Gender and food security: How to bolster food production ?

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Providing women with equal access to productive resources and opportunities may be the key to bolstering the struggling global agricultural sector

Africa: Towards Gender – Just Food and Nutrition Security

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This week sees the launch of a new resource on Gender and Food Security from the IDS-based BRIDGE team. The Gender and Food Security Cutting Edge Pack makes the case for a new, gender-aware understanding of food security, arguing that partial, apolitical and gender-blind diagnoses of the problem of food and nutrition insecurity are leading to insufficient policy responses and the failure to realise the right to food for all people.

Achieving Gender Equality in Agriculture – http://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/nodeimage/5842085889_620656d5fe_b_0.jpg

How can we better achieve nourishing food for all?

The pack identifies examples of practices, policies and programmes at the regional, national and local levels which use strategies that are often simple, yet innovative, to address food and nutrition insecurity in rights-focused, gender-aware and often gender-transformative ways. These include enhancing coherence between policies on gender, agriculture, nutrition, health, trade and other relevant areas, through national and regional processes, and developing ecologically sound approaches to food production, such as agro-ecology, that promote sustainable farming and women’s empowerment.

Women make up 43% of the agriculture workforce in developing countries. Photograph: Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images – http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/3/7/1299507390896/Women-plant-rice-in-Pakis-006.jpg

Over the course of the three year programme, five core principles have emerged which are essential to underpinning thinking and action on food and nutrition security:

Read the full article: allAfrica