Abstract
Can investing in women’s agriculture increase productivity? This paper argues that it can. We assess climate and gender bias impacts on women’s production in the global South and North and challenge the male model of agricultural development to argue further that women’s farming approaches can be more sustainable. Level-based analysis (global, regional, local) draws on a literature review, including the authors’ published longitudinal field research in Ghana and the United States. Women farmers are shown to be undervalued and to work harder, with fewer resources, for less compensation; gender bias challenges are shared globally while economic disparities differentiate; breaches of distributive, gender, and intergenerational justices as well as compromise of food sovereignty affect women everywhere. We conclude that investing in women’s agriculture needs more than standard approaches of capital and technology investment. Effective ‘investment’ would include systemic interventions into agricultural policy, governance, education, and industry; be directed at men as well as women; and use gender metrics, for example, quotas, budgets, vulnerability and impacts assessments, to generate assessment reports and track gender parity in agriculture. Increasing women’s access, capacity, and productivity cannot succeed without men’s awareness and proactivity. Systemic change can increase productivity and sustainability.
Highlights
According to the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), almost half (45%) of the global population, i.e., 3.1 billion people, live in rural areas
In the global North, our research focuses on the U.S, including Noll’s field work using interviews and focus groups [15], but is broader in its regional discussion of Europe and Australia, with analysis at the country level, including Canada and European countries based on available research
Part of the challenge of responding to humanitarian crises in hunger is that scale in agriculture is inversely proportional to sustainability because large scale relies on mass monoculture production that depends on synthetic fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and other extension inputs that include proven carcinogens; for example, Monsanto’s use of glyphosate in its herbicide, Roundup, has recently been connected to liver cancer
Summary
According to the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), almost half (45%) of the global population, i.e., 3.1 billion people, live in rural areas. 2.5 billion of these rural dwellers depend on agriculture for their livelihood and means of subsistence [1]. A quarter of the world’s population are women living in rural areas. It can be concluded that 1.73 billion women live in rural areas, and that for 1.4 billion of these women, agriculture is their primary livelihood. Just over a third of these women, i.e., 500 million, are ‘peasants’ who do not own land and receive barely 5% of available agricultural resources [1]. Women make up 43% of the workforce in the global
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