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WIKIPEDIA ASSIGNMENT – GENDER AND FOOD SECURITY

• First of all, considering the how crucial the “gender and food security” issue is for women particularly in developing countries, we decided to make this section as a separate page. We plan to give a hyperlink and a short summary to the “gender and food security” sub-section in the existing “food security” article.

• The existing “food security” article is too long to bring attention to “gender and food security” subsection. In addition, when we review the talk page of the article, we realized that there are some projections to edit the complete article and to shorten the “gender and food security” sub-section, which is quite extensive in comparison to the entire article. We have already mentioned our intent to edit the “gender and food security” sub-section and make it as a separate page to the talk page.

• According to the FAO, the widely accepted World Food Summit (1996) definition reinforces the multidimensional nature of food security and includes food access, availability, food use and stability. In the existing article, we realized an excessive focus on “availability” and other elements are quite under-developed.

• In line with the recent changes in the article, we decided to take these 4 elements as our departure point and structure the article as follows. (We are currently in the process of creating more striking and relevant sub-headlines) On the other hand, we realized that the existing subsection of “gender and food security” mainly relies on liberal perspective; therefore, we plan to bring attention other perspectives.

• Availability— women as food producers: These include access to land; access to inputs, technology, and services; and access to markets.

• Access – women as food consumers: These include access to employment and fair work conditions, unpaid work, social and economic programs such as cash transfer programs, credit schemes, public initiatives.

• Utilization – women as food managers in households: These include women’s nutritional status as an input to child nutrition and girls, biased nutritional distribution within households. (There is a need to consider the overlap with the “women” section of the malnutrition article)

• Stability – women affected by exogenous shocks: These include financial crises, climate change, increase in food prices.

• While elaborating these sub-sections of our article, we are planning to address to global policy responses as well as regional and national initiatives.

References

"Women, Food Security and Agriculture in a Global Market Place" International Center for Research on Women

ADB, FAO. 2013. “Gender Equality and Food Security: Women’s Empowerment as a Tool against Hunger”

Agnes R. Quisumbing, Lawrence Haddad, Ruth Meinzen-Dick & Lynn R. Brown. 1998. “Gender Issues for Food Security in Developing Countries: Implications for Project Design and Implementation”. Canadian Journal of Development Studies

Agarwal, Bina. 2012. “Food Security, Productivity and Gender Inequality”. https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:163107&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF .

Ajani, Olubunmi Idowu Yetunde. 2009. „Gender dimensions of agriculture, poverty, nutrition and food security in Nigeria“, IFPRI

De Schutter, Olivier. "Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food" Human Rights Council, Twenty-second session 24 December 2012

MDG Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Progress Chart 2010

Mehra, R. and M. Hill Rojas. 2008. “Women, food security and agriculture in a global market place”

Parvin, Gulsan Ara. 2012. “Role of Microfinance Institutions to Enhance Food Security in the Climate Change Context: Gender based analysis of rural poor community of Bangladesh”, CGIAR

Quisumbing et al. 1995. “Women: The Key to Food Security”, The International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C., August 1995

Rao, Nitya. 2006. “Land Rights, gender equality and household food security: Exploring the conceptual links in the case of India”, Food Policy, Volume 31, Issue 2, April 2006, Pages 180–193

Sarapura, Silvia. “Innovating Agriculture through Gender Lenses” http://www.academia.edu/254531/Innovating_Agriculture_through_Gender_Lenses

Spieldoch, A. 2007. “A row to hoe: the gender impact of trade liberalization on our food system, agricultural markets and women’s human rights”, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Geneva

Utilization

Household decision-making models assume family as a homogenous unit operating with a common utility function , whose members share the same amount of access to and utilization of household’s resources including food. However, these models are not capable to explain dynamics impacting intra-household resource allocation and its effects to distribution within the family.

There is a huge number of empirical and theoretical studies declining altruistic family joint utility function theory of Becker . Sen’s theory of intra-household bargaining shows the inequality in decision-making process among different members of households and how this inequality affects distribution of resources.

Case studies

Recent empirical case studies show that food allocation is sometimes preferentially distributed to certain members of households according to age, gender, health, or labor productivity and not all members benefit equally from it.

Differences of food utilization of women in polygamous households in Burkina Faso

The magnitude of inequality is more prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa where males are the primary decision makers within extended families and polygamy is quite common. Mostly, women work in small lands to provide food for themselves and their children. According to a research in Burkina Faso, women in polygamous households were considerably more food insecure in comparison with their equals in monogamous households in case of food scarcity.

The same research also shows how ranking among women within polygamous households matter in terms of food security and suggest that last-order women in polygamous households is more food secure in good times due to her relatively close tie with the household head. Yet, this advantage turns into a disadvantage due to her less access to arable land and her relative incompetence to establish a supportive network, unlike elder women in the same polygamous households, which can prevent her from food shortage when the households face with food insecurity.

Buffering bias against girls in Ethiopia

Many studies focus on resource allocation within households suggest that younger households are buffered from food insecurity by adults . However, these studies do not address whether the buffering experiences of young households are gendered.

Hadley et al. observed “buffering hypothesis” in the city of Jimma, Ethiopia, where adult members of households waive some part of their food to buffer younger households in case of food insecurity. The research showed that girls are discriminated against boys since buffering aims at boys, 41% of girls in severely food insecure households also experienced food insecurity compared to 20% of boys in severely food insecure households.

No difference in food security among female and male-headed households in indigenous ethnic groups in Bangladesh

A research on four indigenous ethnic groups in Bengal found that there was no significant difference in food security between the male and female headed households in these communities. This finding was in contrast to general wisdom that the “female headed households are more vulnerable to food insecurity”.

Lack of cultural and social restrictions on women such as participation in the labor force enables these women to perceive themselves food secure unlike societies where patriarchal norms are strong and there exist a number of restrictions on women.

On the other hand, another study in rural Bangladesh shows that malnutrition is prevalent in girls than boys. The research used Harvard weight-for-age standard, which found that 14.4% of girls were classified as severely malnourished in comparison with only 5.1% of boys, showing sex-biased nutrition-related practices favoring boys.

Single obese mothers in USA

Low food security does not only display itself in hunger and decrease in body size, but also in weight-gaining. According to a number of studies showing the linkage between low food security and sex differences, low food security is linked to being over-weight and “gaining 5 pounds or more in one year, but only among women” . “Very low food security is associated with being underweight, but again only for women” .

An empirical research is conducted between mothers and non-mothers in the US to understand the relation between “motherness” in gaining weight for women. The research found statistically significant association between “motherness” and “food insecurity”. Relatively income-restrained single mothers, in parallel to the requirements of traditional expectations and socially constructed roles for them, risk their individual health by skipping meals, eat less or consume high-calorie but nutritionally-poor food, in order to provide food security of their children.

We also created "Gender and Food Security" article and incorporated the elements of food security there along with policy proposals

Access to Land

See also: Land law

Women's ability to own or inherit land is restricted in much of the developing world. Even in countries where women are legally permitted to own land, such as Uganda, research from Women’s Land Link Africa shows that cultural norms and customs have excluded them from obtaining land ownership in practice. Globally, women own less than 20% of agricultural land. Typically, in most of the developing countries, a woman’s use of land is restricted to temporary cultivation rights, allocated to her by her husband, and in exchange, she provides food and other goods for the household. She is not able to pass the land on to her heirs nor she will be entrusted with the land if her husband dies; the land is automatically granted to her husband’s family or any male children the couple may have produced. Bina Agarwal, a development economist known for her work on women's property rights, states "the single most important factor affecting women’s situation is the gender gap in command over property." Agarwal claims that in many cases, rural women demand land rights, but she also confirms that some cases exist in which women do not identify land rights as a major problem. On the other hand, Cecile Jackson objects the claim of Agarwal on the ground that it is important to focus on gendering land questions instead of treating land issues only in terms of land rights of women as Agarwal does . Gendering land questions requires more ethnographic research of social relations around land.

Increasingly, as land privatization leads to the end of communal lands, women find themselves unable to use any land not bestowed upon them by their families, rendering unmarried women and widows vulnerable. Many women still face legal hurdles when attempting to acquire land through inheritance or the marketplace. In order to reorganize post-colonial societies, SADC states have engaged in land redistribution and resettlement programs, ranging from temporary lease-holding to permanent property rights. Even in cases where no gender bias is officially present in land redistribution policy, social custom permits officials to favor male-headed households and individual men over female-headed households and individual women.