Global forum on food security and nutrition

Contributions received

Kuruppacharil V. Peter Peter, World Noni Research Foundation, India

"Feminisation of agriculture" is now frequently used as men move to cities for better livelihood. Kerala the southern state of India has shown the way for women empowerment through more involvement in agriculture and related activities. "Self Help Group" has emerged as a viable and socially accepted group. There are even all women farming green armies getting involved in waste disposal, sowing, transplanting, weeding, fertilizing, irrigation, harvesting and post harvest handling including value addition. There are also problems of liquor addition among men which leads to disharmony in families. Kerala has more women than men. There are matriarchal systems followed in a few Hindu and Muslim sections. The very famous court pronouncement giving equal right to sons and daughters to inherited property has further made women important partners in development. The Kerala Agricultural University has established A CENTRE FOR GENDER CONCERNS which conducts research on women empowerment. There are even women climbers to harvest coconuts from 30 feet tall trees. The success story of Poultry raising by self help group is worth study. There are public canteens run by women only.

Nitya Rao, facilitator of the discussion, School of International Development and LANSA, India

Thank you Dr Peter for your contribution. The Kudumbashree programme in Kerala has indeed encouraged groups of women farmers to undertake collective farming. While such policy recognition clearly support's women's empowerment, do any of the studies undertaken by KAU you mention specifically focus on food security and nutritional outcomes? Do migrant men contribute incomes to their families, or is a large percent spent on liquor? Secondly, while women are clearly involved in all the activities from planting to post-harvest processing, do they receive any support in terms of improved inputs or equipment to help reduce the drudgery and time involved in some of these activities?

Elvis Njabe, Denmark

Woman and food security

Food Security depends on some basic pillars like agricultural production, economics and nutritional status for its complement. The involvement of women dates since ancient agriculture before the industrial revolution. However there are enormous constraints like social, cultural and economic aspects.

Statistics shows that in a region like Sub-Saharan Africa, 80% women are involved in processing food crops, providing household water and fuelwood and about 90% are involved in hoeing and weeding of farmland. Notwithstanding the good gender agricultural policies and programmes that are in place, the strong cultural stigma of women's land rights, educational level and access to agro-credit, still stand as great limiting factors.

However, what do policy makers do with this cultural stigma of women having certain rights and access?

Kind Regards 

NJABE

Yaounde- Cameroon​

Nitya Rao, facilitator of the discussion, School of International Development and LANSA, India

Thanks Dr Njabe, could you clarify what the gender agricultural policies and programmes are? If they provide women recognition as farmers, then they should contribute to also changing social norms and cultural stigma that invisibilise women's contributions? Within the discussions on unpaid care work, the 3 Rs framework is now the major demand within feminist advocacy. The first step is to recognise women's work. If this is adequately done in policy, the other two, namely, reduce and redistribute, could potentially follow. In the case of agricultural work, this would involve developing appropriate tools and technologies to support and reduce women's work.

Paul Rigterink, Potomac Technical Advisors, United States of America

I am working with the agriculture engineers at the University of Cordoba in Monteria Colombia to start a video training program called “Success in Cordoba and Uraba”.  In this program we will make videos of extremely poor Colombian citizens who have made a successful first step out of poverty using better agricultural procedures. It is expected that international development personnel will help write the video scripts. Examples of the videos we will make include videos of people who have doubled their income using better cassava planting procedures developed at the University of Cordoba, videos of people who have successfully overcome the technological hurdle of producing 3-10 chickens to producing 50-1000 chickens, and videos of people who have successfully overcome the technological hurdle of producing 1-5 pigs to producing 15-50 pigs.  These videos will be distributed to 20 municipios in Cordoba (there are 30 but the 10 agriculture engineers only work in 20) so that other campesinos can do use the same ideas. In these You Tube vocational videos we expect to capture experiences about women’s roles in agriculture and agribusiness value chains in order to shape policies and interventions to recognize and support women’s contribution to livelihood security.

Md. Sirajul Islam, BRAC, Bangladesh

We all know that food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells in an effort to produce energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth. Historically, people secured food through two methods: hunting and gathering, and agriculture. The primitive method of securing food was dominated by men. But when agriculture came to action in securing food the role of women were obvious. We all know that the women is the pioneer of agriculture. But in country like Bangladesh in a men dominating households and societies these role seldom recognized. Earlier women were more engaged on post harvest activities but recently they are very much engaged in on farm activities like seeding/transplanting, intercultural operations and harvesting. Very often women engagement in agriculture is treated as household work and thus gets less recognition. Even in the paid labour there exists huge wage differences between men and women. Since nutrition cannot be achieved without agriculture, the role and contribution of women in agriculture must be evaluated. This lead in changing the societal norms and traditions.