Harvesting a Field of Their Own –Woman’s Right to Food in the Global Food Crisis

Tortilla shop in La Noria, Mexico – Image Mathew Hickey 2008

On the scale of problems arising from food scarcity, girl toddlers and infants have separate conditions that make food shortage often more severe in their case.

Under tragic circumstances of neglect and abandonment based on gender, many girl-children worldwide are often held back from receiving their due share. Often the dwindling supply of family food is kept from the girls as their male siblings receive a larger quantity of any food available. Many times the males in the family also receive the higher quality of food.

It is common in many areas of rural Central India for girl-children to often be the last ones fed. Mothers, too, often feed themselves last after all their children have eaten, as they try to feed their children first on what little food is available. As children receive less and less food due to the worldwide shortage, mothers attempting to feed their children, many times, receive no food.

In trying to understand the main causes for global food shortage, can we find a way to help solve the problems of world hunger and its backlash against women? The history of the decline in food production and solutions to improving food distribution and safety can all be found in the public record.

Use of pesticides, new agrochemicals and biotechnological seeds has produced a devastating effect on women and their families worldwide. According to a 2003 Environmental Health Perspectives report by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Science on the effects on women on the use of increasing pesticides with crops states, “Hormonal changes in puberty and menopause increase a women’s risk of autoimmune diseases linked to pollution.”

Pesticides on food crops create greater exposure, especially for women in global rural areas, that reach levels that are often too high and too toxic. Chemicals used to treat the soil or dust on crops has been proven to have harmful effects on the reproductive system of women. Children under 12 yrs of age are especially vulnerable to pesticide poisoning coming from farmers clothing and/or from food crops.

“Hunger and diminished access to health services, including reproductive health care, are also taking a heavy toll on women, adolescents, and other vulnerable groups across Southern Africa,” said UNFPA Zimbabwe Representative, Etta Tadesse, in 2003.

In rural Zimbabwe, malnutrition due to food shortage makes pregnant mothers much more likely to experience miscarriage, infection and other reproductive failures. Without food availability or safety, women are placed at health risks unequal to women living in the industrialized world.

In 2007, two years after the onset of the severe food crisis in Niger, Maimou Issoufou from the village of Sanam, died before delivering her second twin. Even though she received help to get to the nearest hospital as soon as possible by the assistance of two members from MercyCorps, Maimou could not survive.

Hunger had caused Maimou’s body to become so weak she did not have the strength to deliver her second baby. Because of this, Maimou and her second twin died on the way to the hospital in Filingué.

By MercyCorps last estimate, 10% of Niger’s 12 million people are under-nourished.

Women at the food bazaar Null, India – Image Akshay 2008

The UN World Food Programme estimates that 50% of all pregnant women in developing countries are suffering from food related deficiencies that can be fatal. Iron deficiency has been indicated as a cause of death for 315 million global women who have died during childbirth. Instead of food scarcity, pregnant women need an even greater supply of food during pregnancy, supplying more nutrients, to keep themselves and their developing baby well and alive.

In 2006, approximately 4,000 “crop widows” were created in Andhra Pradesh, India as cotton farmers killed themselves in record numbers due to the severe pressures of debt and crop failures. Cotton has not been the only crop to cause women to lose their husbands to suicide. Farmers growing food crops like soy, onions, sugarcane, groundnuts, spices and grapes have also committed suicide in India in record numbers, leaving their wives to pick up the pieces.

In the small state of Kerala, as many as 150 grape farmers committed suicide in 2007 as farmers succumbed to lost crops and rising bank debt.

Hardships for many other farmers in India has created desperate measures. Bad weather along with the rising costs of fertilizer and equipment have caused farmers to face incredible losses. Even the new bioengineered seeds, which came with the promise to create more bug resistant crops, ended up creating fields that have not been able to re-seed automatically.

India’s National Crime Records Bureau, 2002 – 2007, now estimates that the sucides of farmers has created, at the smallest count, – 87,567 widows.

Because of these deaths, a new generation of women farmers has now been forced to take over fields with soil that is heavy with bank loans. The crisis has left crop widows in a state of great emergency and change.

These widows face extra hardships as legal sanctions in India give them no rights to their husbands land. If this isn’t hard enough, many crop widows have tried to take on the full responsibility of the debt loans left to them by their husbands. Without legal rights or legal recourse in gaining the land, many widows end up, during this process, with an eldest son or brother-in-law who often legally takes over ownership of the debt-ridden property.

Owning only 1% of the land in Sub-Saharan Africa, women farmers provide 80% of the foodsource today for the Sub-Saharan region. A region where 43% of the population lives on less than $1 USD per day. As women work in all aspects of food production from field to market they are cut short on government assistance. Women farmers in the Sub-Saharan regions receive only 10% of agricultural credits given to small farmers and only 7% of farm extension services.

“In sub-Saharan Africa – and this is equally true of other regions with the persistence of hunger – women bear full responsibility for the key issues in ending hunger: family health, nutrition, sanitation, education, and increasingly, family income. Yet women are denied – and systematically denied – the information, education and freedom of action they need to fulfill these responsibilities,” said Joan Holmes, of The Hunger Project, at the 2003 Policy Forum: Women’s Leadership and the Future of Africa.

What women need today is a “field of their own,” said award winning Indian scholar on women and agriculture, Ms. Bina Agarwal, Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth at Delhi University.
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This short AP news release shows the production of mud cookies by women in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti 2008. Women suffering under severe shortages of food are now using the cookies as a major food source for themselves and their families.
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For more information on the world food shortage:
Food Policy Report No. 18
The World Food Situation – Dec 2007
New Driving Forces and Required Actions
by Joachim von Braun
Link to:
The International Food Policy Research Institute
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Sources for this article include the UN-WFP, US National Institute of Environmental Health Science, UNHRC – Human Rights Council, Global Fund for Women, UN Special Rapporteur – Jean Ziegler, National Geographic, The Hunger Project, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Center for Disease Control, US Central Intelligence Agency country reports, NGO Committee on the Status of Women 2007, PBS news, MercyCorps, CSE – Pollution Monitoring Laboratory, UNFPA, The Institute of Science in Society – ISIS and MaximsNews Network.
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©2008 Women News Network – WNN

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