Women produce food, but the last to eat it

by Kanaga Raja

Women account for 70% of the world’s hungry and suffer from malnutrition and food insecurity.

While women produce and provide food, they still account for 70% of the world’s hungry and are disproportionately affected by malnutrition and food insecurity, according to the latest report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

 The report by Ms Hilal Elver was presented to the Human Rights Council during its recently concluded thirty-first session.

 In her report, Ms Elver said that notwithstanding the legal framework designed to protect them, women experience poverty and hunger at disproportionate levels.

 “Institutionalised gender discrimination and violence still impose barriers that prevent women from enjoying their economic, social and cultural rights and specifically the right to adequate food and nutrition, and the status of women and girls has not substantially improved, despite recurrent calls for the inclusion of a gender perspective to development programs and to social policies.”

 Disproportionate

According to the Special Rapporteur, women account for 70% of the world’s hungry and are disproportionately affected by malnutrition and food insecurity.

 This ratio is overwhelming in some developing and Least Developed Countries; for example, more than one third of women in several South Asian countries are underweight.

 “Poor nutrition, lack of healthcare, social protection, limited economic opportunities and general neglect has excluded more women from global society than the number of men killed in 20th century wars, combined,” said Ms Elver. On the other hand, she added, female farmers are responsible for cultivating, ploughing and harvesting more than 50% of the world’s food.

 In sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, women produce up to 80% of basic foodstuffs and in Asia women constitute 50-90% of the labour force dedicated to rice production.

 Access

“Although women produce and provide food they are often the last ones to access food for themselves,” said the report, noting that gender gaps are observed in access to all productive resources, such as land, seeds, fertilizers, pest control measures and mechanical tools, credit and extension services.

 According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), “... inequalities between men and women in their access to productive resources, services and opportunities are one of the causes of under-performance in the agriculture sector, and contribute to deficiencies in food and nutrition security, economic growth and overall development.”  

“Improving this situation for women would lead to important advantages for society as a whole. It is estimated that closing the gender gap in agricultural yields would increase agricultural output in developing countries by between 2.5 and 4%. This in turn could reduce the number of undernourished people in the world in the order of 12-17%, or as much as 150 million people,” said the Special Rapporteur.

 According to the rights expert, girls and women suffer from discrimination in relation to their right to food at all stages in life.

 Food

In many countries, females receive less food than their male partners, due to a lower social status. In extreme cases, a preference for male children may lead to female infanticide, including by deprivation of food.

 “Structural violence is an under-examined barrier to women’s right to adequate food and nutrition. Gender-based violence, which is a primary form of discrimination, impedes women from engaging in their own right to adequate food and nutrition, and efforts to overcome hunger and malnutrition.”

 Furthermore, girls and adolescent women induced by tradition or forced into child marriage and adolescent pregnancy, suffer the consequences of a high work burden and deprivation of their child rights, including their right to adequate nutrition and education.

Adolescent pregnancy is a typical outcome of child marriage and complications during pregnancy and childbirth are the second largest cause of death for 15-19 year-old girls globally.

 Disconnects

According to the Special Rapporteur, the reasons behind the failure of women’s access to adequate food can arguably be linked to two structural disconnects which exist at the cross-roads between women’s rights and the right to food.

 The first disconnect refers to the failure in international law to fully endow women with their right to food, while the second disconnect concerns the structural separation of nutrition from the human right to adequate food, which has focused on increasing food production and not on broad and equal food access.

 Women additionally face numerous legal barriers in domestic law, which prevents them from fully realising their right to food, including property rights, land rights and intellectual property rights.

 These legal barriers also prevent women from maintaining livelihoods that provide sustainable incomes necessary to purchase food, thus challenging women’s right to food and ability to achieve food security.

 “Rather than enabling women to secure stable livelihoods, both formal and customary laws are often barriers to women’s economic independence.”

 The report said that legal barriers also prevent men and women from equally benefiting from paid employment through the sanctioning of systems of overt discrimination against women in the workplace.As of 2014, 77 out of 140 countries with reported data still had legal restrictions on the type of paid employment activities available to women. Even when equal employment opportunities are available, equal pay is not: only 59 countries from the same sample of countries legally require equal pay for work of equal value.

-TWN