From Truth Out: http://truth-out.org/news/item/14891-womens-work-gender-and-the-global-food-system
By Tory Field and Beverly Bell
Sunday, 03 March 2013
“We, women from more than 40 countries, from different indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, have gathered together to participate in the creation of a new right: the right to food sovereignty. We reaffirm our will to act to change the capitalist and patriarchal world which puts the interests of the market before the rights of people. We will find the energy to establish our right to food sovereignty, carrier of hope in constructing another world. We will carry this message to women all over the world.”
- Women’s Declaration on Food Sovereignty (excerpted), Nyéléni, Mali, February 27, 2007
Women produce 60 to 80 percent of all food, both as subsistence farmers and as agricultural wage laborers. They are the primary providers for the majority of the world’s 925 million hungry people, obtaining food, collecting firewood and water, and cooking. And yet they have less access to land and the resources necessary to grow on it than their male counterparts. Inequitable distribution of land, labor, and resources leaves farming women triply burdened by work: in the fields, in the home, and in society.
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How do the agricultural policies of powerful governments and international institutions affect women? They often exacerbate gender norms and force women globally to bear the brunt of harmful changes. In the US, a corporate agribusiness model leads to violations of women’s rights in all aspects of the food system. We have adapted the following from Gender Action’s 2011 report on gender and the food crisis:
- Local and domestic agricultural markets in many countries are often devastated by global trade policies engineered by governments like the United States and by international financial institutions (IFIs). In country after country, for instance, such policies make it possible for subsidized US agricultural products to flood domestic markets and undercut local producers. This dynamic often forces men to travel to other countries in search of work, leaving women behind to tend to family and work family farmland;
Continue reading at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/14891-womens-work-gender-and-the-global-food-system
