Close your eyes. Imagine a farmer working in a field, back bending, arms swinging up above the head and then down towards the earth as a hoe slices into the ground. In your mind, what is the gender of the farmer? If the image is of a man, you’d probably be wrong. Male stereotypes dominate the world of farming, but it is women who account for 70-80 percent of household food security in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite women being the base of food security in African countries, their role has in the past been ignored by policy makers. The result is that gender inequalities have gone unchecked, conspiring against food security for women and preventing them from playing a fulfilled role in the food security situations of their communities.
The consequences of food insecurity are dire. Lack of food means poorer nutrition for mothers and their children and thus a deteriorating health situation. It leads to the breakdown of communities and family structures, as families are forced to migrate in search of livelihoods. Food insecurity may force women into prostitution and lead to a rise in child trafficking.
Many factors conspire against food security for women. Discrimination against women in laws governing access to land is one of these factors. According to a 1995 International Food Policy Research Institute paper, although land laws vary widely, some religious laws forbid female land ownership. When civil law does give women the right to inherit land, local custom may rule otherwise. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where women have prime responsibility for food production, they are generally limited to user rights to land, and then only with the consent of a male relative. The consequence is that women have limited economic choice and are exposed to homelessness, poverty and violence. (Sources and further reading: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2004/38247/print_friendly_version.html; http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/fps/fps21.htm)
Damaging economic policies cause or exacerbate gender inequality and food insecurity. While trade agreements are presented as gender-neutral, trade and economic policies are formulated within a social context that enables or disables women to gain access to and control over productive resources, according to a 2002 Aprodev conference. “Failure of decision makers to recognize the central role of women in food production and the nutritional well being of their families and communities and the impact of trade liberalization has led to the gradual erosion of the prime source of food security and sustainable development,” said the conference report. Marginalisation of small-scale farmers accentuates gender inequalities by pushing poor and women farmers into the background and reducing their market space. “People everywhere lose control over their means of survival, and become dependent on world market forces of trade and finance. They are excluded from progress, by being first integrated into the world market and then alienated from their means of survival,” states the Aprodev report.
(Source and further reading: http://www.aprodev.net/files/gender/2002GOODConf.pdf)
A devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic has accentuated a food security crisis, with food production reduced by up to 60 per cent in some cases because women's time and energy turns to caring for HIV/AIDS-infected family members. HIV/AIDS, food security and poverty are linked. The combination makes people poorer because they can’t work due to sickness and thus lose income. Expenses for medical bills and related costs skyrocket. Malnutrition resulting from poverty enhances the onset of progression to full blown AIDS. In the worst situations there is population displacement and increased sexual violence.
(Sources and further reading: http://www.odi.org.uk/Food-Security-Forum/docs/Shumba%20Ja03.pdf; http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0000118/page5.php)
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 formally recognised the right to food as a basic right. More recently, the international community has identified the reduction of poverty and hunger as crucial for development goals. At the 1996 World Food Summit, reducing hunger and food insecurity was declared an essential part of the international development agenda. Leaders from 185 countries and the European Community reaffirmed, in the Rome Declaration on World Food Security, "the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger." They further pledged to cut the number of the world's hungry people in half by 2015.
In 1999 the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, in the text of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights stated that the right to food is realized "when every man, woman, and child, alone or in community with others, [has] physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement." (Source and further reading: http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/ib/ib29.pdf)
In Africa, Article 15 of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa specifically recognises the right of women to food security. The article places an obligation on states to ensure that all women have the right to nutritious and adequate food by providing women with access to clean drinking water, sources of domestic fuel, land and the means of producing nutritious food. States are further obliged to establish adequate systems of supply and storage to ensure food security.
How do the ideals and declarations translate into food on the table? Like the image of the farmer doing backbreaking work with a hoe, it requires hard work of a different kind. Political commitment, consultations with communities, shared decision making, transparency and education are some of the criteria needed to make food security a reality and decrease the estimated 800 million people globally who are undernourished and food insecure. But all of this will in itself be useless unless there is recognition of the damaging role that factors like unfair trade terms and high debt burdens play in militating against food security.
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