Agriculture and Rural Development

Genderinag.org is an online forum which is designed to provide access to resources, tools and information which can help practitioners and other stakeholders mainstream gender into agricultural development. Genderinag.org is dedicated to raising gender awareness and improving gender mainstreaming to promote improved gender equality and gender equity in development.

We, 200 women and men, leaders of national, regional and international farmers’ organizations, civil society groups and social movements, and key academic and research institutions, from four continents of the world –Africa, Americas, Asia and Europe-, as well as representatives from national governments and inter-governmental organizations, have gathered in Bilbao, Spain, for the Family Farming World Conference with the theme “Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth.”

This Report points to four priority areas for policy going forward. First, reducing gender gaps in human capital—specifically those that address female mortality and education. Second, closing gender gaps in access to economic opportunities, earnings, and productivity. Third, shrinking gender differences in voice and agency within society. Fourth, limiting the reproduction of gender inequality across generations. These are all areas where higher incomes by themselves do little to reduce gender gaps, but focused policies can have a real impact.

This report, based on research into CAADP (Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme)-aligned plans in six countries, carried out for ActionAid by Overseas Development Institute and the Future Agricultures Consortium, finds that the initiative is succeeding in generating renewed attention and ambition for agriculture - a sector that was neglected and close to collapse only a few years ago. Much-needed investments and important policy reforms are on the cards.

The following bibliography includes 33 tools from the gender advocacy community that are among the best practices for gender integration for policymakers and programming practitioners. There are four sections: policy and programming gender information; policy-specific gender information; program-specific gender information; and, lastly, gender analysis, audit, and assessment tools.

This guide is designed to help USAID agriculture officers better incorporate gender issues into solicitations and their technical evaluation. It is not an exhaustive presentation of the myriad gender issues that may affect a given project. It is not intended to cover all questions an agriculture officer might have, nor is it intended to be applied verbatim as a template. The level of specificity and types of information included in the procurement document depend on the type of instrument selected and is context-specific. It is therefore important to coordinate early on with the contracting/agreement officer and work closely throughout to ensure that you are meeting the needs of your specific contract/ agreements.

USAID strives to promote gender equality by making gender issues central to the achievement of strategic plans and assistance objectives. The Office of Agriculture has led the development of a series of briefs on effective practices to help Mission staff better design, implement, monitor, and evaluate programs that fulfill this objective. All briefs draw heavily on programmatic examples and work done through the Initiative to End Hunger in Africa Gender Assessment Synthesis Report (USAID 2010).

Published by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International Labour Office (ILO). This report reflects the latest thinking on the gender dimensions of rural poverty. The cornerstone of its analysis is the United Nation’s Decent Work Agenda, which calls for creating better jobs for both women and men, obtaining social protection for all rural workers, ensuring that labour standards apply to all rural workers and promoting rural institutions that equally represent women’s and men’s interests.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon highlighted the vital contributions of rural women to development, while calling for their enjoyment of a full range of rights from property ownership and inheritance, to health and education. “Rural women do most of the agricultural work in developing countries, but endure the worst working conditions, with low pay and little or no social protection,” Mr. Ban noted in his message for the International Day of Rural Women, observed annually on 15 October.

Globalisation impacts on local land markets and land-use; land transaction costs affect food prices; and the combined effect is particularly damaging to women who produce food and who put food on the table for their families. This paper examines three issues: what is attracting investors and market speculators into the farm and land sectors? What is at stake for small farmers - and especially women farmers - and long-term impacts for food production and food security? And what action is needed to enable women to secure access to natural resource and land assets for current and future generations?

The present report, submitted pursuant to General Assembly resolution 62/136, reviews the activities undertaken by Member States and United Nations entities to empower rural women and improve their situation and contains recommendations for consideration by the Assembly.

The following documents the process and results of a series of workshops conducted in 2005 to facilitate farmer organization input to the development of the CAADP process. While five years have passed since the workshops, the recent acceleration of the CAADP process, particularly in the ECOWAS countries, is bringing a renewed focus at the regional and global levels to CAADP.

This new report by ActionAid reveals that hunger could be costing poor nations $450 billion a year – more than ten times the amount of aid needed to halve hunger by 2015 in order to meet Millennium Development Goal One. ActionAid’s report scores donor and developing nations on their efforts to fight hunger and is released as world leaders prepare to meet next week at the UN in New York to discuss progress on the Millennium Development Goals.

One of the highest development priorities in the world must be to improve smallholder agricultural productivity, especially in Africa. This is essential for reducing poverty and hunger.

Wenews Article by Rebecca Harshbarger on the status of female farmers amidst the current global food crisis. The article tracks the evolution of involving female farmers in activities to combat food insecurity and hunger.

The aim of this report is to provide scientifically based facts, arguments and ideas for what is needed to meet some of the most important challenges in the world today. This report is about food and agriculture, it sees food as more than calories that fill people’s stomachs, and it sees agriculture as more than producing and harvesting food.

“From Dialogue to Action- The Empowerment of Rural Women in Agriculture" Luncheon Discussion, June 29, 2010. Final Report

A side event jointly organized by FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) during the Annual Ministerial Review of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), participants examined how to overcome critical gaps in the advancement of rural women.

On June 18th, the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization held a Global Food Security Consultation Meeting with Washington D.C. based agriculture organizations concerned with building a response to food crisis around the world. The goal of the Cluster is to improve food security responses in humanitarian situations through the provision of predictable support to country-level clusters addressing food availability, food access and food consumption/utilization concerns.

This report analyses government and donor spending on agriculture, involving extensive work in three countries – Uganda, Malawi and Kenya – and a comprehensive literature review of many others over the past 10 years. It shows, first, that donors and developing country governments are still shortchanging farmers, and second, that funding is scarcest for the services that have the potential to make the greatest impact on poverty and hunger.

Women in agriculture continue to be underrepresented and underserved, and their contributions are not fully tapped. As stated by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, ―Until women and girls are liberated from poverty and injustice, all our goals—peace, security, sustainable development—stand in jeopardy.‖ Whereas the fields of health and education have long acknowledged this truth—that explicitly attending to gender issues is one of the most effective, efficient, and empowering ways to boost development and address poverty—the field of agricultural research still lags. It is time to transform the future.

The steep increase in global food prices has added nearly 100 million people to the numbers who are chronically hungry, pushing the world total to nearly 1 billion people. Amid a global financial crisis and further market instability, the number of poor people also is climbing, undoing significant gains made against hunger and poverty in the past decade. This paper reviews current thinking and practice on increasing agricultural productivity, both subsistence and commercial agriculture, and examines what is known about women's roles in both sectors.

This paper makes a case for gender equity in the agricultural R&D system. It reviews the evidence on exactly why it is important to pay attention to gender issues in agriculture and why it is necessary to recognize women‘s distinct food-security roles throughout the entire value chain—for both food and nonfood crops, marketed and nonmarketed commodities. The authors examine whether women are factored into the work of research institutions, and whether research institutions effectively focus on women‘s needs. In short, are these institutions conducting research by and for women? The paper‘s conceptual framework demonstrates the need to integrate gender into setting agricultural priorities; conducting the research itself; designing, implementing, and adopting extension services; and evaluating their impacts.

This is a quick guide that outlines the gender dimensions of each strategic objective, and FAO action to achieve gender equity in agriculture and rural development. Mainstreaming gender equity has become a strategic objective, of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Publication by Cathy Farnworth and Jessica Hutchings. Gender relationships are fundamental worldwide to the way farm work is organised, the way assets such as land, labour, seeds and machinery are managed, and to farm decision-making. Given this, the lack of adequate attention to gender issues within the organic and sustainable farming movements is worrying. The revolutionary potential of sustainable approaches to farming to reshape our food systems, and the way humans interact with those systems, will not be realized unless there is a concerted effort by committed sustainable farmers and consumers to work towards gender equality. Indeed, the question addressed by this paper can be turned on its head. As well as asking how participation in organic and sustainable farming can empower women, we can ask: How does the participation of women broaden and deepen the multiple goals of organic and sustainable farming?