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| Photo Credit: India Program Director, Rucha Chitnis |
Oliver De Schutter
ACROSS the developing world, millions of people are migrating from farms
to cities in search of work. The migrants are mostly men. As a result,
women are increasingly on the front lines of the fight to sustain family
farms. But pervasive discrimination, gender stereotypes and women’s low
social standing have frustrated these women’s rise out of poverty and
hunger.
Discrimination denies small-scale female farmers the same access men
have to fertilizer, seeds, credit, membership in cooperatives and
unions, and technical assistance. That deters potential productivity
gains. But the biggest barriers don’t even have to do with farming — and
yet they have a huge impact on food security.
As sole or principal caregivers, women and girls often face a heavy
burden of unremunerated household chores like cooking, cleaning,
fetching water, collecting firewood and caring for the very young and
the elderly. These uncompensated activities are equivalent to as much as
63 percent of gross domestic product in India and Tanzania. But they
result in lost opportunities for women, who don’t have the time to
attend classes, travel to markets to sell produce or do other activities
to improve their economic prospects.
To be sure, some female-headed farm households get remittances from
absent men, but that is often not enough to compensate for the economic
pressures they face. And we know that when women get more education and
improve their social and economic standing, household spending on
nutrition increases, child health outcomes improve and small farms
become more productive.
A 2000 study of developing countries by the International Food Policy Research Institute
found that as much as 55 percent of the reduction in hunger from 1970
to 1995 could be attributed to improvements in women’s status in
society. Progress in women’s education alone (which explained 43 percent
of gains in food security) was nearly as significant as increased food
availability (26 percent) and health advances (19 percent) put together.
Many governments have recognized the causes of the poverty trap but have
not done enough to remove the obstacles facing women. For example,
several Asian countries have introduced stipends to keep girls in
school, but many schools lack adequate sanitation facilities; there is a
paucity of female teachers, which discourages socially conservative
parents who do not want their daughters to be taught by men; and not
enough is done to prevent farmers from pulling their children — girls
first, usually — out of school to till the fields.
Countries like Indonesia have introduced microfinance
programs to help women pursue small-business ideas instead of
housework. But creditworthy women are sometimes used as intermediaries
to obtain loans for businesses run by their male relatives.
In a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council
that is being released today, I urge a comprehensive, rights-based
approach focused on removing legal discrimination and on improving
public services — child care, water supplies, sanitation and energy
sources — to reduce the burden on women who farm. But such an approach
must also systematically challenge the traditional gender roles that
burden women with household chores in the first place.
In Bangladesh, a program begun in 2002 by a nonprofit group, Building
Resources Across Communities, shows how this might be achieved. It
provided women with poultry (easier to raise than pigs, cows, goats and
sheep); subsidized legal and health services; clean water and sanitary
latrines, and a temporary daily stipend to tide over extremely poor
women who were working as maids for extra income, so that they could
focus on farming. The program also secured support from local elites,
who among other things could help ensure that the women’s children were
enrolled in school.
In the Philippines, a conditional cash-transfer program, started in
2008, covers 3 million households. Aiming to improve women’s access to
obstetric care, and to improve spending on children’s health and
education, the program includes a “gender action plan” that requires
that bank accounts be set up in women’s names (which protects their
control of the money and prevents fraud); trains women on their rights
with respect to domestic violence, child care, nutrition and other
areas; and trains fathers to share responsibility as caregivers.
In Yunnan Province in western China, women’s groups were enlisted for a
rural road-maintenance program in 2009. The participants, mostly drawn
from ethnic minorities, received an average payment of $686 for an
average of 110 workdays, allowing them to rise above poverty. The women
were able to work while maintaining other income-generating activities
like raising pigs or selling vegetables. They also got training to
improve their agricultural productivity.
Recognizing the burden that the feminization of global farming places on
women requires us to overturn longstanding gender norms that have kept
women down even as they feed more and more of the world. The most
effective strategies to empower women who tend farm and family — and to
alleviate hunger in the process — are to remove the obstacles that
hinder them from taking charge of their lives.
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