Gender and food security

Gender inequality both leads to and is a result of food insecurity. According to estimates women and girls make up 60% of the world's chronically hungry and little progress has been made in ensuring the equal right to food for women enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Women face discrimination both in education and employment opportunities and within the household, where their bargaining power is lower. On the other hand, gender equality is described as instrumental to ending malnutrition and hunger. Women tend to be responsible for food preparation and childcare within the family and are more likely to be spent their income on food and their children’s needs. The gendered aspects of food security are visible along the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilization and stability, as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

According to the World Food Summit of 1996, food availability is defined as sufficient quantities of foods available on a consistent basis. Women play an important role in food production, processing, distribution and marketing. They often work as unpaid family workers, are involved in subsistence farming and represent about 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, varying from 20% in Latin America to 50% in Eastern and Southeastern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, women face discrimination in access to land, credit, technologies, finance and other services. Empirical studies suggest that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, women could boost their yields by 20–30%; raising the overall agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4%. While those are rough estimates, the significant positive impact of closing the gender gap on agricultural productivity cannot be denied.

Women's ability to own or inherit land is restricted in much of the developing world. Even in countries where women are legally permitted to own land, such as Uganda, research from Women’s Land Link Africa shows that cultural norms and customs have excluded them from obtaining land ownership in practice. Globally, women own less than 20% of agricultural land. Typically, in most of the developing countries, a woman’s use of land is restricted to temporary cultivation rights, allocated to her by her husband, and in exchange, she provides food and other goods for the household. She is not able to pass the land on to her heirs nor she will be entrusted with the land if her husband dies; the land is automatically granted to her husband’s family or any male children the couple may have produced. Bina Agarwal, a development economist known for her work on women's property rights, states "the single most important factor affecting women’s situation is the gender gap in command over property." Agarwal claims that in many cases, rural women demand land rights, but she also confirms that some cases exist in which women do not identify land rights as a major problem. On the other hand, Cecile Jackson objects the claim of Agarwal on the ground that it is important to focus on gendering land questions instead of treating land issues only in terms of land rights of women as Agarwal does. Gendering land questions requires more ethnographic research of social relations around land.

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