Blanca Molina holds up organic peas picked in one of the four greenhouses she built with her own hands on her small family farm in Villa Simpson, in the Aysén region in the Patagonian wilderness in southern Chile. Credit: Marianela Jarroud /IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Apr 13 2016 (IPS)

Rural women in Latin America continue to face serious obstacles to land tenure, which leave them vulnerable, despite their growing importance in food production and food security.

“Women are the most vulnerable group of people with respect to the question of land tenure,” Soledad Parada, a gender adviser in the regional office of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), in the Chilean capital, told IPS.

She added that “in general, the activities carried out to improve the land tenure situation have failed to take women into account.”

As a result, “women have access to land through inheritance or because they were granted it by an agrarian reform programme, but they are always at a disadvantage,” she said.

Like in other developing regions, family agriculture is the main supplier of food in Latin America, and women produce roughly half of what the region’s 600 million people eat.

An estimated 58 million women live in the countryside in this region. But “the immense majority of land, in the case of individual farmers, is in the hands of men,” said Parada.

“Only between eight and 30 percent of land is in the hands of women,” she said, which means that only this proportion of women “are farmers in the economic sense.”

The country with the largest percentage of land owned by women is Chile (30 percent), closely followed by Panama, Ecuador and Haiti. At the other extreme is Belize (eight percent), with just slightly larger proportions in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Argentina.

Another FAO study, conducted in only a handful of countries in the region in 2012, reported that women accounted for 32 percent of owners of land in Mexico, 27 percent in Paraguay, 20 percent in Nicaragua and 14 percent in Honduras.

Furthermore, women tend to have smaller farms with lower quality soil, and have less access to credit, technical assistance and training.

“Of people who work in technical assistance, 98 percent do not even think of visiting women,” land tenure expert Sergio Gómez, a FAO consultant, told IPS.

Moreover, he said, “All formal procedures require the man’s signature, otherwise the visit doesn’t count, because the property is in his name.”

The gender gap in land ownership is historically linked to factors such as male preference in inheritance, male privilege in marriage, and male bias in state land redistribution programmes and in peasant and indigenous communities.

To this is added the gender bias in the land market.

Aura Canache, in front of one of her sheep enclosures on her small farm, less than one hectare in size, located 130 km from Caracas, in the Barlovento farming region in the coastal area of northern Venezuela. She has had difficulty accessing credit to help run her farm. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

Because of all of these handicaps, women “have been explicitly left out” of land ownership, Parada said.

There are other inequalities as well. In Mexico, for example, women in rural areas work 89 hours a week on average, compared to just 58 hours for men. A similar gap can be found throughout the region.

Nevertheless, nearly 40 percent of rural women have no incomes of their own, while only 14 percent of men are in that situation.

Some progress has been made in recent years, as the region has experienced a significant increase in the proportion of farms in the hands of women. Parada said that in the last few decades, many countries in the region, such as Nicaragua, reformed their laws to ensure more equal access to land for women.

“In other countries advances have been seen in terms of legislation, such as setting a condition that in the case of a married couple, both members are in charge of the land, and the authorisation of either one is needed to carry out any transaction,” Parada said.

But much more still needs to be done, largely because the effective right to land not only depends on legislation, but also on the social recognition of this right – and inequality still persists in this respect.

“All of this has tremendous consequences,” Parada said.

The hard-working hands of Ivania Siliézar pick improved beans grown on her three-hectare farm in the eastern Salvadoran department of San Miguel. Thanks to these native seeds, her output has doubled. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“The fact that land is mainly in the names of men, especially in the case of family farms and small-scale agriculture, represents an enormous barrier for women to access other kinds of benefits,” she said.

Alicia Muñoz, the head of the Chilean National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri), told IPS that achieving the right to land “has been one of our longest and biggest struggles.”

“We are fighting for women’s work to be recognised, because it is women who are the leaders in the countryside, in small-scale family agriculture. Access to land tenure has always been a demand of peasant women,” she said.

Muñoz said it is a “cultural issue” faced by countries in the region which so far has no solution.

Despite all of the efforts to close the gender gap in different countries of Latin America, “in agriculture, the men speak for the women,” he said.

Against this backdrop, gender equality is one of the main “implementation principles” of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security, approved in 2012 by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) to facilitate dialogue and negotiations.

The guidelines adopted by the intergovernmental CFS, which is described as the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for all stakeholders to work together to ensure food security and nutrition for all, say states must ensure that women and girls have equal tenure rights and access to land, independently of their marital status.

The document also urges states to “consider the particular obstacles faced by women and girls with regard to tenure rights and take measures to ensure that legal and policy frameworks provide adequate protection for women and that laws that recognize women’s tenure rights are enforced and implemented.”

The CFS stresses the need to guarantee women’s participation in all decision-making processes, as well as equal access to land, water and other natural resources.

But in order to achieve this, the presence of women in negotiations must be fomented “by the authorities or by whoever agrees to implement the guidelines. And the FAO has a role to play in this,” Parada said.

Muñoz agreed, saying that “both governments and the FAO have to promote women’s participation, otherwise everything will stay the same.”

“We love land and nature, we are very reliable and responsible,” the Chilean activist said. “It is women who know about family farming, who carry the farms on their shoulders. It’s time we were recognised.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Part of the grounds and house where the Agroecology Institute for Rural Women will be set up. Credit: Courtesy of ANAMURI

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Jan 4 2014 (IPS)

An organisation that brings together some 10,000 peasant and indigenous women from Chile is launching an agroecology institute for women campesinos, or small farmers, in South America.

For years, the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI) has been training thousands of people through La Vía Campesina, the international peasant movement, working on the basis of food sovereignty, which asserts the right of people to define their own food systems.

But today it is undertaking its most ambitious project.

The Agroecology Institute for Rural Women (IALA) will be the first in Latin America to only target women. It is taking shape in the town of Auquinco – which roughly means “the sound of water” in the Mapuche indigenous language – in the district of Chépica, 180 km south of Santiago.

The training sessions have already started, even though the building isn’t ready yet.

“We aren’t pursuing a dream, but a challenge,” the international director of ANAMURI, Francisca Rodríguez, who will run IALA, told Tierramérica*.

The project has a political core: “food production to resolve the problem of hunger.”

“It is essential to find ways to make it possible for us to continue surviving and existing as an important segment of agriculture amidst the fierce attack on campesinos, which has to do with productive sectors but also with the models of consumption,” she said.

IALA is focused on defending campesino family agriculture, she said.

It’s an effort to join in “the big task” of the Agroecology Institutes of Latin America, from which it took its acronym, she said.

These projects began in Venezuela, where the first agronomists – all children from campesino families – have graduated.

The IALA institutes were replicated later in Brazil and Paraguay, as well as Ecuador and the rest of the Andean region. The latest major achievement has been the SURI Campesino University, which opened its doors in Argentina in April 2013.

“It’s important for us to have professionals in the field of agriculture, in order to help achieve food sovereignty, and to continue along this route which requires specialists who have come from the land itself,” Rodríguez said.

“No one better than campesinos can feel the need to continue developing agriculture that is at the service of humanity,” she added.

Rodríguez said that in ANAMURI “we understand the challenge,” and while the institute will initially focus on women from the Southern Cone of South America, it could later be expanded to incorporate men.

In Auquinco, they have a one-hectare plot and a large house where the students will stay, purchased for just 23,000 dollars. They said the price was low because after the former owners, a couple who had gone into exile during Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, returned to the country, they decided to sell the property to the women so the group could do good work with it.

Because of the damages it suffered during the February 2010 earthquake, however, the house needs extensive repairs, though the architects that evaluated the damage assured them it will maintain its character as a traditional rural dwelling, after the renovation.

The repairs must begin as soon as possible, said ANAMURI director of organisation Alicia Muñoz.

“During the current [southern hemisphere] summer, we have to organise brigades of volunteers to help us fix up the house and the grounds, so that it won’t lose its original character,” Muñoz said.

ANAMURI decided that 2014 would be “the year of restoration” – a volunteer campaign that starts Jan. 4 with a visit to the building to clear the overgrown vegetation and begin the most urgent part of the remodeling: fixing the roof.

“Our dream is having an institute for the conservation of the kind of agriculture that women know how to do, that is truly trustworthy from the point of view of health and nutrients,” Muñoz said.

In the history of Chilean agriculture, men have always dominated the scene, “with women relegated to the domestic sphere, to the processing of food, keeping house and raising the small livestock,” anthropologist Juan Carlos Skewes told Tierramérica.

But “their contribution, in my view fundamental, to agricultural work and to the alternative development project that is the vegetable garden, has been forgotten,” he added.

“Every vegetable patch, every campesino family farming practice, involves biodiversity, conservation of genetic material, the possibility of reproducing seeds and making better use of local resources,” said Skewes, director of the School of Anthropology at the Alberto Hurtado University.

“There is also the question of better coordination of resources, self-sufficiency and strengthening local economies,” he added.

“So, summing up, there are autonomous projects, a capacity for self-management, autonomous sustainable production, and management of non-genetically-modified material, and there is a chance to counteract, resist or challenge industrial processes in agribusiness, as well as the food processing industry,” he said.

The expert said that “in these tremendously contemporary aspects, the key player is the rural peasant woman, organised in the protection of seeds for self-consumption and the sustainable management of agriculture.”

In ANAMURI, the new year is full of hope. The participants are confident that the new government, to be headed by a woman, socialist former president Michelle Bachelet, will open up doors for them to strengthen their work.

They are also confident in receiving support from the United Nations, which declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming.

“Many people are going back to the countryside, which means there is hope,” said
Rodríguez. “We know we’re helping to strengthen the country on our parcel of land in Auquinco.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.