Post-2015 must advance food security for women — Lakshmi Puri

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Excellencies, distinguished colleagues and friends.

Let me start by saying that women and girls are critical for food security, in all of its areas – production, availability, access and utilization.

In many countries, women form the backbone of the agricultural sector and food production systems, making up the bulk of the agricultural labourers. Eight out of 10 agricultural workers in Africa are women and in Asia six out of 10 are women. Rural women often represent approximately two thirds of the 400 million poor livestock keepers.

Women also play a key role in household food security. Women are on the front line of nutrition as care givers in the family — producing, storing, cleaning, cooking the food for consumption – and ensuring that food, when available, reaches children first.

Women have a crucial role in ensuring the health of children. An undernourished woman will give birth to a baby with low birth weight, causing the intergenerational cycle of undernutrition and poor health to continue. Poor nutrition leads to an estimated 111,000 maternal deaths each year. Undernutrition also contributes to up to 50 per cent of all cases of child mortality.

Twenty years ago, the Beijing Platform for Action emphasized that women were key to reducing poverty and ensuring food security. The Platform for Action called upon Member States and all stakeholders to formulate and implement policies and programmes that enhance women’s access to financial, technical, extension and marketing services. It also highlighted the need to improve women’s access to and control over land and appropriate financing, infrastructure and technology.

But twenty years later women continue to face barriers and constraints, including limited access to assets and resources necessary for food security.

Women’s and girls’ farming work, domestic work and care work — all essential for food security — are not recognized and valued into the national accounts. Also, there are social, cultural, economic and environmental barriers that threaten women’s own food security.

In order for us to reach the targets we have set for ourselves in the Beijing Platform for Action, during the 1996 World Food Summit and in the MDGs, we must not only implement nutrition-enhanced intervention in agriculture, health, hygiene and water, but we also must address the structural inequalities that women face to their status, rights, access to resources and agency.  

An estimated 60 per cent of chronically hungry people are women and girls. In some communities women and girls often eat last and least, due to economic and cultural barriers. Women’s participation in decision-making processes and in the leadership of rural institutions remains low – which has led to women’s rights, contributions and priorities to be largely overlooked by mainstream policies and institutions on agriculture, food security and nutrition.

And although women represent over 50 per cent of agricultural workers in some regions, women have less access to productive resources such as land, seeds, fertilizers, technology, finance and services. For example, in North Africa and West Asia women represent fewer than 5 per cent of all agricultural land holders in all countries where data is available.

Also, gender inequalities in the distribution of unpaid care work, both in developed and in developing countries, continues to deprive women from opportunities for paid work, education, and political participation — all of which have a bearing on their food security and nutrition.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security have proven to be an effective measure to close the gender gap in the context of food and nutrition security.

The guidelines promote secure tenure rights and equitable access to land, fisheries and forests as a means of eradicating hunger and poverty. They were officially endorsed by the Committee on World Food Security in 2012, with gender equality as one of its main principles.

Since then, implementation has been encouraged by the G20, Rio+20 and the UN General Assembly. The Rio+20 outcome document also emphasized “the importance of empowering rural women as critical agents for enhancing agricultural and rural development, and food security and nutrition.”

The post-2015 development agenda offers a key opportunity to address gender disparities in agriculture, food security and nutrition.

UN Women is pleased that the proposed Sustainable Development Goals include stand-alone goals on both achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls, and on ending hunger, achieving food security and nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture. Yet we must work to ensure that the final framework expands real freedoms, capabilities, opportunities, and agency of women to grant food security for all, and gender-equitable societies.

This final framework should focus on ensuring equal access to and control over productive resources, provision of quality basic services and infrastructure, and support to women smallholder farmers to improve productivity and resilience of food supplies.

From 2002 to 2008, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that only 5.6 per cent of the USD 18.4 billion spent on agricultural aid was directly towards women’s empowerment in agriculture. And in 2011, only 5 percent of aid directed toward agriculture was focused on women.

In future, we must also ensure that when the post-2015 development framework is implemented, more resources go toward gender-related issues in the context of food and nutrition security.

UN Women is fully committed to the achievement of global food and nutrition security and we will work with Member States and key stakeholders to strengthen the means of implementation of the post-2015 development framework, to ensure that women are at its center and benefit in all funding considerations. 

UN Women will continue to support interventions which protect and promote the human rights of everyone to adequate food of adequate quality, with particular emphasis on women and girls.

We call on all leaders – Member States, UN agencies, civil society and the private sector — to take new and concrete actions for the full and accelerated implementation of the Platform for Action, so that women are able to reach their potential as key game changers to ensure global food and nutrition security.

Thank you.