Credit: UN Women

By Claudia Sadoff
WASHINGTON DC, Mar 7 2022 (IPS)

The increased empowerment of rural women in Bangladesh over the past 10 years has been no accident.

A decade ago, not even one in four rural women could be said to be “empowered” across five key metrics, a figure that surprised even those working on the ground with the country’s poorest. By 2015, this had risen to more than two in five, or 41 per cent, with continued gains in recent years.

A key reason for this rise was a systematic effort to measure empowerment among rural women in real terms using measurements that were directly related to their daily lives, including farming and fishing.

The findings were a wake-up call that guided and motivated action towards a more targeted approach to improving women’s participation and decision-making in food systems.

The result is not only greater gender equality but subsequent improvements in nutrition, health, and productivity. And while the gender gap was slowly closing, Bangladesh achieved lower-middle-income status, with reductions in extreme poverty, as well as child and maternal mortality.

Clearly, for women around the world, there remains a long way to go. But as Bangladesh has demonstrated, unlocking the multiple benefits that gender equality can bring begins with first quantifying the level of empowerment and gender parity among rural women and their communities. In this case, researchers deployed a pioneering tool, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI).

Bangladesh became the first country to carry out a national household survey that included the WEAI in 2012. One component of the index provided the first measure of women’s empowerment across five key domains: decisions about agricultural production; access to and decision-making power about agricultural resources; control of use of income; leadership in the community, and time allocation.

In addition, another component measured gender parity, or the percentage of women who are empowered or whose achievements are at least as high as the men in their households. This allowed women’s empowerment to become a litmus test for agricultural productivity, nutritional status, and public health.

The publicly available data was instrumental in demonstrating the scale of gender inequality in Bangladesh as well as exposing the variation in empowerment within the country. And this information also enabled the second step, which was to inspire government-backed programs that addressed the mutual links between women, agriculture, and food security.

The Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) program, designed in partnership with Bangladesh’s Ministry of Agriculture, featured agricultural training, nutrition behaviour change communication and gender sensitization trainings in Bangladesh between 2015 and 2018.

Not only did these trainings positively impact women’s empowerment by up to 13 percentage points, but the program also increased the production of crops other than rice and improved the quality of household diets. The ANGeL program has since been rolled out nationwide.

To date, the WEAI has spawned several different versions, some including more extensive metrics and others fewer, to meet the needs of more than 200 organizations in 58 countries.

But applied at a global level, supported by CGIAR, tools like WEAI can provide a common metric that helps design policies to meet multiple goals, from improving diets and childhood development to increasing women’s livelihoods.

If more countries, governments and agencies made use of the WEAI or similar, to guide policy and investment decisions, women’s empowerment could be leveraged as a gateway towards a healthier, more inclusive and fairer world.

When performance is measured, performance improves but when performance can also be directly compared across countries, regions, and different production systems, the result can accelerate progress by inspiring a race to the top. This is why efforts are under way at CGIAR to harmonise different instruments to allow progress worldwide to be monitored and stimulated more widely.

Governments also have a critical role to play in investing in collecting and reporting on empowerment indicators and working alongside development partners to act upon their insights.

The more policymakers and researchers know about the extent of gender inequality and its wider role in the health and prosperity of its population, the more governments, researchers and NGOs can take targeted and effective action that addresses global challenges at their roots.

Women’s empowerment in agriculture leads to greater diversity in food production and household diets, and, in many countries, helps children’s long-term nutritional status. With a consistent approach that first reveals and then reduces the gaps in women’s empowerment, everyone stands to benefit.

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Food insecurity increases by 5–20 percentage points with each flood or drought in sub-Saharan Africa.

Changing precipitation patterns, rising temperatures and more extreme weather contributed to mounting food insecurity, poverty and displacement in Africa in 2020, compounding the socio-economic and health crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new multi-agency report coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Credit: WMO

By Claudia Sadoff and Joachim von Braun
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 25 2021 (IPS)

The global food system is facing more demands from society than ever before in modern times – and rightly so.

From responding to the climate crisis to dealing with rising malnutrition and ensuring the sustainable use of natural resources and protection of biodiversity, the responsibility of our food systems is no longer just to “feed the world.”

The recent action agenda released by the UN Secretary General at the Food Systems Summit not only highlighted this urgency but reminded us that our food systems are also one of our greatest hopes for making progress on these fronts.

While the US$10 billion pledged by the United States to end hunger and malnutrition is a welcome start, our food systems have been forced to cope with an increasingly complex, interconnected set of challenges for too long – often without a corresponding shift in focus from governments and other key players.

The changes required also need sufficient funding for food systems transformation, estimated to be in the range of $400 billion per year. This goal is within reach and is roughly comparable to three times New York City’s annual budget or less than 0.5 percent of world GDP in 2020.

Food systems transformation also requires impactful innovations, so particular importance in this funding should therefore be placed on investment in research and innovation.

Increased and sustained funding for research and innovation is crucial, as the world requires technological, policy and institutional innovation to address the increasingly complex set of challenges that are facing, and threatening, food, land and water systems in a climate crisis.

Investments in agricultural research and innovation generate significant returns. Benefit-cost ratios of CGIAR research, for example, have shown consistent returns on investments to the order of 10:1.

Despite this, international agricultural research remains underfunded, threatening food, economic, and environmental security around the world, whilst hunger and poverty continue to rise.

In addition to securing funding for research and innovation, research itself must evolve to address the growing challenges around the world. In particular, research efforts should favour more circular business models that are driven by value, rather than volume, and those that promote resilience to shocks and balance with nature over more environmentally damaging models.

We must also ensure that more research translates into concrete innovations that truly advance food systems transformation. While we desperately need technological innovations to increase productivity, reduce poverty, hunger and malnutrition, as well as climate proofing our food systems and making them more equitable, such innovations can only be taken forward if they are bundled with appropriate national policies, institutional changes and global actions, and strategies to deal with shocks and conflict.

Sometimes the implementation of innovations inevitably involves trade-offs, not only synergies. Research and innovation efforts will be crucial to understanding and managing such trade-offs, as well as to help ensure that interconnected challenges are tackled in the most efficient and holistic way.

To both achieve and maximize the potential of research and innovation, governments of the world should consider allocating just one per cent of the portion of their national GDP that relates to food systems, towards research and innovation.

At present, many countries, including many of the world’s richest, only spend half of this. For the least developed countries, aid will be needed to reach such a level, potentially through a special trust fund backed by the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).

Such a fund, when properly backed by developed countries, would help to support greater scientific capacity on the ground in low- and middle-income countries, which will be needed if we are to address the challenges facing the whole world, not just the developed world.

Today’s agri-food systems no longer simply feed people. They must also provide nutrition, promote livelihoods, protect the environment, and tackle climate change – often all at once. Financing and unlocking innovations are needed to address these challenges together.

If our food, land and water systems are ever able to achieve society’s mounting demands, we must ensure our priorities are in order and begin to properly finance them.

Ultimately, all of the ambition generated around the UN Food Systems Summit will fall short if we fail to finance the new research and innovation we know we need.

Claudia Sadoff is Executive Management Team Convener, and Managing Director, Research Delivery and Impact, CGIAR; Joachim von Braun is Chair of the Scientific Group, UN Food Systems Summit

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A fisherman of the Abume community, Lake Volta, Ghana. Credit: Nana Kofi Acquah/International Water Management Institute

By Claudia Sadoff
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, May 31 2019 (IPS)

Global biodiversity loss has reached critical levels. One million species of plants and animals are now estimated to be at risk of extinction. The window for action is closing, and the world needs to urgently take note.

Countries would do well to consider this: our ability to preserve species hinges to a great extent on the actions we take to protect freshwater ecosystems. Safeguarding water for the environment is critical for biodiversity and for people.

Freshwater ecosystems are major biodiversity hotspots. We derive much value from them, even though we may not realise it. Wetlands purify drinking water; fish is one of the most traded food commodities on the planet; and floodplains can provide vital buffers that lessen the impacts of flooding.

The people who depend most on the services provided by aquatic ecosystems are generally the poorest and most marginalized in developing countries and consequently those hardest hit by biodiversity loss.

However, all of us, both rich and poor, depend on healthy ecosystems, so degradation of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity pose an enormous threat for everyone.

About 35 per cent of the world’s biodiversity-rich wetlands, for example, have been lost or seriously degraded since 1970. The annual value of the benefits these wetlands (freshwater and coastal) provide is estimated at a staggering USD 36.2 trillion; nearly double the benefits derived from all the world’s forests.

Sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems (and of water resources in general) must aim to ensure that ecosystems continue providing these services.

A key approach for reversing this trend centres on ensuring that water continues to flow in a way that will sustain aquatic ecosystems, thereby supporting populations, economies, sustainable livelihoods, and well-being.

Pumping water by hand in mid-Western Nepal. Credit: Satyam Joshi/USAID

This means maintaining the right quality, quantity and timing of water flows – which scientists call “environmental flows”, or “E-flows” for short.

Managing tradeoffs

Water, through contributions to economic growth, environmental health and human well-being, plays a critical role in many of our broader sustainable development goals. It will therefore be necessary to consider some inevitable tradeoffs when planning for the sustainable management of water.

Take the expansion of irrigation for more intensive crop production, for example, which is essential for ending hunger. The alternative to increasing irrigation would be massive encroachment of agriculture on forests and other fragile ecosystems, thus undermining the protection of biodiversity.

At the same time, increased irrigation will, by removing water from rivers and aquifers, inevitably have some negative impacts on aquatic ecosystems.

The challenge is to maximize synergies and minimize tradeoffs, and to do so in ways that are transparent and equitable, based on scientific evidence. Undertaking detailed assessments of E-flows helps make the tradeoffs explicit.
The information derived from E-flow assessments can contribute to important discussions between different sectors and actors, helping to determine which outcomes are acceptable to society and likely to be sustainable.

E-flows assessment in action

For more than a decade, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has been devising and steadily improving methods for E-flow assessment. In a 2007 project, IWMI partnered with World Wide Fund for Nature-India (WWF-India) to carry out the country’s first-ever holistic environmental flow assessment, focused on the iconic Ganges River.

The Indian government subsequently incorporated the concept of E-flows into the aims and objectives of the National Mission for Clean Ganga, the implementation arm of the National Ganga River Basin Authority.

Working with partners, IWMI researchers have now developed E-flow calculators, a family of software formaking rapid, assessments anywhere in the world from a computer.

More recently, IWMI researchers have further adapted their E-flow calculator for specific river basins, such as those in western Nepal. As a result of those developments, E-flow assessment is now poised for wider application in diverse settings.

In support of national efforts to better manage tradeoffs in water management, information provided by E-flow calculators can also contribute to tracking “water stress”.

For instance, how much freshwater economic activities withdraw compared to the total renewable supply, and how much water should be left in rivers to maintain basic ecological functions and ecosystem services.

Too much of our biodiversity depends on water for us to overlook sustainable water management as a key part of the solution to species extinction. The time has come for a more concerted effort to stem the loss of aquatic ecosystems and of the myriad species that inhabit them.

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