honouring women of the food movement on international women's day
(the women named in the rest of this article are doing some amazing work)
Honoring Women of the Food Movement on Int’l Women’s Day
by Danielle Nierenberg
Today is International Women’s Day – a day to recognize the steps that have been taken to improve gender equality and to acknowledge that much more needs to be done to level the playing field for women in all sectors, including agriculture.
Olivier De Shutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, The Feminization of Farming, drawing attention to the need to empower women farmers and remove the obstacles that hold them back from improving agricultural productivity, nutrition, and incomes. He says that “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.”
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, 40 percent of agricultural laborers in developing countries are women – and in some countries, they are as much as 80 percent of the agricultural work force. But women farmers’ yields are roughly 20-30 percent less than male farmers.
If gender barriers were eliminated and women farmers were able to match the yields of male farmers, global malnourishment could be reduced by 12 to 17 percent. And a study conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute found that almost 55 percent of the reduction in hunger from 1970 to 1995 could be attributed to improvements in women’s status in society. In our guest post on Ecoagriculture Parners Landscapes for People, Food, and Nature blog, we highlight how providing better access to credit and inputs can not only improve the livelihoods of women farmers, but translates to better nutrition for their families.
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/08-7
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