Global Partnership Announced to Increase Visibility, Address Discrimination and Secure Rights for Women Farmers
[News]
Neglect of Women Farmers Leads to Malnutrition, Failed Harvests,
PRESS RELEASE
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Neglect of Women Farmers Leads to Malnutrition, Failed Harvests,
Lives of Backbreaking Drudgery, Say Experts
NEW DELHI (19 MARCH 2012) — Over 700 participants including ministers, World Food Prize laureates, gender experts, international and non-governmental organizations, and farmer’s groups from 50 countries rallied for increased investments and improved policies targeting women farmers at the first-ever international conference on women in agriculture.
The majority of formal processes and policies now in place to lift up women farmers have failed, according to participants, who called for dramatic new approaches that build change from the ground up and make women an equal partner in agricultural development.
Women provide some 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, but face widespread restrictions on their ability to buy, sell or inherit land, open a savings account, borrow money or sell their crops at market. Farming is a major source of employment and the economic backbone in many developing countries. Their ability to produce food is further hampered by a lack of access to fertilizers, water, tillers, transport, extension services, knowledge, and physically exhausting labor and drudgery associated with traditional farming practices that have remained unchanged for generations.
“There is a deep inter-linkage between women and agriculture, the development of both being essential for the progress of every nation,” said H.E. Pratibha Devi Singh Patil, president of India who addressed the meeting. “The first Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, once said that ‘in order to awaken the people, it is the women who have to be awakened. Once she is on the move, the family moves, the village moves, the nation moves.’”
“We find ourselves in a world where urgent actions are needed to unleash the potential of half of the world’s population,” said Michelle Bachelet, Head of UN-Women in a video address. “Women play a large role in agriculture, providing food for their families and communities but we need urgent policy attention.”
The Global Conference on Women in Agriculture, was organized by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI). It was sponsored by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), a group that seeks to ensure agricultural research leads to concrete development outcomes.
“We all know of the large role that our mothers, our sisters, our wives, and our daughters play in agriculture. This conference has developed a way forward for more creative and effective joint actions to empower these women farmers,” said S. Ayyappan, director general, Indian Council of Agricultural Research.
The benefits of investing in women famers include the potential to increase food production by up to 30 percent, thus reducing the number of hungry people by up to some 150 million, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In 2010, there were some 925 million undernourished people, mostly in the developing world.
“Women take on the most tedious and backbreaking tasks,” said the Hon. Minister of Agriculture and Food Processing, Sh. Sharad Pawar during an address at the conference.
These include most of the non-mechanized labor in farming—transplanting crops, weeding, harvesting, and post-harvest processing. Researchers reported on new technologies that could cut down the billions of hours women spend on drudgery, including more than 20 new tools ergonomically designed for women by the Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering in Bhopal.
“Better food security and lowered malnutrition will only come if women are empowered,” said Raj Paroda, executive secretary of APAARI. “We need to help women play a more effective role and be recognized by policymakers and development agencies. We need to link women to markets and provide them with access to knowledge and assets.”
Experts released other new research findings on a wide range of topics from linking women to markets, to household food security, to malnutrition, and to roles of men and women farmers. Some findings include:
- Research from a nationwide survey of households in India finds that women farmers are as productive as men, despite having less access to irrigation, education, and other services such as extension. They use more labor, perhaps making up for other disadvantages. Yet women continue to earn a lower wage in agriculture than males, and the gap is rising despite comparable productivity, indicating discrimination in the casual labor market.
- Better yields do not necessarily lead to increased food security and lowered malnutrition for households. Research suggests the need for broader agricultural thinking to include household food security.
- More education for girls and women may not always lead to an increased voice in decision-making due to long-standing gender biases and roles that start at birth.
“We need more evidence to explain the context and the constraints, as many of our assumptions may not be correct,” said Ume Lele, former senior advisor at the World Bank.
Paroda noted five actions points that emerged from the conference. They include recognizing women’s central roles in agriculture and nutrition; generating more knowledge and evidence; spurring more collective action and leadership among women in order to take advantage of opportunities; addressing discrimination and securing women’s rights; promoting ownership and control of land and other resources in order for them to be able to negotiate and bargain; tailoring the global agenda to suit local needs; and following up on youth engagement.
Conference organizers formally launched and expanded a program, the Gender in Agriculture Partnership as a “global initiative embracing all actors involved in gender in agriculture,” to systematically engage a wider network, through the GFAR partnership, to drive forward change. They stated that a global conference on women in agriculture would be held every three years to move forward the action points from the conference and transparently track change in the agricultural system. The Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) offered to host the next conference in Africa.
“You can only fend for yourself if you have the knowledge,” said Monty Jones, a World Food Prize laureate, chairman of GFAR, and executive director of FARA. “Finance schemes should leave money in your palm; they should build income, not just help farmers to break even. There should be a bank account for every woman who is working in the field.”
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Addressing gender in agriculture on a global scale through the Global Conference on Women in Agriculture is a follow-up action from the 2010 Global Conference for Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD) road map. The outcomes and recommendations from the gender conference in New Delhi will be presented at the next GCARD to be held in Uruguay 29 October through 1 November 2012.
Posted on 21/03/2012
