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U.N. Celebrates the “Backbone” of Humankind

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 15 2013 (IPS) - On any given, one in every eight people on this planet wakes to the sharp pangs of hunger and no hope of a meal. In total, 860 million people go hungry every year.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has referred to the so-called “war on hunger” as the easiest conflict to win, yet, experts say, far too little is being done to mobilise the army most capable of fighting this scourge: rural women.

According to the FAO, women make up 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing nations. Of the roughly 1.3 billion smallholder farmers and landless peasants in the world, close to 560 million are women.

In many countries, particularly on the hunger-plagued African continent where some 239 million go hungry every year, peasant women daily innovate new ways to stretch limited food reserves, beat the devastating impacts of climate change, and preserve those environments vital to the production of nutritious food.

In a message to the 193-member world body on Oct. 15, officially declared the International Day of Rural Women, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed, “Empowering rural women is crucial for ending hunger and poverty.”

Rural Women’s Day was first observed in 2008, coming on the heels of a December 2007 General Assembly Resolution that recognised “the critical role and contribution of rural women, including indigenous women, in enhancing agricultural and rural development, improving food security and eradicating rural poverty.”

But a commitment on paper does not mean much without action at the local level – the FAO points out that implementing the resolution requires the provision of targeted services, from better access to credit and larger, more extensive food assistance programmes in rural areas to a stronger focus on education for women and girls, and cash transfers or social safety nets for female-headed households.

Meanwhile, the last few years have seen a shift in the priorities of policy-makers and advocates of rural women’s rights: between 2006 and 2008 and again in 2009-2010, all eyes were on the food price crisis, with solutions seeking primarily to ease the burden of high food prices on rural women.

Increasingly, climate change is becoming the most pressing concern, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting that higher temperatures and erratic rainfall could push agricultural yields in Africa down by as much as 20 percent by 2050. Extreme weather events like droughts and floods are forecast to rise dramatically, threatening huge swathes of farmland and coastal areas, especially in developing countries.

Experts at the World Bank say that women – with fewer endowments, negligible access to land titles and lower mobility – will bear the brunt of these changes, unless preventive measures are immediately taken. These could take many forms, from recognising and utilising indigenous, climate-resistant agricultural techniques, largely passed down through women; including rural women in decision-making processes regarding adaptation and mitigation and strengthening women’s livestock ownership rights.

 
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