Women in developing countries face significant barriers in growing food crops and properly feeding their children, a new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) finds. Not removing these barriers could severely compromise future food security, health care, and nutrition, according to the report which synthesizes new data on women's roles in food production, preparation, and consumption in 15 developing countries.
"Though men receive most of the agricultural extension services and new technologies, women are the caretakers of the food supply in developing countries," says Agnes R. Quisumbing, research fellow at IFPRI and lead author of the report, "Women: The Key to Food Security." Quisumbing's coauthors are Lynn R. Brown, Hilary Sims Feldstein, Lawrence Haddad, and Christine Pena, all researchers with IFPRI.
"There are countless barriers in place that belittle this role and hinder women's efforts to grow and harvest crops. If women were given the same resources as men, developing countries would see significant increases in agricultural productivity. Reforms are needed on several fronts--from education and training to land ownership," according to the report.
The report also finds that addressing gender disparities in other aspects of the household could improve the nutrition and health of children. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, "Women, relative to men, tend to spend their income disproportionately on food for the family. Women's incomes have a far greater impact on household food security and on improving child health and nutrition than men's incomes," says Quisumbing. "But women spend most of their time on activities like fetching water and fuelwood and grinding grain. If time-saving technologies enabled women to spend more of their time on home-based and outside income-generating activities, this would improve the nutrition of children."
According to findings of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), women account for more than half of the labor required to produce the food consumed in developing countries and perhaps three-fourths of the labor for food production in Africa. In Asia, women work as hired agricultural laborers or unpaid family workers, contributing between 10 and 50 percent of the labor needed for growing various crops. In Latin America, women play a key role in family farming.
The report finds that despite women's importance in agricultural production, they usually have weak land rights. Insecurity of land tenure reduces the likelihood that women will adopt environmentally sustainable agricultural practices and compromises women's ability to obtain credit because land is often the only acceptable form of collateral.
Women also own or have access to fewer tools than men, and until recently most new agricultural technology and machinery that has been introduced was inappropriate to women's needs. Women are often excluded from agricultural extension programs, which mainly target men. The report notes that if more extension agents and agricultural scientists were women, extension services and agricultural technologies could be made more appropriate to female farmers. The representation of women in these activities is currently "minuscule."
Women are also less educated than men in developing countries. In Asia, one out of two women is illiterate, in sub-Saharan Africa two out of three. "Underinvestment in women's education has high opportunity costs in terms of foregone agricultural output and incomes," says Quisumbing. "Better-educated farmers are more likely to adopt new technologies." The report notes the unrecognized potential of women's indigenous knowledge about seeds and growing systems.
If men and women had equal access to agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer and technologies, gains in agricultural output would be substantial. Yields among Kenyan women farmers could increase by 9 to 24 percent if women had the same experience, education, and inputs as men.
Strong gender biases in food allocation decisions exist within households in some areas, mainly in South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan), according to the report. "Our data show a strong pro-male and pro-adult bias in terms of the quantity of food intake in South Asia, which has detrimental effects on the health and nutritional status of women and girls," says Quisumbing. The risk of dying from severe malnutrition is more than twice as high for girls than for boys. There is less evidence of such pro-male biases in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
Given women's roles in agricultural production, domestic production (food processing and fetching water and fuelwood), and reproduction, the study finds that women in developing countries are short of time compared with men. In a five-country study, time recorded in direct child care was generally less than one hour. "Women constantly face trade-offs in their time allocation decisions," says Quisumbing. "During times of economic hardship, the burden of adjustment is often assumed by women. They absorb shocks to household welfare by expanding their already tightly stretched working day and by sacrificing their own portions of food for children. This pattern occurs often to the detriment of women's own health and nutrition. "We must focus on protecting women's nutritional status for their own benefit and for their children's benefit," adds Quisumbing.
The study makes the following policy recommendations:
(IFPRI news release)