Feeding the World to 2020: What Role Will Women Play?

Women may hold the key to feeding the world by 2020 and beyond, according to a growing body of evidence showing that women play a vital role in agriculture and food security in developing countries. However, research also shows that severe economic and social inequities prevent women from reaching their full potential as food producers, wage earners, and guardians of household food and nutrition security.

These issues took center stage last month as the eyes of the world turned to Beijing, where 37,000 people gathered for the Fourth World Conference on Women and the associated Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) Forum. The resulting Platform for Action addressed many of the obstacles facing women in developing countries, including inequalities in income, education, health, and access to resources and markets. Attendees knowledgeable about the role of women in agriculture held divergent views about the potential for widespread reform.

"Institutions have to change, and that requires substantial resources over the long term," said Mayra Buvinic, president of the International Center for Research on Women in Washington, D.C. "Unfortunately, we are in a time when financial resources are shrinking rather than expanding, and that may be a major hurdle."

Suzanne Kindervatter, director of the Commission for the Advancement of Women at Interaction, believes that follow-up by NGOs will help pressure governments to fulfill the commitments they made at Beijing. Interaction is a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of more than 150 humanitarian aid organizations involved in relief, refugee assistance, and development.

"I have a lot of hope for this Beijing document," Kindervatter said. "The nongovernmental organizations were involved in the process in a more comprehensive way than ever before. There's been much more focus on implementation and putting these ideas into action, and the NGOs are ready to push and monitor that."

Half of Humanity

Despite varying opinions on the prospects for reform, a consensus is emerging in the international community regarding the importance of women in agriculture. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), women account for more than half of the labor required to produce the food consumed in developing countries, and as much as three-fourths of the labor in Africa.

"The entire agricultural revolution must take into account that half of humanity is women," said Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe, the vice president of Uganda, in a speech at the Beijing conference. "It is imperative that agricultural and natural resource programs address the gender issue."

In Uganda, women produce 80 percent of the food, according to the vice president. They are responsible for 60 percent of planting of all food and nonfood crops, 70 percent of weeding, 60 percent of harvesting, and 90 percent of processing and preparation.

"They should, therefore, play their proper role in the determination of food and agricultural policies and be able to earn proceeds from the fruits of their labor, which is not the case in rural communities at the moment," she said.

"Feminization"

The "feminization of agriculture" has developed hand in hand with the "feminization of poverty," according to FAO figures showing that more than 550 million women, or 60 percent of the world's rural population, live below the poverty line in rural areas. This represents a 50 percent increase for women over the past 20 years, compared with a 30 percent increase for men.

"Factors contributing to the feminization of rural poverty include, among others, cutbacks in essential services resulting from restructuring policies, environmental and social degradation, and increasing male outmigration," said Leena M. Kirjavainen, director of the Division of Women and People's Participation in Development within the FAO's Sustainable Development Department.

Despite women's critical roles in rural agriculture and household food security, cultural, political, and economic inequities continue to prevent women from reaching their full potential. Compared with men, women have less land, capital, technology, and education throughout the developing world.

"The issues of insecure land tenure and lack of access to land are probably the most crucial aspects faced by many women farmers," Kirjavainen said. Some religions forbid women from owning or inheriting land. Local custom can also stand in the way, such as in Sub-Saharan Africa, where women must have the consent of a male relative to use land. Since land is a major source of collateral in developing countries, women's lack of land rights also keeps them from obtaining credit, an issue that won a great deal of attention in Beijing.

Among the other obstacles to women's agricultural productivity are a lack of appropriate technology, exclusion from most agricultural extension programs, and fewer educational opportunities than men. The Beijing platform specifically addresses these concerns, according to Kindervatter. The document targets gender equity in basic and primary education worldwide, urges more women's involvement in scientific and technical fields, and calls for greater women's access to extension services.

Including women in these areas would also improve agricultural research and policymaking, according to researchers familiar with women's participation in agriculture. Women and their views are poorly represented in agricultural research, even though they have firsthand knowledge that could contribute to successful research efforts.

"Women may be a storehouse for a lot of knowledge and indigenous information that we're not tapping into," said Nandini Gunewardena, a member of the Gender and Poverty Team in the World Bank's Asia Technical Human Resources Division.

Women can provide insight on a wide range of topics with implications for research, from cultural practices to local weather conditions. In forestry, for example, women are major users of noncommercial products such as medicines, herbs, foods, and perfumes, Gunewardena said. They know a great deal about extracting forest products without depleting natural resources.

Impact on Nutrition

Improving women's incomes would improve nutrition in developing countries, particularly among children. Across the developing world, nutrition security is almost the exclusive domain of women. Women's incomes have a far greater impact on household food security and child nutrition than men's incomes, according to researchers.

"Women will spend a higher proportion of their income on the family, and especially on feeding the family," said Katrine Anderson Saito of the Agriculture and Environment Division in the World Bank's West Africa Department. "It's important to ensure that women have access to adequate income."

Because women's income tends to come more frequently and in smaller amounts than men's, it may be spent more readily on daily needs. Overall, men have more control over their income than women do, and men tend to spend more of their income on themselves. To improve women's incomes and thus family nutrition, women need to have their own income-earning activities. "That's the only way to ensure they have access to income over which they have control," Saito said.

Finding Time

A major challenge facing women who need to earn more income could be finding the time for it. Researchers who have studied the daily workloads of men and women say that in every country studied, women work longer hours than men.

"Women have far less time, relative to men, because they must spend a large portion of their time on domestic activities, such as child care, fetching fuel and water, and food processing," said Agnes Quisumbing, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "Reforms are urgently needed that save women's time so that they can spend more time in home-based or outside income-earning activities."

In hard economic times, women take on most of the extra burdens, said Quisumbing. They work longer days and sacrifice their own food to feed their children--even to the detriment of their own health and nutrition.

Environmental degradation exacerbates the problem of time scarcity by adding to women's workload. For example, erosion and deforestation have made firewood more scarce and added to the time that women spend gathering wood. A generation ago, gathering firewood in the Himalayas took no more than two hours a day. Now it takes a full day of trudging further up the mountains to collect a day's supply of fuel.

Beijing Follow-up

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action will be presented to the United Nations General Assembly for endorsement during the body's 50th anniversary this fall. The document covers some areas considered critical for reform by researchers who study the role of women in agriculture, food security, and nutrition. However, the document has not met with universal acclaim.

A UN report on the conference noted that "the treatment of macro-economic issues and their effect on women drew praise from NGOs and developing country delegations--and reservations from developed country delegations." The same report said that environmental issues remained a cause of concern for conference delegates, NGOs, and observers who "complained that environmental issues were given relatively little attention in Beijing."

A consensus has emerged among researchers that these and other critical issues must be addressed by the research community, the development sector, national governments, and civil society if women are to help meet the challenge of feeding the world by 2020.

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