FAO in North America

Measuring women’s empowerment

Submitted by Teresa Buerkle on February 29, 2012

USAID launched its Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index during the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York yesterday. The Index, developed under the US Government’s Feed the Future initiative, will help capture women’s empowerment and inclusion levels in the agricultural sector by looking at such areas as time burdens, community leadership, and control over income and resources. It also measures women’s empowerment relative to the men within their households.

By looking beyond indicators like income and education, the Index aims to present a more precise picture that can help national governments and development partners better monitor the effectiveness of their efforts towards empowering women in the global fight against hunger and poverty.

At the launch in New York, FAO Deputy Director-General Ann Tutwiler welcomed the initiative as an “important contribution”:

“We all agree on the need to have better metrics to both measure our progress, but more importantly, to identify where the needs are.

“As development professionals, we want to do everything, and we want to do everything everywhere. Being able to identify where the biggest intervention points are is important for governments, donors and development agencies.”

Developed in partnership with the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative of Oxford University, the Index has been piloted in Bangladesh, Guatemala and Uganda.

Read more on the USAID Impact blog.

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Rural women in UN spotlight

Submitted by Teresa Buerkle on February 28, 2012

Rural women are at the top of the agenda as the UN Commission on the Status of Women meets in New York over the next two weeks. This is good news since globally rural women lag behind rural men and urban women in all Millennium Development Goal indicators, according to a new fact sheet produced by FAO and its UN partners.

FAO’s most recent State of Food and Agriculture report found that just giving women the same access as men to land, credit, tools, improved seeds and other agricultural resources could increase production on women’s farms in developing countries by 20 to 30 percent – enough to feed up to 150 million more of the world’s hungry people.

Women make up, on average, 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries. To boost global food production by the 60 percent FAO estimates is required to feed a global population of over 9 billion in 2050, agriculture – particularly smallholder agriculture in which women are the driving force – will need to play a much more effective role.

Worldwide, less than 20 percent of agricultural landholders are women due to legal and cultural constraints in land inheritance, ownership and use. Women represent fewer than 5 percent of all agricultural landholders in North Africa and West Asia, while across sub-Saharan Africa, they make up on average 15 percent.

And disparities in progress between men and women and between urban and rural areas persist beyond the agriculture sector. Rural girls are more likely to be out of school than rural boys and twice as likely as urban girls to be out of school. Rural women are far likelier to be illiterate, under- or unemployed, to suffer domestic violence and to have less access to services, including prenatal services, than urban women.

Speaking on behalf of the three Rome-based food agencies at the Commission’s opening session yesterday, FAO Deputy Director-General Ann Tutwiler highlighted the devastating costs of such inequality for future generations:

“Malnourished rural girls become malnourished rural mothers, whose children are 40 percent more likely to die before their fifth birthday than children born in a city. If the cycle is not broken, it will continue to undermine children’s mental and physical development, productivity and health.”

Watch her full address below:

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How can women’s land rights be secured?

Submitted by Teresa Buerkle on January 25, 2012

Photo: ©FAOThe International Land Coalition (ILC) Land Portal and FAO’s Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition are currently hosting an online discussion – “How can women’s land rights be secured?” The organizers hope the discussion will enrich the debate in New York at the 56th Commission on the Status of Women (27 February to 9 March, New York), which is focusing this year on the empowerment of rural women.

The ILC, FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development are organizing a side-event – “How can women’s land rights be secured? Learning from successful examples” – at the CSW on 1 March 2012.

Have examples to share of women successfully claiming their land rights? Effective policies and tools that can be replicated? Join the lively discussion already under way.

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Mind the gap

Submitted by Teresa Buerkle on December 21, 2011

FAO has just launched a new website dedicated to the organization’s latest research and knowledge about closing the gender gap in agriculture to achieve food security for all.

Men and women in agriculture: closing the gap features the findings and policy recommendations of the State of Food and Agriculture 2011 (SOFA): “Women in agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development”, and will be regularly updated with FAO’s latest research on the subject.

The site offers a topical approach to closing the gender gap in access to agricultural resources, with key facts and policy recommendations broken down by themes, including education, financial services, information and extension, land, livestock, rural employment, farm labour and technologies.

“Policy-makers, FAO, development agencies, everyone needs to understand that agricultural policy is gender policy because women are everywhere in this sector, virtually any intervention in agriculture is going to have gender impacts so agriculture is gender and gender is agriculture,” explains Terri Raney, the team leader and FAO Senior Economist behind SOFA 2011.

According to SOFA 2011, the agriculture sector is underperforming in many developing countries in part because women have consistently less access than men to agricultural assets, inputs and services and to rural employment opportunities. Increasing women’s access to land, livestock, education, financial services, extension, technology and rural employment would boost their productivity by 20 to 30 percent, which alone could lift 100–150 million people out of hunger, and generate gains in food security, economic growth and social welfare, the report says.

“We want to share our knowledge as widely and efficiently as possible in order to accelerate progress in women’s access to agricultural resources, which is imperative to achieve global food security,” explains Marcella Villareal, Director of FAO’s Gender, Rural Employment and Equity.

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Report charts pathway to tackling hunger and climate change

Submitted by Teresa Buerkle on November 21, 2011

A new report issued in the run up to the next round of UN climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, later this month, lays out key policy responses to the global challenge of feeding a world faced with climate change, rapid population growth, poverty, food price spikes and degraded ecosystems.

“Business as usual in our globally interconnected food system will not bring us food security and environmental sustainability,” says the report, Achieving food security in the face of climate change – a summary for policy makers from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, an international group of experts convened by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

The report’s recommendations include significant increases in global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems over the next decade; sustainably intensifying agricultural production while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture; and reducing losses and waste in the food system.

No small challenge, according to Sir John Beddington, the UK’s chief scientific adviser and chair of the Commission:

“It’s about reorienting the whole global food system – not just agricultural production, and not just in developing countries. We need a socially equitable, global approach to produce the funding, policy, management and regional initiatives that will deliver nutrition, income and climate benefits for all.”

The Commission’s final report, upon which the recommendations are based, will be released early in 2012.

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New gender in agriculture website

Submitted by admin on November 4, 2011

©FAO/Alessandra BenedettiThe World Bank has just launched a new website aimed at providing access to resources, tools and information to help efforts to incorporate gender into agricultural development.

Designed as a forum for the sharing of analytical and advisory services on a wide range of gender-related topics, Genderinag.org provides a single source for specialists, practitioners and academics to exchange ideas and lessons from efforts to cut poverty through sustainable rural development.

The site, produced in collaboration with FAO and IFAD, was developed thanks to the Bank’s Gender Action Plan, established in 2007 to improve women’s economic opportunity by increasing access to land, labor, agriculture and financial services, and by ensuring that women’s needs for infrastructure are better served.

FAO’s latest State of Food and Agriculture report estimates that closing the gender gap in access to agricultural resources could reduce the number of hungry people worldwide by 100 to 150 million.

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Counting on girls in agriculture and rural development

Submitted by Rachel Friedman on October 13, 2011

A new Chicago Council on Global Affairs report, Girls Grow: A Vital Force in Rural Economies, highlights actions that should be taken to support and empower adolescent girls to play an active role in society. The report serves as part of a larger effort of the Coalition for Adolescent Girls to advocate for and empower young girls in developing countries. One of the recommendations for action addresses women’s important role in food production, arguing for girls to be “major stakeholders in agriculture and natural resource management.” Shifting inheritance laws, land tenure rights, and access to financing and agricultural resources are all important elements in fostering the successful contribution of adolescent girls to agricultural development, and ultimately food security.

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Entering a ‘Year of Agriculture’

Submitted by Rachel Friedman on October 12, 2011

The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) kicked off their ‘Year of Agriculture‘ with the first in a series of development roundtables. Visiting scholar Robert Thompson discussed ‘The Challenge of Feeding Nine Billion by Mid-Century.’  The presentation provided context for issues associated with feeding a growing global population – increasing food production, improving infrastructure to store and transport crops, managing natural resources in a sustainable manner – and offered up Thompson’s recommendations for achieving these goals in the coming years. Watch the video of the presentation on the SAIS website.

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Leveling the ploughing field for women

Submitted by Teresa Buerkle on September 19, 2011

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced today that the US government will allocate $5 million this year to fund innovative approaches to promoting gender equality in agriculture.

Speaking in New York during a panel discussion on women and agriculture convened on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary Clinton said the funds would be used “to expand our knowledge base.”

“We know that women farmers represent a major untapped resource, but we don’t know nearly enough about which approaches will change that. We need concentrated research about the obstacles facing women farmers worldwide so that we know how to remove them so women can contribute even more.”

“If all farmers, men and women, had access to the same resources we could increase agricultural output by 20-30 percent,” Clinton said, echoing the conclusions of FAO’s latest State of Food and Agriculture report, which found that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, women could increase yields on their farms by 20-30 percent. “That would feed an additional 150 million people every year.”

Calling for research proposals and programs to support women farmers, Clinton said:

“When we liberate the economic potential of women we elevate the economic performance of communities, nations and the world.”

The panel, which was moderated by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, included FAO Director-General elect Jose Graziano da Silva, who shared his experiences with Brazil’s “Zero Hunger” programme, which he coordinated as Brazilian Extraordinary Minister of Food Security and the Fight Against Hunger.

Graziano cited the important role of women not only in food production, but also with regard to food access and distribution. “Mothers ensure that ‘food first’ is not a slogan,” he said.

“You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to do good things,” Graziano added, saying that the cash transfers implemented in Brazil as part of Zero Hunger were modeled on the U.S. food stamp programme.

Other panelists included President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania; Rajiv Shah, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development; Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever; Kathy Spahn, President and CEO of Helen Keller International; and Reema Nanavaty, Director of the Economic and Rural Development for the Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India.

View the full panel discussion below or read the complete transcript on the U.S. State Department website.

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Malthus in the modern era

Submitted by Rachel Friedman on July 15, 2011

British scholar Thomas Malthus posited that resource scarcity, famine and disease would eventually check the rapidly growing global population. While population has risen precipitously since Malthus’s time and is projected to hit 7 billion in October, the issue of resource scarcity continues to be a concern, particularly with regards to feeding a hungry planet.

On the heels of World Population Day on July 11, the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Population Reference Bureau organized the second annual Malthus Lecture. Ismail Serageldin, director of the Library of Alexandria, presented the state of global hunger and the challenges that must be overcome in order to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe. In his lecture, Dr. Serageldin emphasized that “we must abolish hunger” but makes clear that a suite of solutions are necessary and “looking for a silver bullet would be pointless”.

Video of the lecture and Dr. Serageldin’s presentation slides are available online.

An article in this week’s Time Magazine – A Future of Price Spikes – also looks at the challenges facing the global food system and what’s needed to avoid the “Malthusian conclusion”.

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