August 10, 1995

New Report Finds Women Offer Untapped Potential for Boosting Food Production in the Developing World

WASHINGTON, D.C.--A new report by a leading international research group finds that women in developing countries face significant barriers in performing their crucial roles in growing food crops and preventing malnutrition among children. The report finds that not removing these barriers could severely compromise food security, health care, and nutrition in the coming years. The report released today by the Washington, D.C.-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) synthesizes the latest data on women's roles in food production, preparation, and consumption in 15 developing countries. It provides new insights into women and agriculture, which is particularly timely as representatives from 140 countries prepare to meet at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, next month.

Today, 800 million people go to bed hungry each day. In the coming decades, crop yields must increase tremendously to meet the needs of the growing population. The report finds that an untapped source of productivity gains could lie in addressing gender disparities in agriculture.

"Though men receive most of the agricultural extension services and new technologies, women are the caretakers of the food supply in developing countries," said Agnes R. Quisumbing, research fellow at IFPRI and lead author of the report, "Women: The Key to Food Security." Quisumbing's coauthors are Lynn R. Brown, Hilary Sims Feldstein, Lawrence Haddad, and Christine Peņa, all researchers with IFPRI. "However, there are countless barriers in place that belittle this role and hinder women's efforts to grow and harvest crops. If women were given the same resources as men, developing countries would see significant increases in agricultural productivity. Reforms are needed on several fronts--from education and training to landownership."

The report also finds that addressing gender disparities in other aspects of the household could improve the nutrition and health of children. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, "women, relative to men, tend to spend their income disproportionately on food for the family." The report notes that men retain discretionary control over a higher proportion of their own incomes for personal expenditures.

"Women's incomes have a far greater impact on household food security and on improving child health and nutrition than men's incomes," said Quisumbing. "But women spend most of their time on activities like fetching water and fuelwood and grinding grain. If time-saving technologies enabled women to spend more of their time on home-based and outside income-generating activities, this would improve the nutrition of children."

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), women account for more than half of the labor required to produce the food consumed in developing countries and perhaps three-fourths of the labor for food in Africa. In Asia women work as hired agricultural laborers or unpaid family workers, contributing between 10 and 50 percent of the labor needed for various crops. In Latin America, women play a key role in family farming.

The report finds that despite women's importance in agricultural production, they usually have weak land rights. Such insecurity of land tenure reduces the likelihood that women will adopt environmentally sustainable agricultural practices and compromises women's ability to obtain credit because land is often the only acceptable form of collateral. Women also own or have access to fewer tools than men, and until recently most new agricultural technology and machinery that has been introduced has been inappropriate to women's needs. Women are often excluded from agricultural extension programs, which mainly target men. The report notes that if more extension agents and agricultural research scientists were women, extension services and agricultural technologies could be made more appropriate to female farmers. The representation of women in these fields is currently "minuscule."

Women are also operating at far lower educational levels than men in developing countries. In the early 1980s, more than two-thirds of all women were illiterate. "Underinvestment in women's education has high opportunity costs in terms of forgone agricultural output and incomes," said Quisumbing. "Better-educated farmers are more likely to adopt new technologies." The report also notes, however, the unrecognized potential of women's indigenous knowledge about seeds and growing systems.

The report identifies a growing body of evidence showing that if men and women had equal access to agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer and technologies, gains in agricultural output would be substantial. Yields among Kenyan women farmers could increase by 9 to 24 percent if women had the same experience, education, and inputs as men. Yields could increase by 24 percent if all women farmers had primary schooling in Kenya.

Strong gender biases in food allocation decisions exist within households in some areas, mainly in South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan), according to the report. "Our data show a strong pro-male and pro-adult bias in terms of the quantity of food intake in South Asia, which has detrimental effects on the health and nutritional status of women and girls," said Quisumbing. Quantity and quality of health care and survival probabilities after diarrhea episodes are all reported to favor boys, the report finds. In India, the length of time a mother breast-feeds is longer for boys, partly because there is less urgency to have another child after a boy. The risk of dying from severe malnutrition is more than twice as high for girls than for boys. There is less evidence of such pro-male biases in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Given women's roles in agricultural production, domestic production (food processing and fetching water and fuelwood), and reproduction, the study finds that women in developing countries are relatively short of time compared with men. In a five-country study, time recorded in direct child care was generally less than one hour.

"Women constantly face trade-offs in their time allocation decisions," said Quisumbing. "During times of economic hardship, the burden of adjustment is often assumed by women. They absorb shocks to household welfare by expanding their already tightly stretched working day and by sacrificing their own portions of food for children. This pattern occurs often to the detriment of women's own health and nutrition.

"We must focus on protecting women's nutritional status for their own benefit and for their children's benefit," continued Quisumbing. "Better-nourished mothers lead to higher-birth-weight infants." Birth weight is the single biggest determinant of neonatal and infant mortality and of child growth up to the age of seven. Additionally, poor micronutrient status of HIV-infected pregnant women has been shown to influence whether an infant is born HIV infected. Up to 30 percent of pregnant women in some of the worst-affected countries are HIV positive.

The study makes the following policy recommendations:

• Increase women's access to physical capital (land, machinery, and tools) and human capital (education and extension services) in agriculture,

• Increase women's ability to earn agricultural and nonagricultural income, and

• Protect women's health and nutritional status through energy and time-saving technologies and appropriate policies.