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Give Women the Seeds and They Can Feed the World
By Melanie Haider
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25, 2011 (IPS) – If women farmers were given more tools and resources, the number of hungry people in the world could be slashed by 100 to 150 million.
This was the message conveyed by Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), at an event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly Thursday to empower rural women for food security and nutrition.
In October, the Committee on World Food Security will meet at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) headquarters in Rome, followed by the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) next year, both opportunities to increase the role of rural women in alleviating poverty and hunger.
The event this week was co-sponsored by UN Women, the United Nations entity for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, and WFP, among others.
Representatives from government, grassroots community organisations and the private sector were on hand to embody the “new coalition that has to come together to make a difference”, as Sheeran put it.
Paul Polman, chief executive officer of Unilever, cited the new Project Laser Beam initiative in which the WFP and its corporate partners, DSM, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Kraft Foods and Unilever, came together to combat child malnutrition in Bangladesh and India.
“Interestingly, in that programme, most of the focus is on women, agriculture, creating smallholder farmers, health and hygiene programmes, hand washing, women in school. It is not surprising to me because we have all discovered, businessmen as we are, that we will probably get a higher return from those investments than others we make,” Polman said.
UN Women and the Coca-Cola company also announced a new partnership this week to break down the barriers faced by women entrepreneurs through programmes on the ground that provide access to skills training and financial services.
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