible for food selection and preparation and for the care and feeding of children. Women farmers represent more than a quarter of the world’s population, comprising on average, 43 per cent of the agricultural workforce in developing countries, ranging from 20 per cent in Latin America to 50 per cent in Eastern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, women have less access than men to agriculture related assets, inputs and services. Had they enjoyed the same access to productive resources as men, women could boost yield by 20-30 per cent; raising the overall agricultural output in developing countries by two and a half to four per cent. This gain in production could lessen the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17 per cent.

Women play vital roles in land use, production, processing, distribution, market access, trade, and food availability. They work as unpaid, contributing family workers, self-employed producers, on and off-farm employees, entrepreneurs, traders, and providers of services, and caretakers of children and the elderly. As producers, women are often charged with the production of subsistence crops on marginal land, compared with men’s tendency to produce cash crops on land nearer to the home or marketplace. Particularly in rural areas, the use of women’s time in agriculture is often constrained by obligations such as fetching water and wood, preparing meals for their families, cleaning, washing clothes and dishes, tending to children and livestock, and other tasks. In Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia women expend most of their energy on load-carrying activities involving transport of fuelwood, water, and grain for grinding. Climate change can also present additional challenges to women’s time availability, due to deforestation, pollution, changes in irrigation and rain patters, and the depletion of natural resources. A gender-based assessment of roles and practices in maintaining crop production and household resources such as fuel and water include understanding the environmental factors surrounding men’s and women’s work.

The gendered division of labor in agriculture creates unequal control, responsibilities, and benefits. The use of cash cropping by men and subsistence agriculture by women tends to increase men’s bargaining power relative to women’s. "Control over food crops and poultry or goats (and benefits derived from surpluses of food crops and small farm animals) tend to rest with women. However, control over the type of cash crop and livestock (and benefits derived therefrom) tended to rest with men, even where women had made an exceptional and direct contribution to the labour involved."

Barriers to Gendered Food Security

Women own less than 20% of agricultural land globally. Rural women also have limited access to rural extension services and technology.

The challenges that women face in most countries revolve around their access to equal resources as men, including the rights to land ownership,

unequal wages, unequal access to credit, technology, education, markets, and government services. Efforts to realize the right to food are being undermined by problems such as increased demand, price volatility, climate change characterized by land degradation and water scarcity, competition for land, urbanization, and increased poverty and vulnerability.  Individual decisions regarding livelihoods, family planning, migration, agricultural production and political participation, can have positive or negative effects regarding food security which have repercussions beyond the individual's control. 

A comprehension of the gendered dimensions of food insecurity, which includes family size, household obligations, access to wage-labor, and the social constrictions on productivity and intake, render individuals more capable of making educated decisions regarding their own health and that of their household. Improvement in food security strategies by individuals and households allows more time and resources to be directed towards improving economic situations by investing in improved means of production, attaining further education, and improving other quality of life measures, which collectively improves the status of entire communities.

Gender and Global Food Security Policy

Policy Recommendations

Speaking on Sept. 19th at a U.N. General Assembly event highlighting women and agriculture, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said “When we liberate the economic potential of women, we elevate the economic performance of communities, nations, and the world.” A collaborative report by the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development in 2009 concluded that several major policy decisions could be implemented in order to improve food security from a feminist perspective. These policy suggestions include tariffs, subsidies, special safeguard mechanisms, food stocks, commodity exchange regulations, regulating trade with transnational corporations, restricting monopolies, social welfare, research, and innovation in food production and food security strategies. Various governments are implementing programs, such cash transfers, employment guarantees and land titling, that target women. Many small-scale, women-centered, agricultural cooperatives have emerged in developing countries to fulfill these needs by pooling resources, establishing economies of scale, and creating greater collective bargaining power for resources, land rights, and market access. One such urban agriculture project is Abalimi Bezekhaya, in Cape Town, South Africa, which provides training, manure, set-up and maintenance of an irrigation system, and R150 ($15 USD) to each participant. Most of the participants are women, according to Liziwe Stofile, who trains new farmers,“The reason that women take over most of the community gardens is because they want to take vegetables home to feed their children. The men only want to make money.”

Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index

The United States Agency for International Development program, Feed the Future, quotes on their website that “Women’s contributions to agricultural production often go unrecognized. Despite their significant role as agricultural producers, women’s access to land and other key productive resources can be limited, and they rarely have legal control over the land they farm. Reducing gender inequality and recognizing the contribution of women to agriculture is critical to achieving global food security—there is consistent and compelling evidence that when the status of women is improved, agricultural productivity increases, poverty is reduced, and nutrition improves.”

The "Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index" (WEAI) is the first measure to directly capture women's empowerment and inclusion levels in the agricultural sector. The WEAI focuses on five areas: decisions over agricultural production, power over productive resources such as land and livestock, decisions over income, leadership in the community, and time use. Women are considered to be empowered if they have adequate achievements in four of the five areas. It is an aggregate index reported at the country or regional level that is based on individual-level data on men and women within the same households. With such tools, scholars, organizations, and government entities can make more informed decisions regarding gendered food insecurity.