Women & Food Security

Women’s role in Food Security, with regards to:

• The relationship between women and food security;
• The constraints they face as farmers and providers of food security; and
• Recommendations to enhance the position of women as farmers and food providers and to enhance food security

Abstract: Women play a huge role in food security, particularly in agrarian developing communities where the majority of the population is involved in rural agricultural subsistence farming and within this sector, women being the major food crop producer, whilst men are involved with cash crops. 

Women, however, are being constrained in the sense that they in comparison with men have limited or no access to agricultural resources of which the main is, land or tenure. Their lack of access to these resources affects their ability to achieve food security, not only for themselves but also increasingly for female-headed households, where they have no support from their husbands. The gist of the solution seems to be women empowerment.

By: Henry Badenhorst

20 April 2010

Introduction

Women play a key role in food security due to the high percentage of their involvement in agricultural food production, especially in the developing world, such as sub-Saharan Africa and South-Asia. Women’s relationship with food security will be discussed. However, women in developing countries due to cultural and legal restrictions are being constrained in their role in the provision of food security and these constraints will be explored in detail. There are however solutions, such as empowerment, to address the constraints women face in their role as an increasing provider of food security and these solutions will be given as recommendations on how to address these gender constraints.

The Relationship between women and food security

What is food security and what is needed for it to exist? Roberts (2001: 4) explains that “Food security exists when all people, at all time, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” The Interagency Working Group on Food Security and Food Security Advisory Committee, (in, Roberts. 2001:4) argues that “Food security is fundamental to individual human dignity, growth, and survival. We all pay for widespread hunger and malnutrition through sacrificed human potential, lost economic opportunity, social tension, violence, and war. Global food security is essential to world peace and national security.”

Food Security according to Johnson-Welch (2000:325), is not just about technologies or food consumption or economic opportunities, it’s about who’s producing, who’s earning, who’s eating that food and about who is making decisions, it’s about people and gender puts a human face on food security (Johnson-Welch. 2000:325). According to Johnson-Welch (2000:328) depends food security, on multiple factors including food availability, physical and economic access, and the ability to utilize the nutrients, and should, therefore, it could best be achieved an integrated approach to planning and implementation. All but 3 of the 13 cases addressed all three components of food security, suggesting that increasing agricultural production is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve food security. Furthermore, these institutions represented in the case study realized their limitations in addressing each of the components, therefore they developed partnerships with institutions that had complimentary skills (Johnson-Welch. 2000:330-331).

The eradication of extreme poverty is the first and overarching Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and is expressed in terms of two targets halving the proportion of people in extreme poverty and halving the number of people suffering from hunger (Kabeer. 2003:107). Poverty has a gendered face, meaning that gender inequality can in the following ways make women vulnerable to poverty, namely: it distorts their access to assets, as women do not have legal rights to land and property, rendering them economically insecure; it distorts women’s access to public goods and services that improve well-being, such as education and health care; it dictates the unequal distribution of resources within the family, such as traditional beliefs that women eat last and least; it affects their access to employment, in that they earn lower wages or are more prone to work in the informal unskilled sector; it leads to the unequal distribution of care work leading to time burdens on women (UNDP. 2005:887-888).

Women have a strong relationship with food security, since their role as providers of food security is so huge, especially in agrarian developing economies. According to UNICEF: “Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property” (Adaway. 2010). FAO states that “women produce between 60 and 80% of the food in most developing countries and are responsible for half of the world's food production, yet their key role as food producers and providers, and their critical contribution to household food security, is only recently becoming recognized” (Women in Development Service. online). 

In many African countries women provide: 33% of the workforce; 70% of the agricultural workers; 60-80% of the labour to produce food for household consumption and sale; 100% of the processing for basic foodstuffs; 90% of household water and fuelwood; 80% of food storage and transport from farm to village; 90% of the hoeing and weeding work; 60% of the harvesting and marketing activities (Women in Development Service. online). A large portion of the world’s food output originates from the hands of women farmers (Ramachandran. 2006:775). Ultimately, gender inequities in food and nutrition security lie at the root of the cycle of hunger and malnutrition in the region (Ramachandran. 2006:788). Women’s role and importance with regards to food security are thus undeniable.

Even in the developing world, which characterized by narrow cultural and legal gender policies, there is an emerging realization that women have an extremely important role to play in food security. In Nigeria, which faces enormous challenges to improve food security, provide employment and ensure that women are mainstreamed into economic activities, there is an increasing realization of both, the critical role women have to play in agriculture and food production, as well as the empowerment of women as the crucial ingredient to bring about sustainable development (Ukeje. 2004:863). In Nigeria, women play a major role, not only in the production of food crops but also undertake some activities such as trade, to earn cash income (Ukeje. 2004:863). Empowerment of women is starting to dawn as the solution to many developing countries’ solution to gender inequalities and consequent food insecurity and increasingly these realizations lead to change.

Another country in the developing world with huge gender inequalities that leads to food insecurity, is India. As the largest South Asian economy, it’s now largely self-sufficient in food grain and as an emerging exporter, yet endemic pockets of hunger remain, and malnutrition is widespread across the region, with women and children being the greatest sufferers (Ramachandran. 2006:773). The ‘Asian Enigma’ as it is termed, of food scarcity and malnutrition amidst plenty, has defied all attempts at a resolution so far (Ramachandran. 2006:773). “The slow-paced response to gender-based food security efforts reflects the complexity of the relationship between the two. Food security, in its broader connotation, results from the availability of adequate food at country level, household and individual access to adequate and nutritious food, effective consumption and adequate nutrition outcomes, all in a sustained manner. As such, it is intricately linked with a woman’s multiple roles expressed in her productive, reproductive and caring functions” (Ramachandran. 2006:773).

The problem of gender discrimination as being the cause of malnutrition, ill-health, and poverty has been overlooked even denied. Ramachandran (2006:775) notes that the realization that the root of the problem lies in gender discrimination, and which is prevalent in most of South Asia, is gaining credence. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (in, Ramachandran. 2006:775), when referring to India’s malnutrition problems, wrote;”Since maternal undernourishment is causally linked with gender bias against women in general, in India, it appears that the penalty India pays by being unfair to women hits all Indians, boys as well as girls and men as well as women”, a statement that could well apply to the entire South Asian region.

The constraints women face as farmers and providers of food security

Women have limited access to critical resources and services, despite their role as the backbone of food production and provision for family consumption in developing countries. While in most developing countries, both men and women farmers do not have access to adequate resources, women's access is even more limited due to cultural, traditional and sociological factors. (Women in Development Service. online). It is often overlooked in policy formulation, that an increasing number of de facto woman heads of households are struggling to make a livelihood and ensure the food security of their families, while they have no access to credit, technology or extension services (Ramachandran. 2006:778).

A good example of gender constraints is Nigeria, where despite women being the key element in food production, with regards to staple crops such as maize, cassava, cowpeas, melons, and rice, they are faced with many factors constraining their effective participation in achieving food security (Ukeje. 2004:864). Ukeje (2004:864-865) furthermore list the following factors constraining the effective participation of women in achieving food security, namely: 1. Limited access to land and capital; 2. Limited access to credit; 3. Limited access to agricultural inputs; 4. Limited access to education, training and extension services; and 5. Limited access to Research and appropriate technology. FAO mentions an additional constraint, namely women’s access to decision-making.

Limited access to land and capital

Not even 2% of the land, worldwide, is owned by women, while the proportion of female-headed households is growing. The transfer of exclusive land rights to males as heads of households, due to land reform programmes together with the break-up of communal land holdings, has led to the fact that the existence of female-headed households and the rights of married women to a joint share are being ignored (FAO. online). Gender inequality within the agricultural sector particularly pertains to women’s lack of access to land for their productive activities. Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPA’s) have highlighted the problems women are facing in obtaining access to land (Kabeer.2003:100). Even when national legislation is put in place to protect women’s rights with regards to inheritance, customs still prevail it seems, as demonstrated by the 1993 Vietnamese land law which intended protection, but was not enforced (Kabeer.2003:101). Women, thus continue to face unfavorable access to land and other important resources such as credit, agricultural inputs, marketing outlets, etc (Kabeer.2003:105). While women in Sub-Saharan Africa, may have access to land, they usually don’t have title to it, resulting in the insecurity of tenure, which leaves widows, divorced and deserted women in a difficult position, particularly in patri-local societies (Kabeer. 2003:123).

The first constraint to women’s effective participation in achieving food security is limited access to land and capital. In most parts of Nigeria, women have restricted access to land due to cultural, traditional and sociological factors (Ukeje. 2004:864). Land ownership confers on to the owner access to credit, and access inputs such as agricultural extension service, seeds, modern irrigation systems, fertilizers, pesticides and membership of cooperative societies, and without land, the women have no security and have to depend on landowners for employment (Ukeje. 2004: 865). The transfer of exclusive land rights to males as heads of households in Eastern-Nigeria, causing female-headed households and the rights of married women to a joint share, to be ignored, means that women are dependent on the goodwill of their husbands and the availability of land to grow food, alternatively to lease land (Ukeje. 2004:865). 

In India, for example, 86% of the arable land is in private hands since land is passed on as an inheritance to male children, excluding women from this vital production resource, in turn, adversely affecting food security (Ramachandran. 2006:776-778). Agarwal (in, Ramachandran. 2006:776) notes, “In largely agrarian economies, arable land is the most valued form of property and productive resource. It is a wealth creating and livelihood-sustaining asset, and for a significant majority of rural households, it is the single most important source of security against poverty”. South Asia falls in the male farming system category and is part of the belt of classic patriarchy, characterized by extreme forms of gender discrimination and it includes the right to ownership of land (Ramachandran. 2006:776).

Limited access to credit

The second constraint to women’s effective participation in achieving food security is their lack of access to credit. When denied security of tenure, women lack the collateral required for credit or the social status to deal with extension workers on an equal basis (Ramachandran. 2006:778). An IFAD study of Bangladesh in 2000 identified lack of access to land and homesteads as the major factor in the exclusion of the poor from credit providing NGO’s (Ramachandran. 2006:779). Women in Nigeria, for example, are unable to provide the collateral required by lending institutions, should they need credit for the purchase of tools, equipment and other agricultural inputs, due to the fact that access to credit is often based on ownership of land, and since the customary law do not allow women to share land property rights along with their husbands (Ukeje. 2004: 865). Nigerian women’s lack of education and training furthermore limits their ability to gain access to credit from formal financial institutions (Ukeje. 2004: 865). Kabeer (2003:123) mentions another issue that constrains women’s access to credit, namely the fact that women often need their husbands’ permission before being granted loans, for example in Sub-Sahara Africa.

Limited access to agricultural inputs

The third constraint to women’s effective participation in achieving food security is their lack of access to agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. Women do not have access to the same productive resources as men (Johnson-Welch, MacQuarrie & Bunch. 2005:354). In fact, one study found that if women had the same use of certain agricultural inputs as men, agricultural outputs would increase between 7 and 24% (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:354). 

Furthermore, they are frequently not reached by extension services and are rarely members of cooperatives, which often distribute government subsidized inputs to small farmers. In addition, women lack the cash income needed to purchase inputs even when they are subsidized (Ukeje. 2004: 865). Instead, state marketing boards and agricultural co-operatives in Sub-Saharan Africa, have tended to buy from, and distribute supplies, credit and extension services to male-headed households (Kabeer. 2003:123).

Limited access to education, training and extension services

The fourth constraint to women’s effective participation in achieving food security is their lack of access education, training and extension services. There are constraints to the education of women due to cultural or religious beliefs, and very often farm extension services and training only target men (Ukeje. 2004: 865). Based on the belief that training girls amount to waste of resources, as they are not allowed to work and they are also going to be part of another family entirely, has meant that the education of girls is not given adequate attention to by rural families (Ukeje. 2004: 865). 

Their needs tend to be ignored, even in agricultural research and technological innovations. According to the FAO, have only 5% of extension services been addressed to rural women (Ramachandran. 2006:778). No more than 15 per cent of the world’s extension agents are women (Ukeje. 2004: 865). In Nigeria, most of the extension services are focused on cash crops rather than food and subsistence crops where women are mostly concentrated (Ukeje. 2004: 865). The low level of education of small scale farmers in Nigeria, especially women, and who form the bulk of the agricultural labour force, has furthermore remained a major constraint to the adoption of modern farming techniques and the ability to access other inputs necessary for increased productivity in the sector (Ukeje. 2004: 873).

Limited access to Research and appropriate technology

Lastly, limited access to Research and appropriate technology is the final constraint limiting women’s effective participation in achieving food security. Women have little access to the benefits of research and innovation, especially in the domain of food crops, which have a low priority in crop improvement research. Women farmers’ roles and needs are often ignored when devising technology and even when the technology is appropriate for their use, the lack of financial resources, hinders their ability to purchase and use of these technologies by women (Ukeje. 2004: 865).

Access to decision-making

FAO mentions another constraint to women’s ability to achieve food security, namely their limited decision-making powers. Given the traditionally limited role of women in decision-making processes at the household, village and national levels in most cultures, their needs, interests, and constraints are often not reflected in policy-making processes and laws which are important for poverty reduction, food security and environmental sustainability (FAO. online). The causes of women's exclusion from decision-making processes are closely linked to their additional reproductive roles and their household workload, which account for an important share of their time (FAO. online). 

Women in developing countries suffer from ‘time-poverty’. Women’s time burden, furthermore constrain their role in achieving food security (FAO. online). In most rural areas, the most time-consuming activities of women are fetching water and fuelwood, and due to widespread deforestation and desertification, these tasks are becoming more burdensome and are preventing rural women from devoting more time to their productive and income-generating tasks, forcing women in some cases to pass the burden of these activities to their children, usually female children (FAO. online).

Other factors that may constrain the effective participation of women in attaining food security are: intra-household gender bias in favour of male children (Ramachandran. 2006:784); the fact that women’s income, more than men’s, is mainly used to meet the food, health, nutritional needs of the household (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:354); women’s time burden, in having to attend to both domestic responsibilities as well as earning an income and/or being involved with subsistence farming (Blackden et al.2006:78); and Intra-household power equations not only serve to keep women unempowered and subservient, but also directly impact on their individual food and nutrition security and indirectly on that of other family members, particularly children (Ramachandran. 2006:783).

Recommendations

Literature notes several solutions to the issue of women being constrained in their ability to provide and ensure food security. Those mentioned include women empowerment; reducing women’s constraints by improving their access to productive technologies such as seeds and extension services through a linked, gender-informed approach; reducing women’s time and labor burdens; establishing and enforcing legislation to ensure women’s access to land and agricultural resources, and education. 

These solutions offered, are in my opinion sufficient to ensure women’s ability to achieve food security, by removing the constraints that deny them access to the same resources than men. Empowerment seems to be the all-encompassing all-inclusive solution, that automatically includes the other solutions of promoting education and legal gender reform; women’s access to productive technologies; and reducing women’s time burden. The key to achieving food security for women is to empower them.

Women empowerment: The key to food and Nutrition security

Studies conducted by The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), in 2005 reaffirmed that empowering women is the key to ensuring food and nutrition security in the developing world (IFPRI. 2005:317). In 1995 the Beijing Platform for Action set goals for empowering women in developing nations and 5 years later, The Beijing +5, reviewed progress towards these goals (IFPRI. 2005:317). 

IFPRI’s study made findings and recommendations. IFPRI made the following findings, namely: 1. Targeting women instead of men in agricultural technology dissemination, such as through NGO provision of training and credit not only had a greater impact on poverty but empowered women by giving them greater mobility, more control over resources, political awareness and decreased the incidence of domestic violence; 2. Equalizing agricultural inputs, such as access to education, labor, and fertilizer, between men and women, results in significant gains in agricultural output; 3. Gender disparities with relation to property rights of farmland discourage women from investing time and resources in sustainable farming practices which threaten natural resource management; 4. Raising a woman’s status dramatically improves the health, longevity, and productivity of her children, especially their nutritional status; 5. Targeting development projects to women, such as the PROGRESA anti-poverty program in Mexico, benefits the whole household, empowering women to make decisions regarding their children’s medical care and education as well as food expenditures and home repairs; 6. HIV/AIDS severely threatens agricultural production and food security, which in turn heighten women’s susceptibility to HIV exposure and infection, due to their socio-economic status within developing traditional communities; 7. There is no single path to strengthening women’s property rights, due to their complex existing rights (IFPRI. 2005:317-319).

IFPRI’s findings provide empirical evidence that empowering women, leads to greater household food and nutrition security (IFPRI. 2005:319). Key recommendations in this regard, made by IFPRI, include 1. To reform and monitor legal institutions as to create a level playing field for men and women and an environment in which women can realize their full potential, such as changes in property rights laws, guaranteeing women title-ship to land, as well as laws pertaining to divorce, inheritance, and violence against women; 2. To increasing resources to women, such as food aid and access to labour-saving technologies, for example lightweight ploughs and fuel-efficient stoves, has the potential to mitigate the impact of AIDS on food security and reduce the spread of the virus, by reducing high risk behaviours, such as transactional sex, which is the main income for desperate women and orphaned children, as well as mitigating labour burdens in HIV affected households; and 3. To increase women’s ability to participate in the development process, through empowering them to make their own choices and allowing them to respond to increasing economic opportunities and it can be accomplished through education, the removal of barriers that drains the productive use of women’s time and energy, the inclusion of women in the design of agricultural and nutrition programmes, as well as special outreach and training programs for less educated and poorer women (IFPRI. 2005:319).

Empowerment is crucial to strengthen women’s ability to ensure food security.

“Empowering women, who play the most important role as producers of food, is key to achieving food security” (Roberts. 2001:3). According to her is the legal system an important tool for this empowerment, for it is the legal system that “is capable of establishing an equitable and transparent framework for the functioning of a civilized society and for protecting the rights of vulnerable groups including women” (Roberts. 2001:3). Mechanisms are structured through the law for both the short-term approach to responding to hunger in a crisis as well as the long-term approach to respond to hunger with agriculture and development policies aimed at food self-sufficiency (Roberts. 2001:3-4). “Ensuring equity in women’s rights to land, property, capital assets, wages, and livelihood opportunities would undoubtedly impact positively on the issue, but underlying the deep inequity in woman’s access to nutrition is her own unquestioning acceptance of her status as an unequal member of the family and society. 

Eventually, gender empowerment alone is likely to be the key to the resolution of the hunger challenge in the region“(Ramachandran. 2006:788). Only when women in South-Asia begin to feel empowered and equal in status to men, will the stranglehold of gender disparities across the region weaken and break. It is then that food security will become merely an economic issue with simple solutions to the problem (Ramachandran. 2006:788). According to Ukeje (2004:874), do women in Nigeria have the potential to increase agricultural production, but to achieve this they need to be empowered through education and the provision of appropriate technology that is gender sensitive.

Linked, gender-informed approach: The Agriculture-Nutrition advantage project

The second solution to combat these constraints women face, is a linked, gender-informed approach to reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition The Agriculture-Nutrition Advantage project which was implemented over a three year period (2001-2004), in five countries, namely; Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda, to address the hunger problem in Sub-Saharan Africa, by cultivating a network of leaders and advocates in Sub-Saharan Africa who would promote an approach to combat hunger that is effective but rarely used in practice, namely linking agriculture and nutrition, while also taking gender into consideration (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:348). The reason for this approach was based on the “premise that agriculture and nutrition communities were missing opportunities to reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition by failing to combine scarce resources, act collaboratively, and incorporate gender analysis throughout their work” (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:348).

The strength of Agriculture-Nutrition Advantage framework is that it focuses on who is responsible for the food and income pathway to good nutrition, namely women whose primary responsibility it is to provide family nutrition (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:354). Both men and women, however, are engaged in agricultural production, marketing, and post-harvest processing, and earning income, according to the framework (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:354). Although men do all three agricultural activities mentioned above, on a much larger scale, the fact remains that women provide much of the labor in subsistence and increasingly in market agriculture, as well as the fact that they outnumber male farmers in many countries (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:354). Historically, however, agricultural policies and programs have failed to address the production-oriented constraints faced by women, such as women’s lack of access to and control over assets and resources (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:354). A linked, gender-informed approach, such as the Agriculture-Nutrition Advantage framework, reduce women’s constraints by improving their access to productive technologies such as seeds and extension services (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:355).

The third solution to combat these constraints women face, is to reduce women’s time and labor burdens, which can lead to improved family nutrition, as a program, whereby portable solar dryers were introduced into rural areas to dry food, saving women’s labor time, in Tanzania proved (Johnson-Welch et al. 2005:355). Development interventions to reduce women's workload can significantly enhance their contribution to household food security, such as the provision of water supplies; the introduction of light transport facilities to carry fuelwood, farm produce and other loads; the introduction of labor-saving agricultural tools; and the introduction of grinding mills and other crop processing equipment are crucial means of freeing women's time (FAO. online). These technologies not only create possibilities for women to enter into more income-generating activities but also help to reduce their stress and to improve women’s health and nutrition (FAO. online). Relieving women from fetching water and fuelwood and food processing would allow them to have more time for productive work and would enable their children to attend school (FAO. online).

Another area of reform needed is the legal and administrative field. Blackden et al (2006:80) suggest that equity must be improved in resource access and control in agriculture, where a gender-informed growth agenda would have to address improving women’s greater land ownership and security of tenure and more equal access to modern inputs. While some of these changes can be made possible through legislation, other changes will depend on changes in intra-household relations, which are less amenable through government intervention (Blackden et al. 2006:80). A combination of public policy, legal reforms, and implementation of existing laws regarding poverty-reducing development, (especially addressed toward obstacles faced by women), will ultimately improve access to food by the poor and begin to eliminate chronic hunger and malnutrition (Roberts. 2001:29). As stated by the Deputy Secretary of the United Nations, Ismat Kittani at the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, “The challenge is how to make the existing laws take effect in the daily lives of women.” (Roberts. 2001:29).

Conclusion

Women play a huge role in food security, particularly in agrarian developing communities where the majority of the population is involved in rural agricultural subsistence farming and within this sector, women being the major food crop producer, whilst men are involved with cash crops. Women, however, are being constrained in the sense that they in comparison with men have limited or no access to agricultural resources of which the main is, land or tenure. Their lack of access to these resources affects their ability to achieve food security, not only for themselves but also increasingly for female-headed households, where they have no support from their husbands. 

The gist of the solution seems to be women empowerment and it can be done through education, legal reforms; reducing women’s time burden; improving women’s access to the same agricultural resources than men; and by a linked, gender-informed approach to reducing poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. To ensure our food security, gender discrimination with regards to food production must be eliminated. Traditions and laws of patriarchal agrarian and developing economies where agriculture is the main source of income needs to be reformed. International pressure in the form of International law, Universal Human Rights and NGO’s must continually be applied until women in these developing countries are no longer constrained to not only ensure their food security, but also ours in the developed world.

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