Update on the Status of Women in the Global Agrifood System
In April of 2023, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a report they had prepared on the progress that women have made as participants in the global agrifood system in the past decade. The work was undertaken with contributions from numerous FAO staff as well as from experts from academia such as Oxford University, humanitarian NGO’s such as World Vision, other multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and national development agencies, such as USAID. Prior to publication, FAO also held consultations with numerous stakeholder organizations in the international humanitarian and development community.
FAO rolled out the report over the month of April in a series of public presentations in several major cities around the world, including Rome, Washington, DC, and Toronto, in an effort to draw more attention to the plight of women working in this key economic sector. I was able to attend the roll-out in Washington, DC on April 17th held at the Ronald Reagan Building, which featured Beth Bechdol, deputy Director-General of the FAO as the moderator, and Lauren Phillips, one of the lead authors of the report, who summarized the report’s findings. Other speakers included Jennifer Klein, Director of the White House Gender Policy Council, Xochitl Torres-Small, USDA Under Secretary of Agriculture for Rural Development (and nominee to be USDA’s Deputy Secretary of Agriculture), USAID Administrator Samantha Power, and C.D. Glin from the Pepsico Foundation.
To some extent, this report represents a check-in on how the status of women in global agriculture has changed since 2010-11, when the first 60 pages of FAO’s annual report on the state of global food and agriculture were devoted to this topic. While the new report did find a few areas where women’s access to the necessary resources to be a successful participant in the agrifood system had improved, many of the existing gaps between men’s and women’s access remain stagnant or even widened. On the positive side of the ledger, women’s access to regular banking services in rural areas has improved over the last decade, with the gap between men and women declining by one-third, and the gap between women and men with respect to access to mobile internet fell from 25 percent to 16 percent between 2017 and 2021. On the other hand, gaps in ownership of irrigation systems and large livestock species such as cattle have changed little in the last decade, while men continue to have greater ownership or more secure tenure rights to land than women in 40 of the 46 countries who have reported such data to the UN. Overall, the gender gap for agricultural productivity between men and women farmers is unchanged over the last decade or so, stuck at 24 percent.
Due to the unpaid domestic work that most rural women in developing countries are burdened with, they have less time and opportunity to obtain stable work in the formal workforce. While women around the world take on the majority of the work associated with child care and meal preparation, women in developing countries face one task that is not typically an issue elsewhere in the world, that of collecting and transporting water for their household’s use. According to UNICEF, women and girls around the world collectively spend 200 million hours fetching water every single day – far more than men and boys.
This looser attachment to the formal agri-food system workforce for women was detrimental to women when it came to their continuing employment in the face of widespread workplace shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, the report found that 22 percent of women lost their jobs in off-farm agrifood systems work in the first year of the pandemic, compared with only 2 percent of men. This differential treatment in access to employment in the sector had adverse consequences for women’s food insecurity–the gap between men’s and women’s food security status (those classified as moderately or severely food insecure) more than doubled between 2019 and 2021, from 1.7 percentage points to 4.3 percentage points. Food insecurity at these levels remains high for both genders, estimated at 31.9 percent for women and 27.6 percent for men.
Even though more national governments around the world have become aware of the challenges faced by women in the agrifood system, relatively few have designated addressing these challenges as a priority. The report indicated that more than 75 percent of agricultural policies that FAO analyzed recognized women’s roles and/or challenges in agriculture, only 19 percent had gender equality in agriculture or women’s
rights included in those policies as explicit objectives.
Key recommendations from the report include the following:
- Improve the collection of high-quality data that is disaggregated by sex, age, and other forms of social and economic differentiation, and undertake rigorous qualitative and quantitative gender research,
- Localized interventions which have been shown to address multiple inequalities that have been proven to close gender gaps and empower women in agrifood systems, to be scaled up carefully taking into account local context, and
- Engage in interventions that are designed to close gender inequalities and empower women.
The report’s authors estimate that if these recommended approaches are adopted widely, closing the gender gap in farm productivity and the wage gap in agrifood-system employment would increase global gross domestic product by 1 percent (or nearly $1 trillion). This would reduce global food insecurity by about 2 percentage points, reducing the number of food-insecure people by 45 million.
