Iná de Cubas next to the biodigester she obtained with the Energy of Women of the Earth project, in the municipality of Orizona, in the Brazilian state of Goiás. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
ACREUNA / ORIZONA, Brazil , Aug 26 2024 (IPS)

A community bakery, family production of fruit pulp, and the recovery of water springs are some of the initiatives of the Energy of Women of the Earth, organised since 2017 in the state of Goiás, in central-western Brazil.

A common resource is non-conventional renewable energy sources, such as solar and biomass, which are fundamental to the projects’ economic viability and environmental sustainability.

The network includes 42 women’s organisations in 27 municipalities in Goiás, a state that, like the entire central-western region, has an economy dominated by extensive monoculture agriculture, especially soybean, corn, sugar cane and cotton.

It is an adverse context for small-scale family farming, due to low population density and distant urban markets. A movement to strengthen the sector has intensified in this century, with the Agro Centro-West Family Farming Fairs promoted by local universities.

There are 95,000 family farms in Goiás, 63% of the state’s total number of farms.

“The network is the link between the valorisation of rural women, family farming and energy transition,” Gessyane Ribeiro, an agronomist who coordinates the project that uses alternative energy sources to empower women in agricultural production, told IPS.

The Energy of Women of the Earth project, which generated the network, is promoted by Gepaaf, a company known by the Portuguese acronym of its name, Management and Elaboration of Projects in Consultancy to Family Agriculture, and born from a study group at the Federal University of Goiás.

Non-repayable funding from the Caixa Economica Federal, a state bank focused on social and housing support, allowed the company, in partnership with two institutes and the university, to deploy actions involving 92 women farmers and to set up 60 family projects and another 16 collective projects until June 2023.

In Acreúna, a municipality of 21,500 inhabitants, 14 women farmers run a bakery that provides a variety of breads, pastries, cakes and biscuits to local public schools, which have around 3,000 students. They are women from the Genipapo Settlement, where 27 families received plots from the government’s land reform programme.

Solar energy made the settlement’s Residents’ Association’s enterprise viable, along with basic education schools in nearby towns. The National School Feeding Programme requires beneficiary schools to allocate at least 30% of their purchases to family farming.

In Orizona, a municipality of 16,000 people, Iná de Cubas received a biodigester and eight photovoltaic panels, which generate biogas and electricity for its production of fruit pulp, also for school meals.

Another technology distributed by the project, the solar pump, recovered and preserved one of the springs that form a stream in Orizona. The equipment, powered by solar energy, pumps water from the spring to a pond belonging to Nubia Lacerda Matias, where her cows quench their thirst.

Before, the animals went straight to the spring, fouling the water and damaging the surrounding forest. The area was fenced off, protecting both the water and the vegetation, which grew and became denser, to the benefit of the people who live downstream.

Women's secure tenure rights lead to several positive development outcomes for them and their families, including resilience to climate change shocks, economic productivity, food security, health, and education. Here a young tribal woman works shoulder to shoulder with her husband planting rice saplings in India's Rayagada province. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Jun 12 2017 (IPS)

In Meghalaya, India’s northeastern biodiversity hotspot, all three major tribes are matrilineal. Children take the mother’s family name, while daughters inherit the family lands.

Because women own land and have always decided what is grown on it and what is conserved, the state not only has a strong climate-resistant food system but also some of the rarest edible and medicinal plants, researchers said.The importance of protecting the full spectrum of women’s property rights becomes even more urgent as the number of women-led households in rural areas around the world continues to grow.

While their ancient culture empowers Meghalaya’s indigenous women with land ownership that vastly improves their resilience to the food shocks climate change springs on them, for an overwhelming majority of women in developing countries, culture does not allow them even a voice in family or community land management.  Nor do national laws support their rights to own the very land they sow and harvest to feed their families.

Legal protections for indigenous and rural women to own and manage property are inadequate or missing in 30 low- and middle-income countries, according to a new report from Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

This finding, now quantified, means that much of the recent progress that indigenous and local communities have gained in acquiring legal recognition of their commonly held territory could be built on shaky ground.

“Generally speaking, international legal protections for indigenous and rural women’s tenure rights have yet to be reflected in the national laws that regulate women’s daily interactions with community forests,” Stephanie Keene, Tenure Analyst for the RRI, a global coalition working for forest land and resources rights of indigenous and local communities, told IPS via an email interview.

Together these 30 countries contain three-quarters of the developing world’s forests, which remain critical to mitigate global warming and natural disasters, including droughts and land degradation.

In South Asia, distress migration owing to climate events and particularly droughts is high, as over three-quarters of the population is dependent on agriculture, out of which more than half are subsistence farmers depending on rains for irrigation.

“For many indigenous people, it is the women who are the food producers and who manage their customary lands and forests. Safeguarding their rights will cement the rights of their communities to collectively own the lands and forests they have protected and depended on for generations.” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“Indigenous and local communities in the ten analyzed Asian countries provide the most consistent recognition of women’s community-level inheritance rights. However, this regional observation is not seen in India and Nepal, where inadequate laws concerning inheritance and community-level dispute resolution cause women’s forest rights to be particularly vulnerable,” Keene told IPS of the RRI study.

“None of the 5 legal frameworks analyzed in Nepal address community-level inheritance or dispute resolution. Although India’s Forest Rights Act does recognize the inheritability of Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers’ land, the specific rights of women to community-level inheritance and dispute resolution are not explicitly acknowledged. Inheritance in India may be regulated by civil, religious or personal laws, some of which fail to explicitly guarantee equal inheritance rights for wives and daughters,” Keene added.

Desertification, the silent, invisible crisis, threatens one-third of global land area. This photo taken in 2013 records efforts to green portions of the Kubuqi Desert, the seventh largest in China. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Pointing out challenges behind the huge gaps in women’s land rights under international laws and rights recognized by South Asian governments, Madhu Sarin, who was involved in drafting of India’s Forest Rights Act and now pushes for its implementation, told IPS, “Where governments have ratified international conventions, they do in principle agree to make national laws compatible with them. However, there remains a huge gap between such commitments and their translation into practice. Firstly, most governments don’t have mechanisms or binding requirements in place for ensuring such compatibility.”

“Further, the intended beneficiaries of gender-just laws remain unorganised and unaware about them,” she added.

Women’s land rights, recurring droughts and creeping desertification

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), one way to address droughts that cause more deaths and displaces more people than any other natural disaster, and to halt desertification – the silent, invisible crisis that threatens one-third of global land area – is to bring about pressing legal reforms to establish gender parity in farm and forest land ownership and  its management.

“Poor rural women in developing countries are critical to the survival of their families. Fertile land is their lifeline. But the number of people negatively affected by land degradation is growing rapidly. Crop failures, water scarcity and the migration of traditional crops are damaging rural livelihoods. Action to halt the loss of more fertile land must focus on households. At this level, land use is based on the roles assigned to men and women. This is where the tide can begin to turn,” says Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD, in its 2017 study.

Closing the gender gap in agriculture alone would increase yields on women’s farms by 20 to 30 percent and total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent, the study quotes the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as saying.

An Indian tribal woman holds up her land tenure document secure in the knowledge that now she can plan long term for her two sons. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Why the gender gap must close in farm and forest rights

The reality on the ground is, however, not even close to approaching this gender parity so essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2 and 5 which connect directly with land rights.

Climate change is ushering in new population dynamics. As men’s out-migration from indigenous and local communities continues to rise due to fall in land productivity, population growth and increasing outside opportunities for wage-labor, more women are left behind as de facto land managers, assuming even greater responsibilities in communities and households.

The importance of protecting the full spectrum of women’s property rights becomes even more urgent as the number of women-led households in rural areas around the world continues to grow. The percentage of female-led households is increasing in half of the world’s 15 largest countries by population, including India and Pakistan.

Although there is no updated data on the growth of women-led households, the policy research group International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in its 2014 study found that from 2000 to 2010, slightly less than half of the world’s urban population growth could be ascribed to migration. The contribution of migration is considerably higher in Asia, it found, where urbanisation is almost 60 percent and is expected to continue growing, although at a declining rate.”

“Unless women have equal standing in all laws governing indigenous lands, their communities stand on fragile ground,” cautioned Tauli-Corpuz.

Without legal protections for women, community lands are vulnerable to theft and exploitation that threatens the world’s tropical forests that form a critical bulwark against climate change, as well as efforts to eradicate poverty among rural communities.

With the increasing onslaught of large industries on community lands worldwide, tenure rights of women are fundamental to their continued cultural identity and natural resource governance, according to the RRI study.

“When women’s rights to access, use, and control community forests and resources are insecure, and especially when women’s right to meaningfully participate in community-level governance decisions is not respected, their ability to fulfill substantial economic and cultural responsibilities are compromised, causing entire families and communities to suffer,” said Keene.

Moreover, several studies have established that women are differently and disproportionately affected by community-level shocks such as climate change, natural disasters, conflict and large-scale land acquisitions, further underscoring  the fortification of women’s land rights an urgent priority.

With growing feminization of farming as men out-migrate, and the rise in women’s education, gender-inequitable tenure practices cannot be sustained over time, the RRI study concludes. But achieving gender equity in land rights will call for tremendous political will and societal change, particularly in patriarchal South Asia, researchers said.

Having land has made all the difference to Zar Bibi, a 60-year-old widow in Pakistan (centre). Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

Excerpt:

Through the Productive Assets Creation Programme (PAC), WFP in Zimbabwe supported 95,000 people in 2016 through the rehabilitation or creation of community assets, such as water harvesting systems. Photo courtesy of WFP.

By Sally Nyakanyanga
HARARE, Jun 5 2017 (IPS)

The shouts can be heard from a distance as one approaches Domboshawa, 30 kilometres northeast of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.

Tokupai madomasi! Tokupai mbambaira! Do you want tomatoes or sweet potatoes? Mune marii? How much do you have? Scores of women and children carrying bundles of vegetables, sacks of sweet potatoes and containers full of farming produce shout above the din of moving vehicles, trying to sell their produce for a meagre profit."Households and communities have been engaged to promote non–oppressive practices, recognising the importance of role sharing.” --Ali Said Yesuf, FAO Chief Technical Advisor

Tsitsi Machingauta, 32, has a two-hectare farm in the area. She decries the numerous problems faced by smallholder farmers, which range from produce rotting in the fields due to the heavy downpours the country experienced this year, to a poor road network that restricts their access to markets.

“Even when supermarket chains come to buy our produce, they pay very little because we do not have the bargaining power. Because of the poor returns, we struggle to make a living, let alone to send our children to school,” Machingauta told IPS.

Machingauta, who is the founder and director of Women’s Farming Syndicate, an organization that supports women smallholder farmers in Domboshaw), explains how the lack of skills to make use of technology and limited time for training for women – compounded by climate change – has worsened the plight of women in the area.

According to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Gender and Community Development (MWAGCD), in Zimbabwe, women make up 70 percent of the rural population and 86 percent of women are involved in farming. Of the smallholder farmers who benefited from the government’s land reform program, only 18 percent are female; for commercial land, women constitute just 12 percent.

A study by the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (2016) on Women Agribusiness Entrepreneurs revealed that fewer women smallholder farmers meet the banking sector’s stringent borrowing requirements, and women are more likely to operate informally.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report on Small Holders and Family Farmers, if women farmers had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20-30 percent, lifting 100-150 million people out of hunger.

Ali Said Yesuf, FAO Chief Technical Advisor, told IPS that in an effort to address these challenges, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) funded 72 million dollars to implement the Livelihood and Food Security Program (LFSP) to increase agricultural productivity and incomes, improve food and nutrition security, and reduce poverty in rural Zimbabwe.

“LFSP will actively address the specific constraints that smallholder farmers, particularly women, face in raising the productivity of their farms and participating in markets,” says Yesuf. The project covers eight districts in Zimbabwe.

The interventions take into account time constraints, which are as a result of women’s numerous domestic responsibilities. The LFSP promotes labour-saving technologies such as mechanised conservation agriculture, mechanised groundnut shellers, mechanised water abstraction technologies and more efficient wood stoves.

Yesuf said extension services and trainings have been carried out close to homes to avoid disruptions of women’s routines.

“Value chains such as poultry – broilers and indigenous chickens – and groundnuts that are perceived to be dominated by women are also given preference.  This allows women to have some control over incomes that are derived,” Yesuf told IPS.

He said the LFSP would also ensure the following:

• Women’s participation in decision-making, i.e. membership on committees such as Rural District Councils (RDCs), Internal Savings And Lending (ISALs), commodity associations, lead farmers
• Household decision-making by working with women and men to integrate gender relations within the household
• Increasing women’s knowledge about markets

The LFSP has employed the Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS) approach which provides safe spaces for communities to integrate decision-making and power relations.

“Through this, households and communities have been engaged to promote non–oppressive practices, recognising the importance of role sharing,” Yesuf told IPS.

As women are known for good saving practices, the LFSP has enhanced and built on such initiatives through the Internal Savings and Lending (ISALs) through training and capacity development and introduction of income-generating activities.

Women in the Midlands Province have transformed their lives through the Extension and Training for Rural Agriculture (EXTRA) project, a three-year project under LFSP. Vavariro ISALs in the Midlands Province is one such group whose members’ lives have been transformed.

“We started by contributing small amounts of money – as little as three dollars per person,” said Virginia Gomana, a Vavariro group member.

“Now we have ventured into big projects that we never thought we could do, such as goat rearing and market gardening, and this has enabled us to own our own homes. Vavariro has also become a platform where we are able exchange ideas, strengthen our skills,” she said.

Yesuf said that financial institutions have also been tapped to better support the needs of these women.

“Women are accessing loans from Micro-Finance Institutions (MFI) through the group methodology where there is group collateral and guarantorship,” he said.

Mercy Ssekide from Uganda’s Mabende District working together with her husband on their farm. Credit: FAO

By Sally Nyakanyanga
KAMPALA, Uganda, Jan 27 2017 (IPS)

Discussions around climate change have largely ignored how men and women are affected by climate change differently, instead choosing to highlight the extreme and unpredictable weather patterns or decreases in agricultural productivity.

Women constitute 56 percent of Ugandan farmers and provide more than 70 percent of agricultural production, nutrition and food security at the household level, according to the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET). However, despite the fact that women do most of the farm work, they only own 16 percent of the arable land in the country.Cognizant of women’s labour burden and time poverty, FAO ensures that all project activities are gender inclusive and participatory.

Stella Tereka, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) focal person on gender and climate change, says that discriminatory cultural practices that tend to favor men have limited women’s ownership and control over key productive resources in the country — a factor also exacerbating women’s vulnerability to climate change.

“The intensive labour burdens on women, especially the unpaid care work in the household, has resulted in women having less time to practice the learning, knowledge and skills gained from groups in their farming activities,” Tereka told IPS.

Winnie Masiko, the gender and climate change negotiator for Uganda at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), noted the lack of clear guidelines to incorporate gender in climate change projects.

“We need to develop a Gender and Climate Change Strategic Plan,” says Masiko.

The Ugandan Land Policy of 2013 grants women and men equal rights to own and co-own land, but this is not always the reality on the ground. Masiko says initiatives should focus on addressing embedded structural imbalances in order to bridge the gender gap, understand women and men’s varying needs, and pave the way for effective adaptation to climate change.

Edidah Ampaire, coordinator for Uganda’s Policy Action for Climate Change Adaptation project, says that women’s rights and contributions are extremely constrained, especially in rural areas, and that little is being done by government particularly through policy to address the imbalance.

“Gender inequalities are rife in farming communities, putting women at a disadvantage,” says Ampaire.

Tereka stressed that promoting gender equality is at the core of FAO programmes and the U.N. agency has made deliberate efforts to ensure the inclusion of women in all their programs.

“It’s imperative that women get empowered and take part in decision-making at all levels – this way we can see them contributing effectively to the development of their family and nations,” Tereka said.

Through the Farmer’s Field School (FFS) methodology, “commonly known as schools without walls”, FAO has enabled both men and women with a common goal to receive training, share ideas, learn from each other through observation and experimentation in their own context. On average the FFS have about 60 percent women farmers participating.

Proscovia Nakibuye, a cattle farmer in Nakasongola district, said the FFS has taught her effective strategies to cope with climate change. “We have been taught good livestock keeping and to plant pastures,” says Nakibuye.

“Farmer Field School offers space for hands-on group learning, enhancing skills for critical analysis and improved decision making by local people,” Tereka explained. “FFS activities are field-based, and include experimentation to solve problems, reflecting a specific local context.

“Participants learn how to improve their agronomic skills through experimenting, observing, analysing and replicating on their own fields, contributing to improved production and livelihoods, The FFS process enhances individual, household and community empowerment and social cohesion.”

Nakibuye and her husband are seeing major changes both in their household and farming activities. “Before, my children were not going to school but now through increased sales of milk, I can afford a decent education for my children,” she said.

FAO has also utilized the Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS) – a community based tool that enables women and men to plan the future they want and take action against barriers, including societal norms that inhibit gender equality and justice.

Mercy Ssekide, a farmer in Mubende District, joined the Balyejjusa FFS. “If you don’t cooperate with your family, the farming won’t be successful – that’s why I had to encourage my husband to join the FFS in order for us to work as a team,” she says.

“We are trained and encouraged to work hard to handle climate change and in order to meet our household needs. During off season we grow tomatoes and earn some money as locals and traders come and buy from us,” says Mercy’s husband.

Together, as a family, they have diversified and ventured into poultry, goat and pig rearing, and kitchen gardening. The Ssekide family are now deciding as a team on the use of their income — and are able to afford giving their two children a university education.

FAO, with funding from European Union, is implementing the Global Climate Change Project in the central cattle corridor in the districts of Luwero, Nakasangola, Nakaseke, Mubende , Sembabule and Kiboga.

Cognizant of women’s labour burden and time poverty, FAO ensures that all project activities are gender inclusive and participatory – particularly adjusting meeting/learning time to ensure women are involved and benefit from the skills and knowledge on climate smart agriculture.

Tereka believes that with an increasingly unpredictable climate, skills development in climate smart agriculture is critical. She urged the Ugandan government to revamp its agricultural extension system to be more gender-responsive, in order for farmers – especially women to – effectively put to good use the inputs being distributed by government under Operation Wealth Creation.

The FFS methodology is now being implemented in 90 countries with 4 million farmers across the globe having improved their skills and adjusted positively to the effects of climate change.

Nomsa Mthethwa, from Jozini in KwaZulu Natal Province, South Africa, has put her children through university from goat keeping. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
KWAZULU NATAL PROVINCE, South Africa, Nov 15 2016 (IPS)

Bongekile Ndimande’s family lost more 30 head of cattle to a ravaging drought last season, but a herd of goats survived and is now her bank on four legs.

In money value, the drought deprived Ndimande of more than 21,000 dollars. Each goat would be worth an average of 714 dollars if they had survived in the dry, hot and rocky environment in her village of Ncunjana in the KwaZulu Natal Province, which has been stalked by a drought that swept across Southern Africa.Goats are much better at dealing with drought, vulnerability and a changing environment than cattle. They're also easier for women to herd.

More than 40 million people are in need of food following one of the worst droughts ever in the region, with the Southern African Development Community launching a 2.8-billion-dollar emergency aid appeal.

Smallholder farmers in South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal Province have shifted to goat production to adapt to climate change. Their fortitude could be a success story for African agriculture in need of transformation to produce more food to feed more people but with fewer resources.

Livestock farmers like Ndimande are making good of a bad situation. They need help to cope with worsening extreme weather events which have led to increased food, nutrition and income security in many parts of Africa.

Science, innovation and technology

Adapting agriculture to climate change and climate financing are pressing issues at the seminal 22^nd meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP 22) which opened this week in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. Morocco – already setting the pace in implementing the global deal to fight climate change through innovative projects – has unveiled the Adaptation of African Agriculture (AAA), a 30-billion-dollar initiative to transform and adapt African agriculture.

The transformation of the agricultural sectors in addressing climate change is essential to tackling hunger and poverty, José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, said in a message in the run-up to the COP 22 following the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on Nov. 4. Agricultural sectors are uniquely positioned to drive sustainable development through climate-smart sustainable agriculture approaches, da Silva emphasised.

Almost all African countries have included agriculture in their climate action plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), highlighting the grave risk that climate change poses both to food security and economic growth on the continent, said Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR research programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

Science, innovation and technology will be at the core of adaption in African agriculture, he said.

According to the African Development Bank, 315 to 400 billion dollars will be needed in the next decade to implement the continent’s agricultural transformation agenda.

Harnessing technology is one of many solutions in addressing the impacts of climate change if smallholder farmers are to sustainably produce food, while rearing livestock. The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) – which has launched a regional project to improve farmer’s access to technologies to lift them out of hunger and poverty – has identified diversifying livestock-based livelihoods as one of four proven solutions that cereal and livestock farmers in Southern Africa can adopt to transit to climate-resilient agriculture.

Goat fortunes

Swapping cattle for goats has allowed Ndimande to grow her flock from 30 goats three years ago to 57 goats and 15 kids. Last year, she sold six goats at an average price of 67 dollars each and invested the proceeds in a new three-bedroom tile and brick house.

Ndimande is one of several farmers in KwaZulu Natal Province who, through training in goat management under a collaborative agribusiness and Community Animal Health Worker project, are helping transform livestock farming.

The Mdukatshani Rural Development Project is a 5-million-dollar partnership between the national Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, the KwaZulu Natal Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and Heifer International South Africa to double goat production by developing 7,000 female commercial farmers and creating over 600 jobs for the youth in KwaZulu Natal Province.

In addition, the project seeks to create 270 micro-businesses and generate 7.1 million dollars in revenue within five years.

“Goats have given me food and income because I am able to sell them within a short space of time unlike cattle,” Ndimande told IPS, explaining that better livestock management skills have improved her flock.

Goats are much better at dealing with drought, vulnerability and a changing environment than cattle. They’re also easier for women to herd, said Rauri Alcock, a director of the Mdukatshani Rural Development Project.

“Women are our priority attention because they are in charge in many households and are the vulnerable people we are trying to get to, so goats, women, global warming come together very well,” Alcock told IPS during a tour of agribusiness project organised jointly by CTA and the Southern Africa Confederation of Agriculture Unions (SACAU) for livestock farmers from across Southern Africa.

Alcock explains that Mdukatshani Rural Development Project’s main entry point has been helping farmers avoiding kids’ deaths in their flocks. Despite being productive, the high mortality of kids at weaning lowers productivity for a farmer to be able to start selling their goats.

“Goats are an adaptation strategy as we talk about climate change. We see that male farmers who have had cattle and lost them are now moving towards keeping goats because goats are actually more resilient and better animals for a harsh changing environment,” said Alcock.

Another farmer, Sikhumbuzo Ndawonde (46), a former steel factory worker in Johannesburg until he was retrenched, has supported his family through keeping goats even though he does not eat them.

“I never eat any goat meat but I love keeping them because I get good income from them besides being able to have a goat for traditional ceremonies. They are now my job,” said Ndawonde, who has a flock of 33 goats and sells at least 10 goats each year.

Climate change has winder implications for livestock keepers in Southern Africa but with management, this is a route to sustainable livelihoods, says Sikhalazo Dube, a livestock specialist and the Southern Africa regional Representative for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

“One of the challenges caused by elevated levels of carbon in the atmosphere is increase in the woody component of the vegetation. Goats as largely browsers are best suited to reduce bush encroachment and in the process benefit nutritionally,” said Dube, adding that in declining feed availability due to drought, keeping goats is ideal.

Small stock can be produced in small areas and require less feed, making them ideal for women and youth who are often landless or not supported to own land to use as an entry point for income generation and Small Medium Scale Enterprises, Dube said.

Estherine Fotabong, NEPAD Director of Programmes Implementation and Coordination, in Nairobi, Kenya during the Second Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance Forum. Credit: Charles Mkoka/IPS

By Charles Mkoka
NAIROBI, Oct 14 2016 (IPS)

Two years ago at the 31st African Union Summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, heads of state and government endorsed the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) programme on agriculture and climate change with the bold vision of at least 25 million smallholder households practicing Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) by 2025.

This means sustainable food systems and broad-based social and environmental resilience from the household level up. CSA also supports the aspirations and goals in Africa’s Agenda 2063 and the AU Malabo Declaration as well as the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and COP21 Paris climate agreement.

As a result of farmers embracing Climate-Smart Agriculture, some fields are still green and alive even as drought rages in the south of Madagascar. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

IPS correspondent Charles Mkoka caught up with Estherine Fotabong, NEPAD Director of Programmes Implementation and Coordination, at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya during the Second Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance Forum this week to shade more light on some of the initiatives her institution is implementing. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What does the CSA Alliance bring to agriculture and rural development on the African continent?

A: As you know, 2025 is the African Union decision to reach 25 million farmers that are practicing CSA on the continent in order that agriculture remains relevant to the changing weather and climate patterns.  NEPAD being the technical arm, it is part of our responsibility to translate all the decisions into practical actions on the ground. In that respect we have developed partnership and programmes that are targeted to bring support to farmers.

Q: NEPAD cannot do this mammoth task alone considering its footprint is invisible in some states. In terms of synergy, who are you working with on the ground?

A: In terms of partnership we entered in the NEPAD/International Non Governmental (INGOs) Alliance. This is an alliance between NEPAD and five INGO’s working through communities and community-based groups on the ground. As NEPAD, we cannot be present in every country but we realise the role of subsidiary organisations to work with others who have the first engagement with farmers. The alliance can structure their programmes into providing concentrated support to the farmers. This support would either be providing new technologies of farming, inputs that farmers need or availability of credit. But also to adopt practices that help them cope with weather patterns or adapt to innovations that reduce greenhouse gases.

The second area of partnership is the CSA forum. You have seen the last two days that there is a lot of knowledge but this knowledge is sitting on computers. It is not shared for others to utilize. This platform creates space to bring all those working on agriculture, climate change and climate smart agriculture to share experience and knowledge generated through research.

Q: Can you tell our readers what other programmes you’re involved in at the secretariat level as far as issues of building climate change resilience and rural development are concerned across the continent?

A: Resilience-building among farmers is one target coming out of the Malabo Declaration. The declaration reaffirmed the continent’s resolve towards ensuring, through deliberate and targeted public support, that all segments of our populations, particularly women, the youth, and other disadvantaged sectors of our societies, must participate and directly benefit from the growth and transformation opportunities to improve their lives and livelihoods.

So we are working with member states to review the Agricultural Investment Plans, so that issues of climate change can be mainstreamed in their lives. It is clear that we are not going to go far if we don’t ensure that climate change issues are mainstreamed in national development and sectoral policies.

Zambia, for instance, was an early adopter of conservation agriculture, which is an example of climate smart agriculture. According to reports, farmers – particularly women – appreciated the increase in yields as a result of CSA. Yields have translated into increased income, which has translated into improved social economic conditions for their families.

Peter Mcharo’s two children digging their father’s maize field in Kibaigwa village, Morogoro Region, some 350km from Dar es Salaam. Mcharo has benefitted greatly from conservation agriculture techniques. Credit: Orton Kiishweko/IPS

Q: Despite the experimentally proven results in the case of Zambia as you have stated, why is there low uptake of CSA across the continent?

A: The programmes we have try to address those obstacles. These include land ownership, particularly for smallholder farmers, access to finance, access to technologies to take up CSA techniques are some of the challenges.

So through our Gender Climate Change Agriculture Support Programme we hope to reach a significant number of households and women farmers to contribute to the target.  Furthermore, through our Climate Fund programme, we hope to continue to finance grassroots initiatives for the 2025 target. It is our belief that government themselves will put in place investments that will support farmers in their countries to ensure they take on board interventions on CSA so they withstand and cushion shocks brought  about by climate variability.

Q: More women are involved in food production on the continent. However, data shows that in terms of the policy framework embracing gender dimension little is being done by countries to provide an enabling environment for women participation especially when it comes to land ownership. What is your take on this?

A: I have always said that I think it will always be smart for any government to invest in women and make their condition better.

Even in the difficult conditions that they work, women contribute 80 percent of the food we consume in our households on the continent. True that they use these resources to support their families so that brings social cohesion in our communities and countries.

But also, we want to invest in women in terms of supporting their economic empowerment. They will also increase their political participation and empowerment. It is really important that countries give particular attention to policies that favour women, such as policies that make it easier to form women cooperatives. In some countries to register a women’s cooperative they have to pay more money than if it was a men’s cooperative. Why?

Why that kind of discrimination and inequality? The platform has to be equal for both men and women. So we need to develop policies that cut across the board for all stakeholders.

The issue of land is a big question and challenge. We can learn from other countries such as Rwanda and Ethiopia. These countries have developed policies that allow for co-ownership of land, so that a woman who is married in a village will not be chased away not to farm when the husband dies, for instance.

Q: In your speech, you hinted at the need to utilise local indigenous knowledge in the face of climate change, together with scientific-backed data. Why is this crucial in resilience-building?

A: We tend to forget what we have been doing over the years and get good results from that. Much as it is important to embrace new knowledge from science, I think we have also good knowledge from what our ancestors have been doing over the years. Such kind of knowledge we should document and replicate.

We should believe that our farmers have knowledge. They have ideas that can be used to cope with climate change. In Cameroon, for instance, fishermen when I visited them described what they had noticed over the years in their area. They explained about the changes in the water level, changes in the seasonal patterns. As such we need to engage with farmers. They have rich information and knowledge that can help us as technocrats to make informed decisions as well.

Excerpt:

Photo courtesy of Esther Ngumbi.

By Esther Ngumbi
ATLANTA, Georgia, Sep 30 2016 (IPS)

London’s Waterloo Bridge over the River Thames is famously known as the “Ladies Bridge,” for it was built largely by women during the height of World War II.  On another continent, women fighting a different war have built an equally remarkable structure: a 3,300-meter anti-salt dyke constructed by a women’s association in Senegal to reclaim land affected by rising levels of salt water.

These women are on the front-line of the fight against climate change, and their ingenuity and resolve resulted in a singular victory. The project allowed the revitalization of rice-growing activities and the re-generation of natural vegetation over 1,500 hectares, and benefiting over 5,000 people in Senegal.Women are a minority on every major committee of the United Nations’ own top climate change decision making group.

Yet, women continue to be excluded from climate change solutions for agriculture.  A look at United Nations report on female representations in main climate change decision bodies shows that women are a minority on every major committee of the United Nations’ own top climate change decision making group. For example, women hold only 6 percent of positions in the Advisory Board of the Climate Technology Centre and Network. At the same time, women smallholder farmers have limited access to agricultural training, credit, seeds, and inputs – all of which are essential for the development and adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices.

Most affected by climate change are the world’s 1.3 billion poor people, the majority of whom are subsistence farmers, women and their families. Furthermore, women make up an average of 43 percent of the global agricultural workforce and produce as much as 90 percent of the food supply in African countries, where they are also mainly responsible for providing water and fuel for their families.  All this makes them exceptionally vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Not only does women’s disempowerment prevent us from understanding the true extent to which climate change is disrupting the way of life for our most at-risk communities, it also perpetuates the antiquated narrative that women are victims, rather than agents, of change.

But, as seen in Senegal, women bring novel perspectives and solutions to the fight against climate change. Furthermore, studies have found that women in leadership improve organizations’ financial performance, strengthen the organizational climate, increase corporate social responsibility and reputation, leverage talent and enhance innovation and collective intelligence.  Therefore, across every level of society, women’s leadership in addressing climate change must be supported.

While there are signs of change—including the recently announced appointment of Patricia Espinosa as Executive Secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—much remains to be done, whether in the Board room or on the threshing floor.

Small-scale women farmers must beassisted with tools, technologies and other resources to effectively deal with the changing climate. These include portable modern stoves that do not require large amounts of firewood and biogas digesters that can turn waste from animals into gas for cooking.

Water conservation technologies, such as micro-dams, rain storage systems,  and drip irrigation technologies that  grow more crop per drop are a prerequisite for dealing with more variable rainfall. Such climate-smart agriculture techniques could potentially allow small-scale women farmers to grow crops and feed their families throughout the year and avoid the “hungry season.”

When women gain access to such resources and tools on a large scale, whole communities and regions can benefit. In India, for example, the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group and the Women’s Earth Alliance launched a yearlong India Women, Food Security, and Climate Change Training program.  Through this program, women were trained on a wide array of conservation agricultural practices including agroforestry, conservation tillage and mixed farming. These practices strengthen resilience of the land base to extreme events, broaden sources of livelihoods, and have positive implications for climate change adaptation.

As a result of the initiative, over 5,000 women were trained and over 6,000 trees were grown. The trainees were further tasked with implementing what they had learned. Many of the 5,000 trained women launched their own small-scale agribusinesses and continued to be leaders in the fight against climate change, reaching out to more than 750,000 people.

Another example is the work of late Nobel Prize winner Prof. Wangari Maathai. Through the greenbelt movement, she empowered women to grow seedlings and plant trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, and provide food and firewood. Since its inception, the organization has planted over 51 million trees, helping to protect Kenya’s forests. This program not only addresses climate change, but it also creates jobs for women while improving water and food security.

Efforts towards empowering women with tools and resources to fight climate change must be intensified and accelerated at local, national and regional levels.  Echoing the words of former President of Finland Tarja Halonen: “Women are powerful agents whose knowledge skills and innovative ideas support the efforts to combat climate change.” Including women in top decision-making organs on issues of climate change and empowering them on ground to take action is essential, and will surely facilitate a more stable and prosperous planet.

Excerpt:

Albert Kanga's plantain farm on the outskirts of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

By Friday Phiri
ABIDJAN, Cote d'Ivoire, Jul 18 2016 (IPS)

Albert Kanga Azaguie no longer considers himself a smallholder farmer. By learning and monitoring the supply and demand value chains of one of the country’s staple crops, plantain (similar to bananas), Kanga ventured into off-season production to sell his produce at relatively higher prices.

“I am now a big farmer. The logic is simple: I deal in off-season plantain. When there is almost nothing on the market, mine is ready and therefore sells at a higher price,” says Kanga, who owns a 15 Ha plantain farm 30 kilometres from Abidjan, the Ivorian capital.

Harvesting 12 tonnes on average per hectare, Kanga is one of a few farmers re-writing the African story on agriculture, defying the common tale of a poor, hungry and food-insecure region with more than 232 million undernourished people – approximately one in four.

Albert Kanga on his plantain farm. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

With an estimated food import bill valued at 35.4 billion dollars in 2015, experts consider this scenario ironic because of Africa’s potential, boasting 60 percent of the world’s unused arable land, and where 60 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture, accounting for roughly a third of the continent’s GDP.

The question is why? Several reasons emerge which include structural challenges rooted in poor infrastructure, governance and weak market value chains and institutions, resulting in low productivity. Additionally, women, who form the backbone of agricultural labour, are systematically discriminated against in terms of land ownership and other incentives such as credit and inputs, limiting their opportunities to benefit from agricultural value chains.

“Women own only one percent of land in Africa, receive one percent of agricultural credit and yet, constitute the majority of the agricultural labour force,” says Buba Khan, Africa Advocacy Officer at ActionAid.

Khan believes Africa may not be able to achieve food security, let alone sovereignty, if women remain marginalised in terms of land rights, and the World Bank Agenda for Global Food System sourcebook supports the ‘closing the gender gap’ argument.

According to the sourcebook, ensuring that women have the same access to assets, inputs, and services in agriculture as men could increase women’s yields on farms by 20-30 percent and potentially reduce the number of hungry people by 12-17 percent.

But empowering women is just one of the key pieces to the puzzle. According to the African Development Bank’s Feeding Africa agenda, number two on its agenda is dealing with deep-seated structural challenges, requiring ambition and investments.

According to the Bank’s analysis, transforming agricultural value chains would require approximately 280-340 billion dollars over the next decade, and this would likely create new markets worth 55-65 billion dollars per year by 2025. And the AfDB envisages quadrupling its investments from a current annual average of US 612 million to about 2.4 billion dollars to achieve this ambition.

“Our goal is clear: achieve food self-sufficiency for Africa in 10 years, eliminate malnutrition and hunger and move Africa to the top of agricultural value chains, and accelerate access to water and sanitation,” said Akinwumi Adesina, the AfDB Group President at the 2016 Annual Meetings, highlighting that the major focus of the bank’s “Feed Africa” agenda, is transforming agriculture into a business for farmers.

But even with this ambitious goal, and the colossal financial resources on the table, the how question remains critical. Through its strategy, the Bank sets to use agriculture as a starting point for industrialisation through multi-sectoral interventions in infrastructure, intensive use of agro inputs, mechanisation, enhanced access to credit and improved land tenure systems.

Notwithstanding these well tabulated interventions, there are trade-offs required to create a balance in either system considering the climate change challenge already causing havoc in the agriculture sector. The two schools of thought for agriculture development—Intensification (more yields per unit through intensive agronomical practices) and Extensification (bringing more land under cultivation), require a right balance.

“Agriculture matters for Africa’s development, it is the single largest source of income, food and market security, and it is also the single largest source of jobs. Yet, agriculture faces some enormous challenges, the most urgent being climate change and the sector is called to act. But there are trade-offs to either approaches of up-scaling. For example, extensification entails cutting more forests and in some cases, displacing people—both of which have a negative impact on Agriculture’s role to climate change mitigation,” says Sarwatt Hussein, Head of Communications at World Bank’s Agriculture Global Practice.

And this is a point that Ivorian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mamadou Coulibaly Sangafowa, stresses regarding Agricultural investments in Africa. “The emphasis is that agricultural investments should be climate-sensitive to unlock the opportunities especially for young Africans, and stop them from crossing the Mediterranean seeking economic opportunities elsewhere,” he said.

Coulibaly, who is also president of the African conference of Agricultural Ministers, identifies the need to improve specialised agricultural communication, without which farmers would continue working in the dark. “Farmers need information about latest technologies but it is not getting to them when they need it the most,” he said, highlighting the existing information gap, which the World Bank and the African Media Initiative (AMI) have also noted regarding media coverage of Agriculture in Africa.

While agriculture accounts for well over 60 percent of national economic activity and revenue in Africa, the sector gets a disproportionately small amount of media coverage, contributing less than 10 percent to the national economic and political discourse. And this underreporting has resulted not only in limited public knowledge of what actually goes on in the sector, but also in general, misconceptions about its place in the national and regional economy, notes the AMI-World bank analysis.

Whichever route Africa uses to achieve the overall target of feeding itself and be a net food exporter by 2025, Ivorian farmer, Albert Kanga has already started the journey—thanks to the World Bank supported West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme-WAAPP, which introduced him to off-season production techniques.

According to Abdoulaye Toure, lead agro-economist at the World Bank, the WAAPP initiative which started in 2007 has changed the face of agriculture in the region. “When we started in 2007, there was a huge food deficit gap in West Africa, with productivity at around 20 percent, but it is now at 30 percent, and two similar programmes in Eastern and Southern Africa, have been launched as a result,” said Toure.

Some of the key elements of the programme include research, training of young scientists to replace the older generation, and dissemination of improved technologies to farmers. With in-country cluster research stations set up based on a particular country’s potential, there is improved information sharing on best practices.

“With new varieties introduced and off-season irrigation techniques through WAAPP, I am now an example,” says Farmer Kanga, who does not only supply to big supermarkets, but also exports to international markets such as Italy.

He recalls how he started the farm named after his late brother, Dougba, and wishes “he was alive to see how successful it has become.”

The feed Africa agenda targets to feed 150 million, and lift 100 million people out of poverty by 2025. But is it an achievable dream? Farmer Kanga is already showing that it is doable.

Farmers are in despair at the drought crisis in Southern Madagascar, where at least 1.14 million people are food insecure. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
BEKILY, Madagascar, Jun 14 2016 (IPS)

Havasoa Philomene did not have any maize when the harvesting season kicked off at the end of May since like many in the Greater South of Madagascar, she had already boiled and eaten all her seeds due to the ongoing drought.

Here, thousands of children are living on wild cactus fruits in spite of the severe constipation that they cause, but in the face of the most severe drought witnessed yet, Malagasy people have resorted to desperate measures just to survive.

“We received maize seeds in January in preparation for the planting season but most of us had eaten all the seeds within three weeks because there is nothing else to eat,” says the 53-year-old mother of seven.

She lives in Besakoa Commune in the district of Bekily, Androy region, one of the most affected in the South of Madagascar.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that an estimated 45,000 people in Bekily alone are affected, which is nearly half of the population here.

Humanitarian agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) estimate that 1.14 million people lack enough food in the seven districts of Southern Madagascar, accounting for at least 80 percent of the rural population.

The United Nations World Food Programme now says that besides Androy, other regions, including Amboassary, are experiencing a drought crisis and many poor households have resulted to selling small animals and their own clothes, as well as kitchenware, in desperate attempts to cope.

After the USAID’s Office of U.S Foreign Disaster Assistance through The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) organised an emergency response in January to provide at least 4,000 households in eight communes in the districts of Bekily and Betroka with maize seeds, many families had devoured them in less than three weeks.

Philomene told IPS that “the seeds should have been planted in February but people are very hungry.”

Due to disastrous crop production in the last harvesting season, many farmers did not produce enough seeds for the February planting season, hence the need for humanitarian agencies to meet the seed deficit.

Farmers like Rasoanandeasana Emillienne say that this is the driest rainy season in 35 years.

“I have never experienced this kind of hunger. We are taking one day at a time because who knows what will happen if the rains do not return,” says the mother of four.

Although the drought situation has been ongoing since 2013, experts such as Shalom Laison, programme director at ADRA Madagascar, says that at least 80 percent of crops from the May-June harvest are expected to fail.

The Southern part of Madagascar is the poorest, with USAID estimates showing that 90 percent of the population earns less than two dollars a day.

According to Willem Van Milink, a food security expert with the World Food Programme, “Of the one million people affected across the Southern region, 665,000 people are severely food insecure and in need of emergency food support.”

Against this backdrop, the U.S. ambassador to the UN Agencies in Rome (FAO, IFAD and WFP), David Lane, has urged the government to declare the drought an emergency as an appeal to draw attention to the ongoing crisis.

Ambassador Lane says that though the larger Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) member states are making plans to declare an emergency situation in 13 countries in the southern region, including Madagascar, “the government of Madagascar needs to make an appeal for help.”

“Climate change is getting more and more volatile but the world does not know what is happening in Southern Madagascar and this region is indicative of what is happening in a growing number of countries in Southern Africa,” he told IPS during his May 16-21 visit to Madagascar.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), these adverse weather conditions have reduced crop production in other Southern African nations where an estimated 14 million people face hunger in countries including Southern Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Malawi and South Africa.

Thousands of households are living precarious lives in the regions of Androy, Anosy and Atsimo Andrefana in Southern Madagascar  because they are unable to meet their basic food and non-food needs through September due to the current El Niño event, which has translated into a pronounced dry spell.

“An appeal is very important to show that the drought is longer than usual, hence the need for urgent but also more sustainable solutions,” says USAID’s Dina Esposito.

The ongoing situation is different from chronic malnutrition, she stressed. “This is about a lack of food and not just about micronutrients and people are therefore much too thin for their age.”

She says that the problem with a slow onset disaster like a drought as compared to a fast onset disaster like a cyclone – also common in the South – is to determine when to draw the line and declare the situation critical.

Esposito warns that the worst is yet to come since food insecurity is expected to escalate in terms of severity and magnitude in the next lean season from December 2016 to February 2017.

Over 600 delegates representing at least 570 million farms scattered around the world gathered in Zambia from May 4-7 under the umbrella of the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO) to discuss climate change, land tenure, innovations and capacity building as four pillars on which to build agricultural development.

Among the local delegates was Mary Nyirenda, a farmer from Livingstone, where the assembly was held.

“I have a 35-hectare farm but only use five hectares due to water stress. With one borehole, I am only able to irrigate limited fields. I gave up on rainfall in the 2013/14 season when I lost about five hectares of maize to drought,” Nyirenda told IPS.

Privileged to be part of the 2016 WFO General Assembly, Nyirenda hoped to learn innovative ways to improve productivity and market access for her garden and poultry produce. But did the conference meet her expectations?

Mary Nyirenda in her garden at her farm in Livingstone, Zambia. Credit: Friday Phiri/IPS

“Yes it has, especially on market access. I’ve learnt that working as groups gives us a strong voice and bargaining power. I’ve been struggling on my own but now I understand that two is better than one, and so my task from here is to strengthen our cooperative which is still disjointed in terms of producer partnerships,” said Nyirenda, emphasising the power of farmer organisations – for which WFO exists.

Convened under the theme ‘Partnerships for Growth’, the clarion call by delegates throughout the conference was to change the narrative that, while they are at the centre of a multi-billion-dollar food sector, responsible for feeding the whole world, farmers are the world’s poorest people.

And WFO President Evelyn Nguleka says the situation has to change. “It is true that farmers in almost all corners of the world constitute the majority poor, but the question is why?” asked Nguleka while responding to journalists during the closing WFO General Assembly Press briefing.

She said the meeting established that poor organisation and lack of information were the major reasons for farmers’ lack of progress, noting, “If farmers remain in isolation, they will continue to be poor.”

“It is for this reason that we developed a legal tool on contract farming, which will be mostly useful for smallholders whose knowledge on legal matters is low, and are easily taken advantage of,” said David Velde, president of the National Farmers Union in the U.S. and a board member of WFO.

Velde told IPS that various tools would be required to help smallholders be well equipped to fully benefit from their work, especially in a world with an unstable climate, a sub-theme that found space in all discussions at the conference due to its multifaceted nature.

With technology transfer being one of the key elements of the sustainable development agenda as enshrined in the Paris climate deal, delegates established that both innovation and capacity building for farmers to improve productivity cannot be discussed in a vacuum.

“Agriculture is indeed a global sector that needs serious attention. The fact that a world farmers’ organization exists is a sign that food production, food security, climate change are global issues that cannot be looked at in isolation. Farmers need information on best methods and technologies on how best to enhance productivity in a climate conscious manner,” said Zambian President Edgar Lungu in his address to the WFO General Assembly.

In the world’s quest to feed the hungry 793 million people by 2030, and and the projected population growth expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050, more than half in Africa, WFO is alive to the huge task that its members have, which can only be fulfilled through increased productivity.

“WFO is in recognition that the world has two conflicting issues on face value—to feed the world and mitigate climate change. Both require huge resources but we believe that it is possible to tackle both, through increased productivity using latest technology,” said William Rolleston, president of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand.

Rolleston, who is also Vice President of WFO, told IPS that while WFO’s work does not involve funding farmers, it helps its members to innovate and forge partnerships for growth.

It has long been recognised globally that climate change, if not tackled, could be a barrier to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). And this presented, perhaps, the hardest of choices that world leaders had to make—tackling climate change, with huge implications on the world’s productive capacity, which has over the years largely relied on a carbon intensive economy.

By approving the SDGs and the historic climate agreement last year, the world’s socio-economic agenda is set for a complete paradigm shift. However, WFO President Evelyn Nguleka wants farmers to remain the focus of the world’s policies.

“Whatever changes the world decides moving forward, it should not be at the expense of farmers to survive and be profitable,” she stressed.

For Nyirenda, access to markets holds the key to farmers’ productive capacity, especially women, who, according to FAO, constitute half of the global agricultural labour force, while in Africa, the figure is even higher—80 percent.

“My interactions with international organisations such as IFAD and others who are interested in women empowerment was a serious-eye opener moving forward,” she said.

Processing baby vegetables at Sidemane Farm in Swaziland. An EU grant helped local farmers to buy equipment and get training in business management and marketing. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Kitty Stapp
May 5 2016 (IPS)

As the World Farmers’ Organization meets for its annual conference in Zambia to promote policies that strengthen this critical sector, IPS looks at how farmers across the globe are tackling the interconnected challenges of climate change, market fluctuations, water and land management, and energy access.

Women working in their vegetable gardens at the Capanda Agroindustrial Pole in Angola. Although almost half of the agricultural workers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, productivity on their farms is significantly lower per hectare compared to men because they tend to be locked out of land ownership, access to credit and productive farm inputs like fertilizers, pesticides and farming tools, support from extension services, and access to markets and other factors essential to their productivity. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Gadam sorghum was introduced to semi-arid regions of eastern Kenya as a way for farmers to improve their food security and earn some income from marginal land. The hardy, high-yielding sorghum variety has not only thrived in harsh conditions, it has won a place in the hearts – and plates – of local farmers.
Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

Organically grown baby spinach, like this for sale in Johannesburg, South Africa, fetches a higher price for farmers in the market. Credit: Johan Eybers/IPS

Mbuya Erica Chirimanyemba in her maize field in Guruve, Zimbabwe. Conservation agriculture techniques have turned her fortunes around. Credit: Ephraim Nsingo/IPS

For 12 years now, the women of the Tsangano cooperative in Malawi’s southern district of Ntcheu have pooled their tomato harvest, selling some 20 tonnes at the outdoor markets that abound in Lilongwe, the capital. Now they aim to diversify from selling to processing vegetables, since they could earn more if they canned the tomatoes and made jam and juice. Credit: Claire Ngozo/IPS

Zero hunger is the goal, but this is all the production of corn and pulses for this household. Credit: TERI University

Forests still support a major part of household income in rural communities, like this one in Odisha, India. Credit: TERI University

Kenyan farmer Isaac Ochieng Okwanyi has had his most successful harvest ever after using lime to improve the quality of his soil. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

Presenting a solution to both climate and energy needs, solar-based irrigation systems can transform fields in semi-arid areas. Credit: TERI University

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Jacqui Ashby and Jennifer Twyman
PARIS, Mar 23 2015 (IPS)

We are lucky to live in a country that has long since abandoned the image of the damsel in distress. Even Disney princesses now save themselves and send unsuitable “saviours” packing. But despite the great strides being made in gender equality, we are still failing rural women, particularly women farmers.

We are failing them by using incomplete and inadequate data to describe their situation, and neglecting to empower them to improve it. As a consequence, we are all losing out on the wealth of knowledge this demographic can bring to boosting food supplies in a changing climate, which is a major concern for everyone on this planet.The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

Whilst it is true that women farmers have less access to training, land, and inputs than their male counterparts, we need to debunk a few myths that have long been cited as fact, that are a bad basis for policy decision-making.

New research, drawing on work done by IFPRI and others, presented in Paris this week by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security will start this process – here are four fast facts that can serve food for thought.

1. Rural women have more access to land than we think

For decades the same data has done the rounds, claiming that women own as little as 2 per cent of land. While this may be the case in some regions, these statistics are outdated and are answering the wrong questions. For example, much of this data is derived from comparing land owned by male-headed households with that owned by female-headed households. Yet, even if the man holds the license for the land, the woman may well have access to and use part of this land.

Therefore a better question to ask, and a new set of data now being collected is, how much control does the woman have over how land is used and the resultant income? How much of the land does she have access to? What farming decisions is she making? There is plenty of evidence to support the fact that women play a significant role in agricultural production. This role needs to be recognised so that women receive better access to agricultural resources, inputs and services

2. Rural women are not more vulnerable to climate change because they are women

We need to look beyond gender to determine the root causes of why individuals and communities are more vulnerable to climate change. We have found many other contributing factors, such as gender norms, social class, education, and wealth can leave people at risk.

Are more women falling into this trap because they don’t have control over important resources and can’t make advantageous choices when they farm? If so, how can we change that? We must tackle these bigger problems that hinder both men and women in different ways, and not simply blame unequal vulnerability to climate risks and shocks on gender.

3. Rural women do not automatically make better stewards of natural resources

Yes, rural women are largely responsible for collecting water and firewood, as well as a great deal of farm work. But the idea that this immediately makes them better stewards of natural resources is false. In fact, the evidence is conflicting. One study showed that out of 13 empirical studies, women were less likely to adopt climate-smart technologies in eight of them.

Yet in East Africa, research has shown women were more likely than, or just as likely as men to adopt climate-smart practices. Why is this? Because women do not have a single, unified interest. Decisions to adopt practices that will preserve natural resources depend a lot on social class, and the incentives given, whether they are made by women or men. So we need more precise targeting based on gender and social class.

4. Gender sensitive programming and policymaking is not just about helping women succeed

We all have a lot to gain from making food security, climate change innovation and gender-sensitive policies. The millions of poor farmers, both men and women, all over the developing world have an untapped wealth of knowledge that we are going to need if we are to successfully tackle the greatest challenge of our time: safeguarding our food supply in the face of climate change.

A key to successful innovation is understanding the user’s perspective. In Malawi, for example, rural women have been involved in designing a range of labour saving agri-processing tools. As they will be the primary users of such technologies, having their input is vital to ensure a viable end product.

In Nicaragua, women have been found to have completely different concerns from men when it comes to adapting to climate change, as they manage household food production, rather than growing cash crops like male farmers. Hearing these concerns and responding to them will result in more secure livelihoods, food availability and nutrition.

We hope that researchers will be encouraged to undertake the challenge of collecting better data about rural women and learning about their perspectives. By getting a clearer picture of their situation, we can equip them with what they need to farm successfully under climate change, not just for themselves, and their families, but to benefit us all.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Mary Wanjiru is a farmer from Nyeri County in central Kenya. Granting land rights to women can raise farm production by 20-30 per cent in developing countries. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Monique Barbut
BONN, Mar 4 2015 (IPS)

Women are not only the world’s primary food producers. They are hardworking and innovative and, they invest far more of their earnings in their families than men. But most lack the single most important asset for accessing investment resources – land rights.

Women’s resourcefulness is astonishing, but they are no fools. They invest their income where they are most likely to see returns, but not in the land they have no rights to. Land tenure is the powerful political tool that governments use to give or deny these rights. We are paying a high price for the failure to grant land rights to the women who play a vital role in agriculture.

Courtesy of UNCCD

Women produce up to 80 per cent of the total food and make up 43 per cent of the labour force in developing countries. Yet 95 per cent of agricultural education programmes exclude them. In Yazd, the ‘desert capital’ of Iran, for example, women have invented a method to produce food in underground tunnels.

In Asia and Africa, a woman’s weekly work is up to 13 hours longer than a man’s. Furthermore, women spend nearly all their earnings on their families, whereas men divert a quarter of their income to other expenses. But most have no rights to the land they till.

Land rights level the playing field by giving both men and women the same access to vital agricultural resources. The knock-on effect is striking. Granting land rights to women can raise farm production by 20-30 per cent in developing countries, and increase a country’s total agricultural production by up to 4 per cent.

This is critical at a time when we are losing 12 million hectares of fertile land each year, but need to raise our food production by up to 70 per cent by 2050 due to population growth and consumption trends – not to mention climate change.

But what is land tenure exactly? Land tenure works like a big bundle of sticks, with each stick representing a particular right. There are five important sticks in the bundle; the sticks to access, to use, to manage land independently, to exclude and to alienate other users. The more sticks a land user has in the bundle, the more motivated they are to nourish and support the land.Women are grimly aware that without land rights, they could lose their land to powerful individuals at any moment. Where, then, is the incentive to invest in the land; especially if you’re hungry now?

The failure to grant these rights, not just to poor, rural land users, but to women as well, means fertile land is exploited to barrenness. With rising competition over what little is available, conflicts are inevitable.

In rural Latin America, only 25 per cent of the land holdings are owned by women. This drops to 15 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa and to less than 5 per cent in western Asia and northern Africa. These are shocking figures, and yet they may be even more optimistic than the reality.

A recent study in Uganda, for instance, shows that even when men and women nominally jointly own land, the woman’s name may not appear in any of the documentation. If a husband dies, divorces or decides to sell the land, his wife has no recourse to asserting her land rights.

Women are grimly aware that without land rights, they could lose their land to powerful individuals at any moment. Where, then, is the incentive to invest in the land; especially if you’re hungry now? Instead, those without rights take what they can from the land before they move to greener pastures. This adds to the unfortunate, yet preventable, spiral of land degradation.

At least 500 million hectares of previously fertile agricultural land is abandoned. And with less than 30 per cent of the land in developing world under secure tenure, there is little hope that these trends will change. The lack of secure land tenure remains a vital challenge for curbing land degradation in developing countries.

Among the rural poor, men are often the main beneficiaries. But granting land rights to both men and women will narrow inequalities and benefit us all.

In Nepal, women with strong property rights tend to be food secure, and their children are less likely to be underweight. In Tanzania, women with property rights are earning up to three times more income. In India, women who own land are eight times less likely to experience domestic violence. The social gains from secure land tenure are vast.

For years, women have dealt with land degradation and fed the world without the support they need. Imagine how granting them land rights could power our future. Let’s mark this year’s International Women’s Day by shouting the loudest for the land rights of rural women.

Edited By Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Members of a women-farmers’ collective demonstrate use of a devices that sends daily bulletins on weather patterns, crops and other matters of importance to farming communities in rural India. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
MAHABUBNAGAR, India, Mar 4 2015 (IPS)

Jawadi Vimalamma, 36, looks admiringly at her cell phone. It’s a simple device that can only be used to send or receive a call or a text message. Yet to the farmer from the village of Janampet, located 150 km away from Hyderabad, capital of the southern Indian state of Telangana, it symbolises a wealth of knowledge that changed her life.

Her phone is fitted with what the farmers call a GreenSIM, which sends her daily updates on the weather, health tips or agricultural advice.

“My profits have increased from 5,000 to 20,000 rupees (80-232 dollars) each season.” -- Jawadi Vimalamma, a smallholder farmer participating in a mobile technology scheme to create awareness among rural women.
Three years ago, a single message on this mobile alerted Vimalamma to the benefits of crop rotation.

“My profits have increased from 5,000 to 20,000 rupees (80-232 dollars) each season,” says the smallholder farmer, who now grows rice, corn, millet and peanuts on her three-acre plot, instead of relying on a single crop for her livelihood.

Not far away, in the neighbouring village of Kommareddy Palli, a woman farmer named Kongala Chandrakala is using the same SIM card on a device nicknamed a ‘phablet’ – a low-cost combination mobile phone and tablet computer that dispenses vital information to small farmers.

The little machine has been a lifeline for this woman, who survived years of domestic violence before striking out on her own.

“Fifteen years ago, I was a school dropout, living in an abusive marriage. Today, I have my own farm, and am making money,” Chandrakala tells IPS.

Both women are members of Adarsh Mahila Samakhya (AMS), an all-women collective that helps empower smallholder women farmers through modern technologies.

The collective has 8,000 members, 2,000 of whom use the GreenSIM card, the result of a collaboration between the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) – an international research organisation headquartered in Hyderabad – together with the Indian Farmers’ Fertiliser Cooperative and Bharti Airtel – one of India’s largest mobile service providers.

The scheme began in 2002, when the government asked ICRISAT to help train local farmers in drought-resilient agricultural practices. When the Institute started searching for local partners on the ground to help execute the project, AMS – then a fledgling group of just a handful of women – came forward.

Shortly after, the collective used its small office to host a Village Knowledge Centre, a kind of experimental technology hub where women could learn how to operate basic devices such as mobile phones and computers, and use them to get information on climate change, groundwater levels, and adapted farming techniques that would help them increase the yields on their small plots of land.

According to Dileep Kumar, senior scientist at ICRISAT, the most popular tool by far has been the GreenSIM, which disseminates a variety of bulletins daily, ranging from market prices, to weather forecasts, to tips on accessing farmers’ welfare schemes, as well as guides to crop planning and best-practices for fertiliser use.

A fight against suicide

A mobile phone may seem like a humble intervention into the vast and poverty-ridden arena of Indian agriculture, but it has proved to be a literal lifesaver for many.

Data from the 2011 census indicates that there are 144.3 million agricultural labourers in India, including 118.6 million cultivators, comprising over 30 percent of the country’s total workforce of roughly 448 million people.

A huge portion of this workforce survives on between one and two dollars a day, pushing many people heavily into debt as they struggle to make payments on farm equipment, and costly pesticides and fertilisers.

A changing climate, resulting in extreme weather events and prolonged periods of drought, does not help the situation, and scores of farmers are impacted by what experts are calling the country’s agrarian crisis.

With few options open to them, hundreds of thousands of farmers choose death over life: data from the Indian National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) indicates that 270,940 farmers have committed suicide since 1995, rounding out to a total of 45 farmer deaths every single day.

Mahbubnagar, the district where the AMS is located, is well known for its recurring droughts and a wave of suicides. The district receives only 550 mm of rainfall each year, well below India’s national average of 1,000-1,250 mm per annum.

The district has seen about 150 suicides since 2013 alone.

Erkala Manamma, president of the AMS collective, claims that the introduction of the GreenSIM is changing this reality. Crop failure is less of a crisis here today than it was a decade ago, and thousands of farmers now feel empowered by the knowledge source that fits snugly in the palms of their hands.

Gopi Balachandriya, a 50-year-old farmer from Rachala village in Mahbubnagar District, is one such example.

In December 2013, he was waiting for an astrologically auspicious day to harvest peanuts on his three-acre farm until a message on his GreenSIM cell phone one morning warned him of a coming storm. “I quickly harvested my crop before the rains came. It saved me from losing my produce,” he recalls.

A similar message helped Mallagala Nirmala, a farmer from the village of Moosapet, understand the need for sustainable usage of fertilisers.

One day a voice message asked, ‘Have you had your farm soil tested?’ A curious Nirmala visited the Village Knowledge Centre where she learnt the basics of healthy soils, including when to add inputs of additional nutrients, which she receives free of cost from ICRISAT. The farmer is now the secretary of AMS.

One of the more tangible results of this experiment in knowledge sharing has been better profit for the farmers involved. Chandrakala, one of 20 female farmers using the ‘phablet’, has increased the rice yield on her one-acre farm from 55 to 75 kg at each harvest.

If she hears, via voice message, that groundwater levels are too low to support a healthy rice crop, she switches to growing grass, which she sells to a nearby community-managed dairy that produces 2,000 litres of milk a day.

Having these options allows her to make between 20 and 30,000 rupees each season, a princely sum compared to the average earnings of farming families in the region, which barely touch 10,000 rupees a month.

The GreenSIM initiative is certainly not the first time groups have partnered together to empower farmers using modern technology.

In the northern Indian state of Haryana, for instance – where 70 percent of the population of roughly 25 million people relies on agriculture for a living – widespread use of a handheld device known as the GreenSeeker, which calculates the health of a particular crop using infrared censors, had massive success among rural communities.

And in 2013, the World Bank reported on a scheme using a mobile phone app that allowed insurance agencies to collect reliable data on crop yields, thus enabling them to offer lower premiums to farmers who rely largely on rain-fed agriculture and were desperately in need of robust safety nets in the form of insurance policies.

In the first year alone, some 400,000 farmers in 50 districts across the northern and western states of Maharashtra and Rajasthan benefitted from the scheme.

The challenge for policy makers is how to replicate such initiatives on a wider scale, in order to ease the abject poverty facing millions of farmers across India – particularly the women, who are most vulnerable to the crushing impacts of poverty and hunger.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Women organise themselves into small collectives, to better bargain and trade their produce. Credit: Helen Keller International

By Josh Butler
NEW YORK, Mar 1 2015 (IPS)

Women in Bangladesh are carving healthier, wealthier futures for themselves and their children – and they have chicken eggs and pineapples to thank.

Since 2009, the non-profit group Helen Keller International has overseen programmes in the eastern Bangladesh region of Chittagong, mentoring women in agriculture to produce food not only for their own families, but also to sell at market."It’s not just about growing their incomes, it’s about education leading to healthier and more productive lives.” -- Kathy Spahn

Kathy Spahn, president of HKI, said one-fifth of homes in Chittagong are considered hungry, while half the children are stunted and one-third are underweight due to poor nutrition. In the area HKI works, around 75 percent of people survive on just 12 dollars a month.

“The area is stigmatised and has little access to health services,” Spahn said at an event this week organised by Women Advancing Microfinance New York.

“We’re teaching women to grow nutritious fruit and vegetables, raise chickens for meat and eggs, and grow enough to sell at markets for extra money.”

The programme, ‘Making Markets Work For Women,’ or M2W2, gives both initial start-up capital and ongoing guidance. Women in Chittagong, who may have previously been viewed solely as homemakers, are given tools to grow nutrient-rich crops like spinach and carrots to feed their own families, as well as more lucrative crops like pineapple and maize to sell.

Chickens are raised, eggs are eaten and sold, ginger and turmeric are harvested and refined and packaged using supplied machinery; and women who never before had any control over family finances are suddenly bringing in their own income to pay for education and healthcare.

Helen Keller International – named for its founder, the inspirational deaf and blind author and activist – traditionally focused on sight and blindness projects, but today focuses on a broader gamut of health and nutrition issues, including blindness caused by Vitamin A deficiency. The group now runs 180 programmes in more than 20 Asian and African countries.

“HKI has been working in Bangladesh since 1978, doing work on nutritional blindness. Doing nutrition surveillance there, we saw the deeper pockets of Vitamin A deficiency,” Spahn told IPS.

“We call the programme ‘enhanced homestead food production.’ With that, comes nutrition information. It’s not just about growing their incomes, it’s about education leading to healthier and more productive lives.”

Women organise themselves into small collectives, to better bargain and trade their produce. While each household may only produce an amount too small to make market sale effective, joining forces with other women means each collective has a larger volume to sell.

“We want to build their capacity in business and marketing. We give them training on market research, demand, book-keeping, and organise the households into groups so they can aggregate their products,” Spahn said.

Credit: Helen Keller International

A group savings scheme is also offered, whereby women can place some of their income into a shared pool that any member can access for large expenses such as hospitalisation or replacement of packaging machinery.

“If something breaks down, we can’t replace it because that’s not sustainable. This is about development, not charity,” Spahn said.

M2W2 was originally a three-year pilot programme from 2009 to 2012, but received an extra injection of funds from the British government to continue until January.

“We are looking for more support to keep going,” Spahn said.

The programme’s outcomes are resounding. Spahn said of the 2,500 households involved, “nearly all” saw a 30 percent increase in income.

“When we started, everybody had a poor diet. Three years later, nobody did,” she said.

Eggs, a rich source of Vitamin A, helped address deficiency of that vitamin and vision problems associated with such deficiencies, but Spahn said the most powerful benefit was social, rather than physical.

“We found 90 percent of women had the sole decision over the money their raised. They were bargaining more efficiently, and feeling more empowered,” she said.

Empowerment and financial independence for women is one of the ideological pillars of Women Advancing Microfinancing New York. WAMNY board member Danielle LeBlanc said the microfinancing and social entrepreneurship can be among the simplest and most effective ways to advance the economic prospects of disenfranchised women in poorer countries.

“With an opportunity to earn income on their own, it helps women gain some independence and increase the financial sustainability of their families,” LeBlanc told IPS.

“When women received the profits from these businesses, they spent it back on their families – sending their kids to school, improving their home. The goal is not just to help create businesses, but to improve the welfare of the family.”

LeBlanc said the term ‘microfinancing’ was a broad concept, viewed differently by many parties. She said governments consider it to be grants of under 50,000 dollars and that banks consider the threshold to be closer to 250,000, but LeBlanc said vast progress can be made with an initial outlay of as little as a few hundred dollars.

“In the U.S., microfinancing might help out street vendors like in New York City, or to fund home daycare centres, or even small businesses with shopfronts. Overseas, we can be talking about the very poor, like women selling goods by the roadside, farmers, or craft makers,” she said.

“To us, the increase in income for a family in poor countries might seem very small, but it makes a huge difference in their lives. It helps increase the nutrition of children, increases the standing of the woman in the family, or can put a tin roof on a thatched house.”

LeBlanc said the increase standing of women in the eyes of their husbands and their community is one of the most important benefits that such projects can offer.

“It changes from community to community, but when women start bringing income into their family, it increases their confidence and they move from being totally dependant on their husband to someone bringing income into the house,” she said.

“There is more respect there for the woman. It makes a huge difference.”

She said the M2W2 programme was selected for presentation at the WAMNY event on Tuesday because of its “holistic” approach to empowering women, benefiting families, and changing communities.

“It is working with various women’s issues, from joint savings programmes to technical assistance and increasing farming output,” she said. “It is getting women working together, to co-operate as a community. Projects like this encourage our members to think outside the box for how to work.”

At its core, M2W2 is a simple one – give seeds and tools to women, show them how to farm, and teach them how to sell their produce. But both Spahn and LeBlanc said that, in the field of microfinance, often the simplest ideas can have the most impressive outcomes.

“The key to whether a programme is successful isn’t necessarily the budget, it’s about whether it is based on a need. It needs clear communication with the community, if it is a programme they like and can use,” LeBlanc said.

Spahn said HKI is currently working on a project in African countries including Mozambique and Burkina Faso, helping women there to grow sweet potatoes to make into chips, bread and cookies – again, both to sell and to feed to their own families.

“We’ve always said, we should aim for complex problems and simple solutions. We want to take a problem apart, and find a solution that isn’t overwhelming,” Spahn said.

“The problem is in scaling things up, from one community to a nationwide programme. Once you have the solution, how do you reach the people hardest to reach? How do you take it past the village?”

Spahn said HKI hopes to institute the M2W2 programme in other other countries.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Communities like this one in Grenada, which depend on the sea for their survival, stand to suffer the most with the loss of the fishing industry due to climate change. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
LIMA, Dec 4 2014 (IPS)

For more than 10 years, Mildred Crawford has been “a voice in the wilderness” crying out on behalf of rural women in agriculture.

Crawford, 50, who grew up in the small Jamaican community of Brown’s Hall in St. Catherine parish, was “filled with enthusiasm” when she received an invitation from the World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO) to be part of a civil society contingent to the 20th session of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP20), where her voice could be heard on a much bigger stage."Many countries are actually putting their own money into adaptation because they don’t have any other option, because they can’t wait for a 2015 agreement or they can’t wait for international climate finance flows to get to them." -- UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres

But mere days after arriving here for her first-ever COP, Crawford’s exhilaration has turned to disappointment.

“I am weary, because even in the side events I don’t see much government representatives coming to hear the voice of civil society,” she told IPS.

“If they are not here to hear what we have to say, there is very little impact that will be created. Already there is a gap between policy and implementation which is very serious because we talk the talk, we don’t walk the talk.”

Crawford said women farmers often do not get the attention or recognition they deserve, pointing to the important role they play in feeding their families and the wider population.

“Our women farmers store seeds. In the event that a hurricane comes and resources become scarce, they would share what they have among themselves so that they can have a rebound in agriculture,” she explained.

WFO is an international member-based organisation whose mandate is to bring together farmers’ organisations and agricultural cooperatives from all over the world. It includes approximately 70 members from about 50 countries in the developed and emerging world.

The WFO said its delegation of farmers is intended to be a pilot for scaling up in 2015, when the COP21 will take place in Paris. It also aims to raise awareness of the role of smallholder agriculture in climate adaptation and mitigation and have it recognised in the 2015 UNFCCC negotiations.

The negotiations next year in Paris will aim to reach legally-binding agreements on limits on greenhouse gas emissions that all nations will have to implement.

Mildred Crawford, a farmer from Jamaica, is attending her first international climate summit in Lima. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Diann Black-Layne speaks for a much wider constituency – Small Island Developing States (SIDS). She said adaptation, finance and loss and damage top the list of issues this group of countries wants to see addressed in the medium term.

“Many of our developing countries have been spending their own money on adaptation,” Black-Layne, who is Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador on climate change, told IPS.

She said SIDS are already “highly indebted” and “this is borrowed money” for their national budgets which they are forced to use “to fund their adaptation programmes and restoration from extreme weather events. So, to then have to borrow more money for mitigation is a difficult sell.”

The executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres agrees that such commitments by developing countries needs to be buttressed with international climate finance flows, in particular for the most vulnerable.

“There is no doubt that adaptation finance needs to increase. That is very clear that that is the urgency among most developing countries, to actually cover their adaptation costs and many countries are actually putting their own money into adaptation because they don’t have any other option, because they can’t wait for a 2015 agreement or they can’t wait for international climate finance flows to get to them (so) they are actually already doing it out of their own pocket,” Figueres said.

Loss and Damage is a facility to compensate countries for extreme weather events. It also provides some level of financing to help countries adjust to the creeping permanent loss caused by climate change.

“At this COP we are focusing on financial issues for loss and damage,” Black-Layne said. “In our region, that would include things like the loss of the conch industry and the loss of the fishing industry. Even if we limit it to a two-degree warming, we would lose those two industries so we are now negotiating a mechanism to assist countries to adapt.”

In the CARICOM region, the local population is highly dependent on fish for economic and social development. This resource also contributes significantly to food security, poverty alleviation, employment, foreign exchange earnings, development and stability of rural and coastal communities, culture, recreation and tourism.

The subsector provides direct employment for more than 120,000 fishers and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of others – particularly women – in processing, marketing, boat-building, net-making and other support services.

In 2012, the conch industry in just one Caribbean Community country, Belize, was valued at 10 million dollars.

A landmark assessment presented Wednesday to governments meeting here at the U.N. climate summit said hundreds of billions of dollars of climate finance may now be flowing across the globe.

The assessment – which includes a summary and recommendations by the UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance and a technical report by experts – is the first of a series of assessment reports that put together information and data on financial flows supporting emission reductions and adaptation within countries and via international support.

The assessment puts the lower range of global climate finance flows at 340 billion dollars a year for the period 2011-2012, with the upper end at 650 billion dollars, and possibly higher.

“It does seem that climate finance is flowing, not exclusively but with a priority toward the most vulnerable,” Figueres said.

“That is a very, very important part of this report because it is as exactly as it should be. It should be the most vulnerable populations, the most vulnerable countries, and the most vulnerable populations within countries that actually receive climate finance with priority.”

The assessment notes that the exact amounts of global totals could be higher due to the complexity of defining climate finance, the myriad of ways in which governments and organisations channel funding, and data gaps and limitations – particularly for adaptation and energy efficiency.

In addition, the assessment attributes different levels of confidence to different sub-flows, with data on global total climate flows being relatively uncertain, in part due to the fact that most data reflect finance commitments rather than disbursements, and the associated definitional issues.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

Potato plants in the backyard of Lina Chingama, 44, from Zimbabwe's Norton town, 40 kilometres west of the capital Harare. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Mar 9 2014 (IPS)

Shyline Chipfika, 26, is one of thousands of Zimbabwean women in urban centres who have struck gold by growing potatoes. And a lot of their success has to do with an import ban.

“I used to be a mere housewife, and my life has changed in a big way after I ventured into potato growing,” Chipfika told IPS.“Who said women can’t provide for their families? Really, watch what the potato magic has done for many women here." -- Grace Mbiza

Chipfika’s husband, faced with joblessness, turned to hawking at a local commuter omnibus terminus in the capital, Harare, after the company he worked for shut down in 2008 owing to the hyperinflation that crippled many sectors of the economy.

Chipfika’s rags-to-riches story is a very rare one in Zimbabwe, and she boldly declares she will not abandon the potato-growing venture anytime soon.

“I used to stay in a small apartment, but thanks to this venture, I have managed to extend my apartment into a respectable piece of property,” she said.

The potatoes do not require large amounts of land, just ordinary backyards, where the women plant seeds in sacks filled with fertile soil.

“The potato growing method on urban yards by women here is very simple yet extremely productive, although since time immemorial, urban yards have often been wasted by many who have not seen any value in them,” agricultural extension officer Mike Hunde, based in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland East Province in Marondera, 70 kilometres outside Harare, told IPS.

The officers are engaged by the government to facilitate agricultural research that enhances productivity.

The government promotes potatoes for food security, and as a way of backing local producers like Chingama and many others. In 2013, it banned imports of this staple food, and the crop took off.

Taking advantage of the ban, women in Zimbabwe’s towns and cities have since formed associations to get financial aid from pro-women non-governmental organisations to intensify local potato production.

According to the Urban Women Farmers’ Union, a trade union for women potato growers in Harare, there are 151 associations that women in towns and cities have formed to mobilise funding to cater for their potato growing ventures, with 16,150 women involved in potato production.

“Since the ban of potato imports here, as women potato growers only, we are supplying potatoes to eight percent of the national market, with huge scale indigenous potato growers dominating 88 percent of the market, while a few urban men who have emulated us are supplying the other four percent of the market,” Abigail Mlambo, secretary general of the Urban Women Farmers’ Union, told IPS.

“As an association of 12 potato growers here, we approached non-governmental organisations to seek funding to advance our urban potato growing project,” Nancy Chikwari told IPS.

After securing 1,000 dollars to buy inputs, Chikwari said their project expanded rapidly. Today, the women’s association boasts of sending their children to colleges and universities without financially straining their husbands.

“In 2013 alone, we harvested 30 tonnes and sold each 15-kilogramme packet for eight dollars, raking in thousands of dollars in profits,” Chikwari told IPS, adding that all of them now owned a car and a house in the capital thanks to potato growing.

Women in this Southern African nation make up the majority of jobless. According to the Central Statistical Office, of the country’s 13 million people, 60 percent (7.8 million) are women and 66 percent of them (5.14 million) are unemployed.

Official figures from 2013 indicate that only 850,000 people are formally employed.

The World Food Programme estimates the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe to be around 60 percent, despite the large numbers of people employed in the informal sector.

But for many urban women now undertaking potato farming at home, unemployment has become a thing of the past.

“Women like me no longer worry about employment. I make extensive sales from the potatoes I reap from my backyard,” 44-year-old Lina Chingama from Norton, a town 40 kilometres west of Harare, told IPS.

Chingama said she harvests the potatoes three times in a year and gets 1,200 kilogrammes of potatoes each time. A 10 kilogramme bag of potatoes fetches about 10 dollars at the local market.

This means Chingama pockets 1,200 dollars for the 1,200 kilogrammes she harvests each time.

Traditionally regarded as dependent upon their male counterparts, owing to urban potato farming, many women have even become breadwinners.

“Who said women can’t provide for their families? Really, watch what the potato magic has done for many women here. We are not just sleeping in towns, but rather fending for our families too,” Grace Mbiza, a women’s rights activist, told IPS.

Independent environmentalist Archibald Chigumbu said the process used by women to grow the potatoes is ecologically friendly.

“Their method does not harm the environment, as ordinary sacks with potato plants are placed within urban yards to nurse potatoes as they develop,” Chigumbu told IPS. He said common potato varieties grown here include Amythest, Mont Claire, BPI, Jacaranda, Opal and Emerald.

Ronald Museka, chair of the Potato Council of Zimbabwe, an organisation representing growers, told IPS, “We want to ensure there is enough production for the local market and urban women are just doing that. Soon they may start exporting.”

Zimbabwe’s Agriculture Minister Joseph Made is strongly supportive of these urban women’s ventures.

“Women have championed a grand move, maximising potato yields in their ordinary domestic yards and at the end of the day smiling all the way to the bank. We will not hesitate an inch to support them in every way possible,” Made told IPS.

But women potato growers here may face another hurdle with unpredictable local authorities, as the by-laws on such projects in towns are unclear.

“Yes, women are doing well, but council authorities haven’t approved urban agriculture and I’m unsure about what may or may not befall their potato projects,” a top local authority official speaking on the condition of anonymity, told IPS.

Women farming on land reclaimed from eucalyptus. Credit: Ngala Killian Chimtom/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
NSO, Cameroon, Dec 28 2013 (IPS)

Sabina Shey Nkabiy, a farmer in Cameroon’s North West Region, moves around these days with a million-dollar smile on her face. The mother of six, who used to trek 10 kilometres a day to farm, now harvests food in her backyard.

“I can now adequately feed my kids,” she tells IPS. “[And] my farm is less than a kilometre from here.”"Every year, I saw my father dig trenches at the borders with the eucalyptus forest in order to stop the roots from encroaching on his farm." -- Stephen Ndzerem

Nkabiy is one of thousands of women who have benefitted from the Eucalyptus Replacement Project, introduced in 2006 by the non-governmental organisation Strategic Humanitarian Services Cameroon, SHUMAS.

According to its coordinator, Stephen Ndzerem, there was a mad rush for eucalyptus trees when coffee prices plummeted on the world market in the 1970s.

“Men immediately went into planting eucalyptus trees because it was a fast-growing tree and could generate income through the sale of timber and electric poles,” he told IPS. “Seventy percent of the land women used to farm on was lost to eucalyptus plantations.”

Nkabiy is one of these women. “My husband took away the piece of land on which I farmed [to plant eucalyptus], and I had to go 10 km in search of new farmland. I suffered,” Nkabiy said. “Hunger struck us real hard.”

Women not only lost farmland, but fertile soils adjacent to eucalyptus plantations became increasingly arid and barren as the roots of the heavy-feeding tree sucked up underground water.

The result was a generalised water crisis and drops in crop yields in the 1980s, with pipes running dry in many villages.

Nkabiy said that before the eucalyptus trees were planted, she earned about 250 dollars from selling crops, and used the rest of the harvest to feed her family. But as the trees grew, her yield dwindled.

“More than 50 percent of taps in many localities stopped flowing, because the water table had dropped,” Ndzerem told IPS.

Growing up, Ndzerem saw his father struggle to contain the water-sucking tree. Pointing to two hectares of flourishing beans, he said, “This was once a eucalyptus forest that now is home to a lush crop farm.”

The eucalyptus forest belonged to Ndzerem’s uncle. Adjacent to it were his father’s food crops.

“Every year, I saw my father dig trenches at the borders with the eucalyptus forest in order to stop the roots from encroaching on his farm,” he told IPS. “It was a painful, exhausting experience.”

Thirsty eucalyptus trees drain soil fertility. Credit: Ngala Killian Chimtom/IPS

So as Ndzerem went through school, eventually earning a law degree from the University of Yaounde, images of his father’s sweating body in the trenches continued to spur him into action.

“I understood that going into legal practice could be rewarding to me as a person, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the daily pains women and children went through, just in efforts to put food on the table,” he said.

“I started with a eucalyptus removal project, but it did not work because people did not imagine how somebody could be removing trees as an environmental project. So I changed it into a eucalyptus replacement project,” he explained.

Partnering with two UK-based NGOs, Plant a Tree in Africa and Future in Our Hands, Ndzerem effectively began replacing eucalyptus trees in 2000 with more environmentally-friendly indigenous species.

“I came up with more than 60 tree species that could aptly replace the eucalyptus tree,” Ndzerem said. “Most of the species are nitrogen-fixing [a process that helps fertilise the soil].”

These include carica papaya, prunus Africana and psydium guajava.

He said the work was done in cooperation with the councils of Jakiri, Kumbo, Ndu and Nkambe, where nurseries were set up, targeting water catchment and farming areas.

Since then, over a million eucalyptus trees have been felled, including 24 hectares of forest in the Taryap Council forest and the Nkambe water basin.

Locals now say they are seeing a significant boost to their incomes. Nkabiy, who lives in the village of Nso, says as the eucalyptus on her farm was being replaced with the nitrogen-fixing and medicinal plants, her yield began to increase again.

She can now adequately feed her family, and still sell the excess.

Her husband, Amos Ndze, tells IPS that agro-forestry practices are much more rewarding.

“My wife is getting larger yields from the farm than was the case when I planted eucalyptus trees here, and these medicinal plants and fruit trees are giving me better money than what the eucalyptus trees gave. I couldn’t have imagined this some 25 years ago when I planted the eucalyptus forest,” he told IPS.

The fourth deputy mayor of Kumbo in charge of environmental issues, Ibrahim Yufenyuy, said it was a very important project “that has stopped women from long-distance trekking in pursuit of farmland. It has also boosted family incomes and improved living standards.”

For Stephen Ndzrem, “it has been a big success story. When you go around now, you see water catchments being restored, and you see councils, village development associations, and even individuals trying to replicate the project.”

Rosamund Benn holding two bottles of virgin coconut oil she produced at her home. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Oct 14 2013 (IPS)

Climbing up the coconut industry has been anything but easy for Rosamund Benn, who has dedicated the past 32 years of her life working on a 50-acre coconut farm in The Pomeroon, a farming region of Guyana.

The Pomeroon borders the Atlantic Ocean to the north, the Essequibo Islands-West Demerara to the east, Cuyuni-Mazaruni to the south and Barima-Waini to the west. The area is characterised by large rivers with an abundance of farms and fruit, including and especially coconuts.

Benn, along with her daughter and husband, produces virgin coconut oil from their home. She says every batch of 400 dry coconuts yields five to six gallons of oil.

“It’s hard work. After gathering the nuts we burst and dig out the kernel, then we get it grated, then we wash the milk out. Everything is done by hand,” Benn, 48, told IPS. “Three persons doing that work can only do three batches per week so every week we produce between 15-18 gallons of virgin coconut oil.”

She says climate change has also been playing a big part in the amount of coconut oil she is able to produce.

But while most of the discussions about the climate change phenomenon centre on the negative impacts, Benn told IPS that for her and other farmers in The Pomeroon, climate change is somewhat of a blessing in disguise.

“During the hot weather and the drier dry seasons which we have been having here in Guyana, you get more yield from the coconuts,” she said.

Scientists say climate change is responsible for higher air and sea temperatures, drier dry seasons, more intense rainfall, shifts in seasonal timings and greater weather extremes, among others.

Dr. Janet Lawrence, a Jamaican entomologist with the Trinidad-based Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), agrees that there are some positive aspects to climate change. But she also noted that with increasing temperatures and a drier region, farmers should expect significantly more pests.

“The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has indicated that between 20 to 40 percent of coconuts and other crops are lost each year due to pests and diseases,” she told IPS.

Pamella Thomas, a farmer from Antigua and Barbuda, who is part of the Caribbean Farmers Network (CaFAN), told IPS that while members of her association were generally ready to deal with the impacts of climate change, most of the farmers in the Caribbean are older and it’s “a bit more difficult to educate them.”

In light of this she said CaFAN has embarked on a drive to get younger farmers on board.

“We are also on an educational drive because persons know climate change is happening but they need to understand the dynamics of what is happening and this requires education,” she said.

She noted that while agricultural science is taught in schools in Antigua the entire subject area needs to be revamped.

“You have the practical aspect of it being taught but the sad thing is they are still teaching the old method. There is no climate change aspect or protected agriculture aspect to it,” she told IPS.

Vilma Da Silva is a small coconut water producer who is also from The Pomeroon. She has been farming for more than 33 years. She laments what she described as the lack of support and recognition for women farmers.

“Farming is hard work and those in authority need to work with the farmers and encourage them to be on the farm,” Da Silva told IPS. “When you are a coconut picker you must be recognised that you are doing an excellent job and you are needed.”

Other challenges faced by women and other farmers in the Caribbean include poor drainage, high costs of production, lack of profitable markets and limited options for manufacturing and processing.

Da Silva said the area has the potential for producing large volumes of coconuts and its byproducts.

“We don’t use any fertiliser and we produce a lot. We don’t have pests and diseases. So The Pomeroon can stand on its own in terms of the coconut production for the virgin coconut oil and the coconut water,” she told IPS.

Farmers in the area have launched the Pomeroon Women’s Agro-Processors Association of which Da Silva is a co-founder.

Through the work of the Association in fruit processing for sale, the lives of its members and more broadly of farmers and women in the community have been transformed as women have been given the opportunity to manage their business and generate an income.

Her colleague, Benn, said her dream list includes secure markets, building their own local factory and expanding the production of virgin coconut oil for commercial purposes.

“We have the coconuts and everybody knows that. The Pomeroon has a wide variety of coconuts that’s being used for producing oil, not only for the water,” Benn told IPS.

In Guyana, coconut ranks third after rice and sugar in terms of acreage cultivated. It is estimated that there are currently 24,000 hectares of coconut cultivation across the country with an average annual production of 90 to 100 million nuts.

Coconut delivers a wide variety of products, including coconut water, coconut oil, coconut milk and dried coconut, which are all in demand regionally and internationally.

“Women were at home, often times with large families, and they needed to be occupied in order to sustain themselves,” Benn said. “Now we are able to sustain ourselves.”

Through a Feed the Future project in Kenya, smallholder farmers, particularly women, are introduced to high-value crops such as orange flesh sweet potatoes that can both boost household food security and increase incomes. Credit: Fintrac Inc.

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jul 27 2013 (IPS)

In the face of global climate change and currency devaluation, improved strategies are being used to combat high international poverty and malnutrition rates, and to increase global food security. 

The  administrator of  the the U.S. Agency for International Development  (USAID), Dr. Rajiv Shah, this week announced two new innovation labs at Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative.

“The U.S. has a proud history of providing food and services to the most in need countries,” said Shah at a Feed the Future progress report on Capitol Hill Thursday.  “It will continue to be our goal to modernise and strengthen these programmes, to create a pathway from receiving food when you are hungry to living in a food secure society.”

One of the recently announced labs, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sorghum & Millet is a partnership between the organisation and Kansas State University.

The lab will attempt to find new technologies and techniques for smallholder farmers to use in order to ensure that their productivity of grasses raised for grain, including sorghum and millet, increases in times of climate change.

“The perspective from us is that we think the emphasis that has been given to agriculture is critical, not just for food security but for economic development and growth in developing countries overall,” senior policy advisor on agriculture and food security at the advocacy organisation Oxfam International, Eric Munoz, told IPS.

“We certainly have questions about USAID’s direction, but they are intended to strengthen their direction as opposed to redirect them.”

The second of the two new labs, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security, is a partnership with a number of universities including Michigan State University and the University of Pretoria.  The lab will attempt to improve food security policies and increase private sector investments to support smallholder farmers.

“The food security policy innovation lab is intended to increase the body of knowledge and understanding of the best way to go about influencing policy and what the best ones are to accelerate the impact that we are trying to achieve,” the food policy advisor for USAID’s Food Security Bureau, David Atwood, told IPS.

Both of these labs will focus on Senegal, Niger and Ethiopia.

“If you look at the big food crises, some 17 million people were affected in 2012, including people in those three countries,” Munoz told IPS.  “They have large populations of food insecure and hungry people.  Focusing on those countries makes a lot of sense.”

A gender lens

Launched in 2011, Feed the Future issues annual reports analysing progress during the fiscal year.  The reports outline overall goals for 2015 and yearly targets along the way.

“The programme is still just a couple years in so we are starting to see some nice results, especially on nutrition,” Katie Lee, advocacy and policy coordinator for international development at the alliance of nongovernmental organisations InterAction, told IPS.

“More gendered data were provided in this second progress report, but the data show that work needs to be done to make sure the programme is reaching more women.”

According to the report, Feed the Future has met the majority of the goals it set for fiscal year 2012 in terms of who is receiving aid and how it is benefitting them.  Leaders at the organisation say that they put more of an emphasis on providing food aid to women.

“Women tend to invest more in family and child education and health, so investing in women can really help take the whole development effort a long way,” Atwood told IPS.

According to Feed the Future, women make up 45 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, and if they were given the same access to land as men, their agricultural output could potentially reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 150 million.

In 2011, Feed the Future supported a group of 65 female farmers in Ghana for five months by training them in record keeping, planning and management.  The group was eventually able to buy new technologies to increase their rice production.

“The progress report is not just about technology, it’s an opportunity to understand where we can do better,” said Shah at the talk on Capitol Hill.  “We’ve gendered out data and learned that we have a great deal further to go to ensure that every dollar is preferentially benefitting women and girls.”

By fiscal year 2013, Feed the Future hopes to see over 15 million rural households directly benefit from U.S. government intervention, over eight million people apply for technologies or management as a result of intervention, and over 13 million children under the age of five have access to U.S.-supported nutrition programmes.

“We want to ensure that when American assistance touches the lives of the hungry, we help them immediately and help them stand on their own two feet in the future,” said Shah.

“When we lead with our values and we partner with our great academic and scientific institutions, our efforts are recognised an appreciated.”

Chelmet Padmamma (second from the left), walks with other women near Babanagar village, Medak district, Andhra Pradesh state in southern India. The village is 170 kilometres from Hyderabad. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Chelmet Padmamma, 42, of Babanagar village in southern India’s drought-prone Medak district, is a happy woman: the rain has come earlier this year, thrice soaking the three-acre farm that she co-owns with four other women from her village.

“This is a dry area and we are dependent on rain. Now that the rain is here, we are going to sow rice. Normally, we would be working in others’ farms as daily wagers. But this year we are taking a month-long break to work on our own farm,” she says, rubbing a red ball of clay in her palm."Such a farming model should be nurtured all over the world because it can be the way to solve the world’s food crisis." -- Subramanium Kannaiyan of La Via Campesina

Padmamma is one of the 15 million rural Indians who have been landless for generations, instead working land owned by people of a higher caste. The farm that she now co-owns is the result of a government initiative called the National Rural Livelihood Mission (CNRLM), which provides land on lease for collective farming.

The initiative aims to provide “space for self-help, mutual cooperation and collective action for social and economic development” for marginalised rural citizens, especially women.

Originally a federal plan, the initiative is implemented by state and local government agencies that consult with village communities. NGOs help identify and select farmers who are both socially and economically marginalised, own no land and can benefit the most from the collective farming method.

D.V. Raidu is the head of Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA), a project under CNRLM in Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India. Raidu told IPS that collective farming has brought unprecedented results, helping over one million people in 8,000 villages overcome poverty and social indignity in eight years’ time.

“This project started in 2004 as a step to eliminate rural poverty,” he said. “We focus on women because they are the most marginalised, without any access to land or money. We help women to build village-based cooperatives. We then take on lease land from villagers who have large landholdings and give that to these cooperatives.

“Typically, each woman has about half an acre of land to herself. In the cooperative, they generate microloans to buy seeds, while we give them free training in farm techniques like multi-cropping [and] composting.”

According to Raidu, cost recovery has been nearly 100 percent, although this is not a profit-driven initiative. Buoyed by the success, the cooperatives are now planning to launch their own raw produce brand and the government intends to promote it.

“The plan is to package the surplus produce like lentils and vegetables in the market under the brand name ‘Krushi’ which means ‘agriculture,’” Raidu said.

Still, some experts argue that the land tenure system in India is so badly skewed only comprehensive reform can fix it.

Dabjeet Sarangi, an agriculturist with Living Farms, an NGO that defends indigenous farmers’ right to forest land and forest produce, noted that, “According to the World Bank, 60 percent of India’s total land is cultivable, but records are available only for less than 50 percent of that.

“Also, studies by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have shown that different states have different land tenure systems. This is a big hurdle. For example, communities like indigenous people have no rights over the land despite living on it for generations.”

Sarangi hopes that at the 38th session of the annual conference of FAO, scheduled to take place in Rome from Jun. 15-22, the urgency of effective land reform would be on the agenda.

“A true people’s movement cannot be driven by the government alone. But, if communities have to start collective farming on their own, they first have to have access to land,” he said.

Subramanium Kannaiyan, a farmers’ leader from India and spokesman for La Via Campesina, a worldwide movement of small and marginal farmers, is also an advocate of collective farming.

Speaking to IPS from Jakarta, where La Via Campesina just held its fifth global conference, Kannaiyan said that, “Collective farming In India has proved to be very successful. It will definitely be successful in other developed countries as well. We believe that such a farming model should be nurtured all over the world because it can be the way to solve the world’s food crisis.”

However, Kannaiyan also warns that cooperatives should not be in a hurry to enter the market and should instead focus on attaining local food security.

“Co-operatives should not behave like corporate houses and, instead of making profits, they should serve the real interest of the peasants which is protection of land and production of food in a sustainable manner.”

Raidu disagrees. “There is nothing wrong in cooperatives entering the competitive markets. In India, there are already several cooperative-owned brands that are earning big profits.

“For example, Amul, the largest-selling dairy-based product brand, is owned by a cooperative. When a farmers’ collective earns money, it goes back to the community. So, there is no reason to discourage them from entering the market,” he said.

Women working in their vegetable gardens at the Capanda Agroindustrial Pole in Angola. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

When the United Nations launched its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) back in 2001, two of its primary objectives were to halve extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 and promote gender empowerment worldwide.

But the links between the two remain unhinged, warns Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, a food think tank “focused on feeding the world better”."Unfortunately, women typically lack access to land, credit, markets, inputs, education, and extension services." -- Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank

Asked about the relationship between the two, she told IPS: “Without improving gender equity and women’s empowerment, it will be impossible to improve food security.”

She pointed out that women make up at least 43 percent of the global labour force working in agriculture; and in some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, women make up 80 percent of all farmers.

“Unfortunately, women typically lack access to land, credit, markets, inputs, education, and extension services, making their role in food production much harder than it has to be,” she said.

Nierenberg said recent findings from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) suggest that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, yields would increase by 20-30 percent, helping raise agricultural output in developing countries and reducing the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17 percent.

“The MDGs on gender equity and food security need to be more intertwined because we can’t have one without the other,” she said.

“I hope when the new set of Sustainable Development Goals (under the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda) are announced, food security will also include women’s empowerment,” said Nierenberg, who is an expert on issues relating to sustainable agriculture and food.

Asked about the upcoming 38th FAO sessions in Rome Jun. 15-22, she said, “I think it’s extremely relevant. I know FAO has made huge efforts to put a gender lens on many of its projects, while I don’t see women farmers specifically mentioned in the agenda.

“I think they would be remiss in not discussing the importance of women in agriculture,” she added.

Among the substantive policy matters to be discussed at the upcoming conference is FAO’s gender policy and the U.N. system-wide Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (SWAP).

Launching FAO’s flagship annual report Tuesday, Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said while the world has registered some progress on hunger, there was a still a long way to go.

“FAO’s message is that we must strive for nothing less than the eradication of hunger and malnutrition,” he said.

The report points out that while some 870 million people (out of a global population of seven billion) remained hungry in 2010-2012, this was just a fraction of the billions of people whose health, well-being and lives were blighted by malnutrition.

The social and economic costs of malnutrition are “unconscionably high”, amounting to perhaps 3.5 trillion dollars per year, or 500 dollars per person globally, says the FAO director-general.

In a report to the Human Rights Council last December, Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, underlined the range of human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which guaranteed the right to food “without discrimination”.

But despite these requirements, he noted, discrimination against women remains pervasive in all spheres of life, resulting from laws that are themselves discriminatory.

The report singled out unequal access to productive resources such as land and to economic opportunities such as decent wage employment; unequal bargaining position within the household; gendered division of labour within households; and women’s marginalisation from decision-making spheres at all levels.

“A successful strategy for strengthening the rights of women in support of the realization of the right to food requires a whole-of-government approach, coordinated across various ministries, including those responsible for health, education, employment, social affairs and agriculture,” the report said.

Asked if eradication of poverty and hunger can be resolved without empowering women, Nierenberg told IPS: “Absolutely, not.”

She said until women have the same access to resources as men, “our efforts to alleviate hunger and poverty will be stymied.”

She said De Schutter has clearly outlined how lack of women’s empowerment is directly related to food insecurity.

“Improving food security and women’s rights have to go hand in hand to make sure that women, children, men, and whole communities and countries are well-nourished and improving their incomes,” Nierenberg said.

She said women are the key to food security and investing in their role as food producers and providers of food will be crucial to helping reduce hunger and improving nutrition.

“And we need to recognise women’s multiple roles – not just as producers and providers, but that they’re also business women who need to make a fair wage, they’re innovators sharing their knowledge with others in their communities, and they’re stewards of the land who deserve to be recognised for the ecosystem services they provide that have long-ranging benefits,” she added.

Maize is a food staple in Guatemala's "Dry Corridor," which has been hit by both drought and flood. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2013 (IPS)

The world’s food security remains “vulnerable”, new data suggests, with some 870 million people experiencing sustained hunger and two billion suffering from micronutrient deficiencies.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Washington think tank, says such numbers are “unacceptably high”, and warns that anti-hunger programmes have been “piecemeal”.

In an influential annual report on the state of the world’s food policy, released Thursday, the organisation said there were some positive achievements made last year, but that a number of policy changes are still required.

Growing jobs

The report identifies agricultural development as an important potential job creator, particularly for young people. In developing countries, however, it warns that youths are no longer seeing agriculture as a viable career, looking instead to urban areas for work.

Leaders in sub-Saharan Africa – a region with the world’s fastest-growing population as well as youngest – are today looking to create job opportunities in agriculture, using new technology and farming techniques. In doing so, they are hoping to encourage the young and innovative emerging workforce in such a way that they can have a transformative impact on both economic growth and social development.

Higher production yields, after all, would simultaneously create jobs, lower food prices, and reduce hunger and malnutrition.

“Agriculture in most developing countries is a labour-intensive sector and makes up a big chunk of the labour force,” Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“In recent years, large firms have introduced a type of agriculture that is very capital intensive and highly mechanised, but employs very little labour, so there has been a huge loss of employment. Further, modern agriculture requires modern infrastructure– electricity, grain elevators, fertiliser storage and mechanical expertise. To get there requires a lot of investment, but if done properly the nonfarm sector will grow alongside the farming sector.”

If properly managed, however, food policy experts say the sector’s employment potential is significant.

“Agriculture in Africa is now recognised as a source of growth and an instrument for improved food security,” Sheggen Fan, director-general of IFPRI, said Thursday.

“Africa’s agriculture can absorb large numbers of new job seekers. But in order for agriculture to be a technically dynamic and high-productivity sector that contributes to food security, it will need an influx of educated and innovative young labour.”

Conflict fuelling hunger

IFPRI’s researchers identify violent conflict, particularly in Central Africa, as both a cause and consequence of food security.

“Violence in Central Africa, especially in Nigeria, which accounts for more than a quarter of agriculture of sub-Saharan Africa has reduced output growth and food security, and has had dramatic social and economic consequences,” Mary Bohman, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said at a panel discussion Thursday.

Armed conflict in northern Mali and renewed violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo reportedly resulted in the displacement of approximately three million people within the region and forced a further 70,000 people to flee to neighbouring countries.

Fighting in Somalia and Yemen, the civil war in Syria, and unrest across the region in the aftermath of the Arab Awakening was compounded by low rainfall.

Drought in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the United States had a dramatic impact on agricultural production and supply throughout the world. Approximately 80 percent of farmland in the United States was hit by the most severe drought in half a century, while high temperatures and low rainfall reduced wheat production in Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine – among the top producers and exporters of wheat.

According to many environmentalists, such extremes will only be further exacerbated as global climate change progresses – with further risks to food security.

“2012 was an extraordinary year for climate change researchers,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resource Institute (WRI), a think tank.

“During the past year, it has become generally accepted that the world will see a two-degree increase in average temperature. But even then, food production, land degradation, deforestation are not the only problems – we’re talking about water risks across the spectrum and skyrocketing food prices.”

He said the new IFPRI report propels the issue of food into the centre of the discussion on climate change.

Gender factor

Experts are increasingly focusing on the centrality of gender equality in promoting agricultural growth and food security. Indeed, at Thursday’s event, presenters exhibited particular excitement over this new emphasis.

Over just the past year, new evidence on the role of gender in agricultural productivity has emerged, including in the World Bank’s annual World Development Report. This new data indicates that agricultural performance and food security improve through both agricultural and non-agricultural reforms that increase women’s access to production resources.

Further, women’s contributions to agriculture in developing countries have been shown to bring overall gains in agricultural productivity as well as increased nutritional benefits. Such contributions also improve women’s access to education, technology and financial services.

“When you look at statistics on the number of women farmers in the world, it is commonly anywhere from 40 to 80 percent in developing countries,” Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, a think tank here, told IPS.

“These women, however, don’t have access to the same resources as men; don’t have access to extension services, credit or the ability to make financial transactions, they often don’t own land or are prohibited from owning land.”

Nierenberg says it is very encouraging to see donors and investors beginning to tailor their production projects to the inclusion of women.

“While men more commonly grow cotton and maize and other industrial crops, women are the ones who grow the food that feeds the family,” she says. “To be effective, initiatives will need to focus on women’s overall equality across all sectors, not just the food and agriculture sector. Until we do that, we’re not going to see the gains we need – like higher yields, economic growth, the protection of environmental resources or the reduction in malnutrition and poverty.”

IFPRI director-general Fan agrees that the status of women is “critical” to poverty reduction, particularly in bringing down levels of malnutrition.

“Women have higher standards, and have been shown to better allocate the household budget as well as feed their families with more nutritious food,” he says. “One of the biggest links between poverty reduction and malnutrition is directly related the status of women.”

In a major endorsement for investment in women – the bulk of food growers in the developing world – United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said food security could not be achieved without women, and that the world’s hungry also needed leaders to prioritise actions.

“Girls and women are society’s best chance to overcome hunger,” Ban told a gathering of world leaders, researchers, farmers and policy-makers at the presentation of the 2012 World Food Prize.

Global leaders meeting in the midwest U.S. state of Iowa to discuss strategies to boost food production worldwide say the particularly challenging food security situation in Africa will require mobilising the continent’s best scientific minds, including those of African women.

Mary Njenga has worked to make clean, simple technologies available to poor rural communities. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“Ending hunger in our lifetime calls for harnessing the creativity of scientists and researchers…ending hunger also calls for better global governance…Ending global hunger can be done and is the right thing to do,” Ban Ki-moon said at this year’s ceremony for the World Food Prize, an international award recognising the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.

Calling for global cooperation in providing leadership in food security at a time when nearly one billion people go to bed hungry according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Ban could have been talking about African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD).

This week, AWARD, celebrated for working to increase the number of women researchers and scientists in agriculture, received close to 20 million dollars in new joint funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development.

The support announced at the Borlaug Dialogue, held Oct. 17-19 in Des Moines, Iowa, will allow AWARD to launch a second five-year phase to equip more women agricultural scientists in 11 sub-Saharan African countries, in addition to the hundreds of researchers already served since 2008.

Only one in four agricultural researchers in Africa is female, according to AWARD’s 2008 benchmark study. But it gets worse: just one in seven holds a leadership position in African agricultural research institutions. AWARD founder Vicki Wilde said this has left women underserved in the agriculture value chain and therefore in a weakened position in the fight against hunger.

“It comes as no surprise why it has been hard to achieve food security in Africa,” Wilde told IPS. “Part of the reason for it being so tough is that while women’s labour force participation in agriculture is the highest in the world in Africa, less than one in four agriculture researchers are women, and this has left us underserved throughout the agriculture value chain.”

Wilde said women were not at the decision-making table on food priorities. She added that although bringing them on board is not the answer to every problem, it would ensure better and faster progress, and small-scale farmers – a majority of whom are women in Africa – would be better served by means of boosting food production and enhancing livelihoods.

“In Africa we need a new generation of leaders who are innovative, visionary, entrepreneurial, well-skilled and gender-responsive, and they have to respond to the priority needs of small-holders, most of whom are women,” she said.

AWARD, commended by major organisations at the Borlaug Dialogue, is a competitive programme which this year has seen 3,000 applications from African women scientists for 320 available fellowships. Wilde said her organisation has sought to widen the talent pool of implementers of effective food security policies.

AWARD is a career development programme that strengthens the research and leadership skills of African women in agricultural science, empowering them to contribute more effectively to poverty alleviation and food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

It offers two-year fellowships focused on mentoring partnerships, science skills and leadership development. African women working in agricultural research for development from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, and who have completed a bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degree in selected disciplines, are eligible.

Mary Njenga, an AWARD fellow from Kenya, is one woman with her sights set on changing policies and mindsets about the role of women in food security.

Njenga, an environmental scientist linking agriculture to environment and energy issues, has focused on improving natural resources management to mitigate climate change.

She has done this by bringing technologies such as environmentally-friendly, simple fuel briquettes made from charcoal dust, sawdust and other organic by-products to poor community-based groups.

“I can work with women and come up with good technologies, but if I do not have a voice with policy-makers, my technologies will remain in the books and not be adopted,” Njenga told IPS.

“Through training and mentorship in AWARD, I have learned to influence policy development for change by being tactful in my writing for different target groups and diversifying my work by not only publishing in journals but also in the media to reach people in the language they can understand.”

Njenga, a PhD fellow at the University of Nairobi working in affiliation with the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), said she was concerned about developing clean fuel briquettes to improve women’s income and protect their health and that of their children while conserving the environment.

“I am worried that we may reach a situation where in sub-Saharan Africa we will be able to produce food but fail to cook it because of a lack of cooking fuel; therefore it is a must that we prioritise biomass cooking energy as an important aspect of food and nutrition security,” Njenga said.

Roy Steiner, director of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation, said the AWARD programme and the fellows involved helped ensure that women were at the heart of agricultural development, advancing research and innovation to reduce hunger and poverty.

Another AWARD fellow, Professor Sheila Okoth of the University of Nairobi, has contributed significantly to reducing hunger through her research on solutions to combat contamination by aflatoxin, a poison produced by a fungus, of farm produce in Kenya.

“I changed tremendously following the training and exposure I had through AWARD,” said Okoth. “I am even more determined to help solve the aflatoxin problem that makes poor farmers even poorer.”

Okoth established the university’s first post-graduate mycology research lab, inspired by her three-month advanced science training at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, which was sponsored by USAID through AWARD.

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Sep 25 2012 (IPS)

If women had equal access to productive farming resources, they could increase their yields by 20 to 30 percent and potentially raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to four percent.

This is according to a draft concept note yet to be released by the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS), an advocacy organisation. The information is based on the organisation’s work through its Working Group on Gender Equality in Rural Advisory Services, which aims to ensure that more women are able to work effectively as extension agents to better serve women farmers.

Extension services provide information, training, advice and technical support to farmers to help them improve productivity and farming methods.

“Women farmers make up a big percentage of agriculture production, especially in Africa. However, there are only a few female extension officers in the field,” said GFRAS executive secretary, Kristin Davis.

“Extension services have to take into account the sometimes special situation of women farmers in terms of family raising and land ownership.”

According to the summary, the increased food production by women farmers would in turn reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 12 to 17 percent. For example, enhanced productivity calculations from Malawi and Ghana show that equal access to inputs and services would increase maize yields alone by 17 percent.

She told IPS that it was unfortunate that most extension services mainly work with male farmers, as most development policies have implicitly assumed that farmers are men.

“Advisory services are therefore seriously constrained in overcoming these biases,” Davis said.

A majority of extension agents are men who are not trained to work with women farmers, according to the Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services (MEAS), a United States-based initiative formed to transform and modernise extension systems in developing countries.

The organisation is currently undertaking an analysis of what is needed to strengthen national agricultural extension systems in 20 developing countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, Mali, Peru, Uganda, Burkina Faso, India, Ecuador, Cambodia and Myanmar.

“Extension systems in the poor countries of Africa, Asia and Central America need to undergo a significant change to effectively serve the needs of small-scale male and female farmers,” said Burton Swanson, the former director of the MEAS Project and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.

“Our goal is to transform these extension systems so they can play a key role in both increasing farm incomes and improving the livelihoods of the rural poor, especially farm women,” he said.

According to GFRAS, women are key to global food production and effective extension. On average, women make up 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, ranging from about 20 percent in Latin America to almost 50 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa president Jane Karuku, issues affecting women farmers include the fact that “women feature relatively little as decision makers and beneficiaries” in cash crop farming. She added that outreach methods, such as on-field training, favoured men over women even in how they were scheduled and organised.

She said there were too few women working in most public extension systems.

“Extension programmes in Africa face important challenges in reaching smallholders, especially women farmers,” Karuku added.

Karuku was speaking to IPS ahead of the African Green Revolution Forum, which is being held in Arusha, Tanzania from Sept. 26 to 28. The forum is aimed at developing African-led food security solutions and Karuku will be a keynote speaker.

“The forum dialogue will show that investing in women smallholders and rural entrepreneurs as agents of agricultural and economic change has significant social and financial benefits. It will highlight the tremendously beneficial cascading effects –increasing household incomes, improving food security, and reducing poverty levels in communities and societies,” she said.

She added that in order to improve the production of Africa’s women farmers, labour-saving technologies were urgently needed.

“They will go a long way towards reducing rural women’s triple burdens – in the household, on the farm and in post-harvest processing – all of which are responsibilities that women disproportionately have in Africa’s agricultural production systems,” she said.

At Gakoromone Market in Meru, in Kenya’s Eastern Province, Ruth Muriuki arrives in a pickup full of tomatoes and cabbages despite the scarcity of rainfall in the area, thanks to the greenhouse technology she uses on her farm – and microcredit.

Ruth Muriuki in the greenhouse she built with the help of a microloan. Credit:Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

“A bundle of ten tomatoes which would cost Sh40 (50 cents of a dollar) three months ago is now going for double the price. But we have no choice,” said David Njogu, a vegetable dealer at the open-air market. Muriuki is selling a big sugarloaf cabbage, which would have cost 50 cents three months ago, at 1.50 dollars.

A spot check in the country shows that prices of horticultural produce have shot up in the past three months following the failure of short rains, which were expected to come between October and December last year.

However, farmers who use the greenhouse technology do not need rainfall for their crops to grow.

In the greenhouses, generally made of glass or transparent plastic roof and walls, temperature and humidity can be controlled, making it possible for farmers to grow crops year-round.

Like Muriuki, Sarah Chebet from Nandi hills in the Rift Valley Province describes her two-year experience with greenhouse farming as “a dream come true.”

“I bought my greenhouse through credit offered by a local microfinance institution. Through the project within the past two years, I have been able to buy a maize milling machine, I have put up a retail shop, I have bought two dairy cows, and I have bought a stock of 400 kilograms of maize, which I intend to sell once the prices shoot up,” said the 28-year-old mother of one.

From a single greenhouse, she picks an average of four crates of tomatoes per weekly harvest, which fetches her about 100 dollars per week.

Nandi hills is one of the dry regions in the country, where rainfall is not guaranteed throughout the year.

“Our boy is still young, that is why we are investing in businesses, so that I can stabilise my level of income ahead of him joining school,” said Chebet. Her husband is in charge of other farm projects on their five-acre piece of land.

According to Silas Tuwei, the Integrated Project Officer at Amiran Kenya Ltd., the company has sold more than 2,300 greenhouses throughout the country in the past two years. “Most of them were bought through microfinance institutions targeting women, youth, and learning institutions,” he said. “On average, almost half of the greenhouses are owned by women.”

Amiran, one of the biggest horticultural companies in Kenya, specialises in construction of greenhouses as part of its business. However, other farmers depend on individual builders who know how to make greenhouses.

“In order to reach out to as many farmers as possible, we have signed an agreement with three finance institutions: the Kenya Women Finance Trust, Equity Bank, and the Co-operative Bank of Kenya,” said Tuwei.

At the same time, the CIC Insurance Company now has a policy to cover the hardware component of professionally constructed greenhouses in Kenya, in case they catch fire, are blown down by heavy winds, or are destroyed by any other natural calamity.

“I have discovered that greenhouse farming and general farming through irrigation is the way to go because rain-fed agriculture has failed me many times, especially in the recent past. The rains are no- longer reliable,” said Muriuki, a 64-year-old mother of seven.

In Meru area, she recalls, “Rainfall always came on Mar. 15 every year. There was no doubt about this. But in the past few years, the situation has changed. There is no guarantee that it will rain on Mar. 15 as it was the case in my youthful days.”

But on barely one acre of land in Karimagachiije village, 15 kilometres outside of Meru town, Muriuki is able to produce at least a ton of vegetables every week through greenhouse farming.

She sells the produce to different markets in Eastern and Central Kenya, earning enough to pay college fees for her two youngest daughters in different universities in the country. “This was my first opportunity to pay school fees. Before I started this project, it was solely my husband’s responsibility,” she said.

However, like Chebet, she was not in a position to raise the required amount of money to set up the horticultural project.

“Three years ago, I approached the Kenya Women Finance Trust, where I borrowed Sh300000 (3,750 dollars) as the capital for my farming project,” said Muriuki.

The Trust is dedicated specifically to empowering Kenyan girls and women through lending facilities. The loans are mostly given through self-help groups, where shares of the group members are used as security for loans borrowed by any of the members, because many poor women do not own property that they can use as collateral.

So far, the microfinance institution is financing close to 500,000 low-income Kenyan women to run different small-scale entrepreneurships not limited to agribusiness.

“In my greenhouse, I use a drip irrigation system, where water is released through pipes strategically buried in the soil with an opening at the foot of every plant. This maximises the use of the little available water, because the drip system does not allow runoff or deep percolation,” she explained. In Kenya, the average cost of building a greenhouse ranges between 1,250 dollars and 3,125 dollars, depending on where one is buying the materials, the quality of the materials and the size of the structure.

“In my entire life, I was not able to raise the amount of money that could be used to put up such a project. But thanks to microfinance institutions which have the interests of women at heart, I have become an independent entrepreneur in my old age,” said Muriuki. (END)

This year’s unusually rainy season in Peru is having a negative effect on the wellbeing and health of women in rural areas who are forced, for example, to spend three times as much time walking to collect firewood and water. But the authorities continue to turn a blind eye to the problems they face.

Women washing clothes in a village in northern Peru. Credit: Elena Villanueva /IPS

“It’s very difficult for us to find firewood, but not only that – since it’s wet because of the rain, we have to dry it so it will burn well, and that is causing us bronchial and lung problems,” María Témpora Pintado, a farmer from Peru’s northern coastal region, told IPS.

Pintado, the president of the district association of women of Tambogrande, a farming valley 950 km north of Lima, described how the women, and often their young children, are exposed to smoke for hours as the firewood dries.

“These tasks are done by the women, who stay in our homes, while the men leave early and come back at night, and do not take part in the collection of water or the care of the children that we have to watch after constantly, to keep the mosquitoes brought by the rain from nesting in their eyes,” she said.

Throughout February, the rains affected 12 of Peru’s 24 departments (provinces), and according to the National Civil Defence Institute, have left more than 32,000 people homeless.

That figure was not broken down by gender, but an estimated half of the people affected are women, including Pintado and her fellow farmers in the 186 hamlets and villages in Tambogrande valley, which is 60 km from Piura, the capital of the department of the same name.

Due to climate change, the rainy season has been more intense this year. For example, rainfall in the southern Andean highlands region of Arequipa has been 327 percent heavier than normal, according to the National Meteorology and Hydrology Service.

As a result, rivers have overflowed their banks; houses, farms and roads have been flooded; villages and towns have been cut off; food shortages have set in; and access to public health services has become extremely difficult.

“Our manioc, sweet potato, plantain, corn, val beans, mango and lemon crops have been destroyed,” Pintado said. “What are we going to feed our children? We are anguished, but we don’t just sit around worrying; we go out and walk, we find a way to make soup to feed them.”

Manioc, sweet potato, plantain, corn and val beans are staples of the Peruvian diet.

Peruvian peasant women are forced to trek further and further from home for firewood. Credit: Elena Villanueva /IPS

Agriculture is the economic mainstay in Peru’s rural areas. Women take part in farming activities like planting, watering and harvesting. In addition to these tasks, they are in charge of food preparation and child care, and they also dedicate time to community organisations.

But their work is not recognised.

However, the concentration of responsibilities in their hands, which is exacerbated by the effects of climate change, is causing health problems that have begun to alarm experts and activists.

“We suffer from vaginal inflammation and dropped womb (prolapse) because we are running around all day gathering firewood, drying it out, lugging water, cooking, checking on the crops, feeding the animals, and taking care of the kids,” Pintado said.

“Is this recognised by any of the authorities? Since they’re all men, they’re indifferent to it; they tell us we were born to do all this,” the community leader complained.

The gender discrimination and poverty which rural women continue to face due to the lack of inclusive public policies are aggravated by the different impacts of climate change.

Rural women have fewer resources to deal with the effects of this global phenomenon precisely because they do not have equal access to opportunities such as education, training, or property, studies point out.

According to the latest national agricultural census, from 1994, 20 percent of farms were run by women, but fewer than five percent of these women farmers had title deeds to their property.

Blanca Fernández, a sociologist with the Rural Development Programme of the Flora Tristán’s women’s group, told IPS that the impact of gender on climate change is highlighting the lack of rights of rural women and the enormous hurdles standing in the way of the full exercise of their rights as citizens.

Fernández argued that the fourth National Agricultural Census, to be carried out in October, must urgently incorporate gender variables in order to gain an understanding of the social and economic conditions of rural women in the Andean highlands and Amazon jungle regions.

“Up-to-date data will make it possible to design sustainable public policies, with the participation of women themselves, that would promote their comprehensive development – a viable strategy to make progress in the work of climate change adaptation and mitigation,” she said.

One of the priority areas to be addressed is agriculture, the Peruvian government stated in the second national report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, published in 2010.

The document says the megadiversity of Peru, one of the world’s 10 most biodiverse countries, is seriously endangered by the impact of climate change on agriculture, where the chief factor of vulnerability is poverty.

One-quarter of Peru’s population of 29 million is rural, and 70 percent of people in rural areas are poor.

Pintado said it is essential for local, regional and national authorities to recognise that when talking about climate change, it is necessary to ask how the phenomenon affects women, collect data on what is happening in that respect in different regions of the country, and then start adopting measures.

“When for example a government official says ‘we are going to evaluate the damage caused to homes by flooding,’ they have to include the damages suffered by women and ensure that the actions carried out will benefit our quality of life,” she said.

These and other proposals from women’s organisations in eight regions in Peru have been compiled in a national document.

The content of the agenda of rural, Andean and Amazon women of Peru will be shared at an international meeting to be held Mar. 5-9 in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, in northwest Ecuador.

The third meeting of rural women of Latin America and the Caribbean is organised by a network of organisations and activists throughout the region, which was created in 1990 during the Fifth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting, to give rural women a stronger voice and give a boost to their proposals and actions in the region.

The Peruvian agenda, to which IPS had access ahead of its release, highlights three aspects related to the exercise of women’s individual and collective rights: violence, food security and sovereignty, and climate change.

The proposals are addressed to government authorities, and include a call for compliance with the law on equal opportunities between men and women, and the implementation of a national agricultural policy with an emphasis on small-scale agriculture. (END)

Eight years ago when Mary Sitali’s husband divorced her, by sending a traditional letter to her parents saying that he no longer wanted her and they could “marry her to any man of your choice – be he a tall or a short man, the choice being entirely yours,” she returned to her village in rural Zambia with their two children and no way of supporting them.

The Barotse Flood Plain, about 190 kilometres long and 70 km wide, floods during the peak rainy season that starts in late January. Credit:Lewis Mwanangombe/IPS

At home in Kandiana village, in Zambia’s Western Province, her late father allowed her to farm his two pieces of land, about a quarter of a hectare each, while the then 51-year-old Sitali waited for another man to marry her, and while her father continued to maintain ownership of the land.

The village is on the fringes of the Barotse Flood Plain, about 190 kilometres long and 70 km wide, which floods during the peak rainy season that starts in late January.

One of the pieces of land that Sitali’s father let her farm was near this flood plain and she was able to plant the traditional rice seed known locally as “Angola”.

The second offer of marriage never came. But through her efforts as a rice farmer Sitali was able to partially support her children, her mother, and even her late brother’s three children.

But Sitali is what the NGO Concern Worldwide describes as a “marginal farmer” because although she works hard, the food she produces is usually not enough to feed her family for the whole year. Other women farmers like Sitali have also had to endure months of hunger, especially towards the beginning and end of the harvest.

Rice has never been a serious cash crop in Zambia, despite its ability to alleviate poverty and chronic hunger. In the 2010 harvest statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture it does not feature among the country’s top 10 cash crops, which include maize, cassava, wheat – predominantly cash crops for white commercial farmers – and groundnuts.

For this reason it has always been outside the basket of crops that receive farm subsidies from the government.

But Sitali is a member of the Nañoko Cooperative Association, which negotiates for farm support for its members from both the government and civil society. It is one of the more than 87 such cooperative associations in the country to which women farmers belong.

According to government statistics, more than 1.5 million women work in agriculture, either as paid employees or as small-scale farmers. Most are semi-illiterate or illiterate and have no formal training in farming practices.

However, NGOs like Concern Worldwide, Civil Society for Poverty Reduction, Pelum Association, Keepers Zambia Foundation, Action-Aid International, Oxfam International and many others support Zambia’s women farmers with training, seed, fertilisers, farm animals and implements. And now the government has started subsidising rice farmers.

“Under the government’s Farmer Input Support Programme we now give rice farmers two bags of subsidised chemical fertilisers – one basal, and a top dressing… They are also given a 10 kilogramme pocket of rice seed,” George Muleta, a field officer for the Ministry of Agriculture, said. On the open market fertilisers can sell for as much as 37 dollars for a 50 kg bag, but with the subsidy it only costs 10 dollars.

The Western Province is the poorest region in Zambia, according to the country’s 2000 national census. Here there are almost two million households, and women like Sitali, who are either divorced, widowed or unmarried, head up to 19 percent of these homes.

And 13,750 women in this province are currently engaged in rice farming, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Patrick Chibbamulilo, senior programme officer at the Japan International Cooperation Agency, said that between 1988 to 2008 Zambia’s national rice harvest grew from about 9,293 metric tonnes to about 24,023. But in only three years from 2007 to 2010 it jumped from 18,317 metric tonnes to 53,000 – a leap of about 288 percent.

Rice farming in Zambia is still rudimentary as the yield per hectare is only 1.44 metric tonnes, compared to the African average of 2.5 metric tonnes per hectare and the world average of 4.15 tonnes per hectare, according to records at the International Rice Research Institute.

For the women in Western Province, farming maize has not been a viable option because the soil here does not support its growth. While it can grow on the flood plain it will be washed away by the seasonal floodwaters from January to May before it matures.

But Sitali and other women here have now benefited from the introduction of a new seed variety of wheat, locally called Nduna.

“We used to go hungry in the lean months of September, October and November – before the mangoes ripen,” Sitali said. “But not anymore, and all thanks to Nduna.”

Nduna, in the local Silozi language of the province, is the title of a traditional leader but the Ministry of Agriculture introduced a wheat seed variety of the same name in 2010. And it was developed specifically for the wetlands of Western Zambia, Muleta explained.

“The introduction of wheat as a second crop has really helped us. Otherwise we would have died of hunger. It has really put money in our pockets,” Butete Biemba, a rice farmer from Ushaa village in Western Province, said. Like Sitali she is a single mother looking after a family of six, after her husband died of HIV/AIDS. She is also a member of the Nañoko Cooperative Association.

Now both Sitali and Biemba earn 60 cents per kg for their wheat. It is more than twice the amount they can sell their rice for, which goes for 25 cents per kg at harvest time.

“Unlike rice, wheat does not require so much water to grow. Just the wetness in the soil is good enough for the crop. And the great thing is that by September all the wheat would have been harvested, leaving the farmers time in which to prepare their fields for the next rice planting season,” Muleta said. (END)

“Sometimes I think of giving it all up,” Aura Canache, a small farmer in Venezuela, told IPS. “My neighbours get loans and aid, but I never have. The farm assistance plans are for men, although there are many women living off the countryside too.”

Aura Canache, in front of one of her sheep enclosures on her small farm. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

Millions of women farmers in Latin America have similar reasons to feel discouraged, because while women farmers and rural workers become more and more numerous, there is a lack of public policies recognising them and addressing the change.

“There is no doubt that there has been a feminisation of the rural labour market in Latin America,” Fernando Soto, senior policy officer at the FAO regional office in the Chilean capital, told IPS.

But that feminisation is taking place in a sector marked by deep-rooted inequality, which Soto illustrated by citing a few examples taken from studies that amply reflect this situation.

In Mexico, “women in rural areas work an average of 89 hours a week, while men work only 58,” he said, adding that the situation is similar in many other countries throughout the region.

Nevertheless, “nearly 40 percent of these women do not have their own incomes, while only 14 percent of the men are in that situation,” said the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) officer.

“A good part of the work of rural women is invisible, and it is an enormous amount of work,” he said.

This situation will be discussed by the delegations attending the 56th session of the
Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to be held at United Nations headquarters in New York Feb. 27 to Mar. 9.

The priority theme at the meeting will be “The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.”

International Women’s Day, celebrated Mar. 8, has a similar slogan this year: “Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty”.

The executive director of U.N. Women, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, said the agency she heads “looks forward to continued and greater collaboration with the U.N. system and other partners to remove the obstacles that exclude rural women and to advance laws and policies that promote their rights, opportunities and participation.”

Canache, on her farm that is less than one hectare in size, located 130 km east of Caracas in the farming region of Barlovento, knows nothing about the meeting in New York. But she is very familiar with the realities that will be described and discussed there.

The Venezuelan farmer, who has 50 head of cattle, 50 sheep and 40 horses, as well as rabbits and two fish farming ponds, has to plough everything she earns into running her farm near the Capaya river, which flooded her land in 2010. On that occasion, a number of her animals drowned, and she had to rebuild some of her farm buildings and clear her dirt roads.

“The climate is getting crazier and crazier, but the last two years the weather was horrible, and that drives up costs and losses,” she says.

Canache, a youthful-looking 73-year-old who employs three farmhands, became a farmer when she was widowed a quarter century ago, after her four children had completed their university studies in Caracas.

“I live for my animals and my farm. But it is too hard to see that for those who give out the (public and private) loans and assistance for agriculture, I don’t exist, while the men who are my neighbours were given huge loans after the flood, and tractors as well,” she says.

“Just imagine what I could do with a tractor!” she says.

“With financing, better roads and some technical support, I could produce a lot more, hire more people and things would not be such a struggle. They discriminate against us, even though we women farmers are more responsible and more reliable in paying off our debts than men. I would give up food from my table to meet my payments,” she says.

Bachelet said that if women had equal access to resources like credits, seeds and fertilisers, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent, which would boost agricultural output in the developing South by four percent and would lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger.

Soto explained that a recent study by FAO on conditions among women working in fruit production, one of the fastest-growing agricultural sectors in Latin America, found that that they suffered from increasingly precarious labour conditions and growing social vulnerability.

The study, carried out in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, but whose findings are considered representative of the region as a whole, concludes that this is due to three main reasons: the informal nature of the work; the fact that the women earn minimum wage or less, despite an increased workload; and the lack of health coverage and labour security.

FAO studies on the link between the rural labour market and poverty, conducted in 13 Latin American countries, show “a lack of public policies, institutions, and oversight of compliance with existing standards and laws,” Soto said.

“A greater state presence is needed, so that distributive mechanisms can function,” because “while agriculture in Latin America is modernising, growing and generating income, it is not being distributed, but is increasingly concentrated,” the FAO expert added.

If the rural labour markets “worked better for women, without a doubt that would reduce poverty among them and improve their living conditions,” he said.

Figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) indicate that rural poverty represents more than half of all poverty in most countries in the region, and in some countries the proportion is much higher: 72 percent in Guatemala, 69 percent in Costa Rica, 67 percent in El Salvador and 59 percent in Paraguay.

Like in other developing regions, family farms are the main providers of food in Latin America, supplying nearly half of what the region’s 600 million people eat.

The work of women on family farms in Latin America tends to be unpaid, Soto said. The women occasionally engage in paid non-agricultural work as well, and they also are responsible for raising the children and “other caregiver tasks that fall to women because of the patriarchal values that prevail” in the rural world, he added.

Among the specific challenges facing women in the rural sector is the problem of access to land, FAO and other organisations point out. Only 11 percent of rural women hold land titles in Brazil, 22 percent in Mexico and 27 percent in Peru, according to studies.

But there are reasons for optimism, because efforts to promote women’s inclusion in rural production are sprouting up, in areas like microcredit, “which has specific products aimed at the inclusion of women,” Soto said.

The growing incorporation of women in agricultural production is key to pulling rural households out of poverty, and it depends on a set of public policies working in a coordinated manner in the labour market, production, and access to credit and resources – “and on greater shared responsibility in child care,” Soto said.

At the 56the session of the CSW, the Latin American government delegations will have two weeks to demonstrate that they are listening to voices like that of Canache and millions of other women who constantly run up against hurdles in the countryside.

* With reporting by Marianela Jarroud in Santiago.

Peruvian peasant women working in the potato fields. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, Feb 24 2012 (IPS)

As the links between food security and climate change become increasingly inextricable, the necessity for sustainable agriculture is now a universal concern.

Smallholder farmers in the global South – who suffer most from changes in climate patterns and the degradation of natural resources, since they live and work in the most vulnerable landscapes – are in urgent need of sustainable agricultural technologies, a reality that was recognised at the annual meeting of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which drew to a close in Rome on Thursday.

Despite ongoing economic and financial crises, developed and developing countries alike – represented by hundreds of development leaders and heads of state gathered in Rome for the 35th session of the Governing Council – committed 1.5 billion dollars to finance agriculture and rural development projects throughout the developing world.

During the two-day event, representatives from IFAD’s 167 member states addressed the connection between overcoming poverty and food insecurity, and discussed how to ensure food security to a growing population while simultaneously protecting the environment.

In December 2011, member states gave a boost to sustainable agriculture with 1.5 billion dollars in new contributions to IFAD.

Now, the U.N. agency says it is scaling up its efforts even further to better link climate-smart technologies and sustainable agriculture in more than 40 countries.

“To help implement IFAD’s environmental policy and climate change strategy, we have developed a groundbreaking initiative called the Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme, or ASAP, which will help channel (funds) into climate-smart, sustainable investments in poor, smallholder communities,” IFAD’s president Kanayo Nwanze announced in his opening statement at the conference.

Representatives of smallholders, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers from all over the world who gathered here ahead of the meeting called on leaders to jointly address the global challenges of food insecurity and climate change, and asked IFAD to place the needs of smallholders on the international agenda.

“One thing people need to understand is climate-smart agriculture,” Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), told IPS.

“We have the imperative to feed more mouths so we need to intensify our food production systems but this has got to be done in a sustainable way.”

She added that, though the agricultural sector is responsible for a huge percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, it also has the potential to retain some of those gases in the soil.

Though science has adapted many new techniques, there is no “one science fits all”; rather, technologies need to fit local needs and conditions in a kind of “package”, Sibanda said.

“There is no point in making seed available when (farmers) cannot afford fertilisers.We need to have a systematic approach,” she said, echoing the view of numerous farmers’ networks that economic investments and the transfer of knowledge to farmers need to be combined in order to affect change on the ground.

“Then there is the key role of farmers themselves,” Sibanda said. “They must have the assets for farming but these have been depleted in most cases by recurring droughts and floods. We have not built enough mechanisms to make sure that we absorb the risk and empower the farmers.”

According to Sibanda, while the link between agriculture and food security is clear, there is too little talk about the farmer herself.

“We need to put people first, and those people are farmers, particularly women farmers.”

She stressed that investments must be targeted towards empower the people who form the nexus of the entire food production system.

“Without putting the people who do the farming at the centre of that dialogue there is no ‘agriculture’ to talk about,” she said.

“Since its mandate is to support small-scale and landless farmers, we have demanded that IFAD support agroecology as the model agricultural method to feed the people and to save the planet,” Henry Saragih chairman of the Indonesian Peasant Union (known by the acronym SPI) and coordinator of the global farmers’ network La Via Campesina, told IPS.

Saragih also believes that utilising farmers’ knowledge of sustainable technologies and innovations is crucial in order to empower and strengthen small family farmers and their markets.

On Tuesday, U.S. technology billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates announced nearly 200 million dollars in grants to smallholder farmers, channelled through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

These new grants will support a number of initiatives including breaking down gender barriers so women farmers can increase productivity; controlling contamination that affects 25 percent of world food crops; and creating an innovative system to monitor the effects of agricultural productivity on the population and environment.

In a discussion with delegates this week, Rwandan President Paul Kagame emphasised smallholder farmers’ key role in producing more food and overcoming environmental constraints in his country, where agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at an average of 8 per cent annually, ensuring food security and higher incomes for farmers.

Kagame challenged other African nations to do more to help the growth of their agricultural sector.

Listing the ingredients for “good agricultural policies” in Africa, Sibanda said that strong countries are “those who have committed to developing an investment framework; those who have met their 10 percent target of the national budget for agriculture (as laid out in the 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security); those who have allowed their agricultural sector to grow at a minimum of six percent per year; and those who have done infrastructure development and knowledge management, (supplying) farmers with the public services they need.”

With the next round of climate change talks scheduled for June at Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil, all delegates agreed on the critical importance of smallholder agriculture for climate solutions.

Rio+20 marks twenty years since the inauguration of the historical conference in the same city that first launched the multilateral agenda for sustainable development. For the first time in two decades, agriculture has emerged as a critical component in the climate change issue.

“As we go to Rio, let’s make sure that everybody appreciates that there (can be no) sustainable development without (sustainable) agriculture,” Sibanda said, adding that, though people have been “scared” of climate change for years, there is now ample evidence of the worst that is yet to come.

“The time for sustainable development talk is now,” she said.

“Whether you’re in a developed country or in a developing country you’re going to be impacted. The fact that food security is now on the global agenda means that we will all have to see how best can we make it happen despite the challenges we face. We’re calling for more investments in agriculture because food is a sovereign right of people,” she concluded.

(END)