DEVELOPMENT-ASIA: Women’s Skills Sow Food Security

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 17 2001 (IPS) - The women who grow rice in Pematang Jering, a village in the northern Indonesian province of Sumatra, follow a simple creed when they work the fields: “If we feed the land well, the land will feed us well.”

By that, they mean caring for the land based on the knowledge that has come down through generations, like traditional methods of organic farming, as opposed to the modern emphasis on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. They also favour sowing local seeds to the genetically modified variety.

As a result, their village is better fed. “The food they eat is healthier and fresh,” says Irma Yanny, of the Federation of Indonesian Peasant Union.

The people in northern Sumatra acknowledge that women play a pivotal role in ensuring food security in the communities, she adds. “If the women’s input is ignored, the consequence will be not enough food to eat.”

This, in fact, is true across much of Asia. In parts of South- east Asia, women are estimated to make up 90 percent of the workforce in rice cultivation.

The region’s women are contributing qualitatively, too, like those in northern Sumatra, through the knowledge and skills they have for activities ranging from seed preparation to soil management.

“Women’s knowledge and skills are vitally necessary for food production and sustainable agriculture,” writes activist Sarojeni Rengam in a paper on ‘Women and Food Security’.

“Women’s intimate knowledge of seed preparation and soil management, plants and pest management, post-harvesting process and storage, animal husbandry as well as food processing and meal preparation are significant,” adds Rengam, executive director of Asia-Pacific division of the Pesticide Action Network (PAN).

However, Rengam says, international development agencies are reluctant to recognise the indigenous knowledge that women possess for food production.

“It is only recently that women’s role in agriculture has started to be recognised. Unfortunately, this recognition has meant that international agencies, such as the World Bank, recommend that women need access to modern technology and resources to ‘improve’ and expand their farm activities,” Rengam notes.

“This includes encouraging cash crop production for export,” she says, adding that such “mainstreaming” of women farmers could have “adverse implications” in food production.

These concerns are understandable in light of two glaring realities. On the one hand, the land available for agriculture is shrinking while the demand for food continues to increase.

“The pressure for the agriculture sector is to produce more and more from less and less,” says R B Singh, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Asia-Pacific regional representative.

Added to that are the noticeable declines in Asia’s agriculture production in the past few years.

“The average annual rate of production growth for the period 1996-2000 amounted to 3.2 percent compared with the average rate of 4.6 percent attained during the preceding five-year period,” according to ‘The State of Food and Agriculture 2001,’ a report published by the Rome- based U.N food agency.

The drop in Chinese production is a key factor in this shift, it adds, pointing to a decline from annual rate of production increases of 6.3 percent during the period 1991-97 to an estimated 4 percent in 1998 and 2.9 percent in 1999.

“Cereal production appears to have declined sharply in 2000, partly because of natural disasters but also because of a major contraction in harvested areas,” the report adds.

Cultivation in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines were also hampered by shifts in the weather, including the El Nino-induced drought conditions.

In Thailand, according to the report, agriculture production in 1998 “suffered from El Nino-related effects and reduced import demand in other South-east Asian nations”.

Such shortfalls have worsened the plight of people either going hungry or struggling to get food in Asia, which is home to two-thirds of the world’s 500 million hungry people, the bulk of them living in South Asia countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Governments have an obligation to ensure that these people have a future free of hunger, says FAO’s Singh. But the recent record leaves little room for optimism, since there has been no effort to meet the commitments made by the region’s developing countries at the 1996 World Food Summit.

At that conference, countries pledged to cut the number of the world’s hungry by half by 2015. The expectations from Asia was to see 13 million people been taken off annually from the number of the world’s hungry.

“That has not happened. The number of those hungry and starving have remained around the ’96 figures. And starting 2001 till 2015, Asia is expected to see 14 million people taken off annually from the world’s hungry,” adds Singh.

For that to happen, asserts PAN’s Rengam, governments need to ensure the security of food-producing communities. “The starting point of food security must be the security of the food producing communities.”

Women in agriculture have to be among the beneficiaries if the promise of “food for all” is to be achieved, she adds. “Food is not just a consumer item or a trade commodity, for these communities it is nourishment, taste and an expression of culture and identity.”