Women in the world’s fields
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) — Planting potatoes in the highlands of South America, harvesting corn in Africa’s valleys, and working the rice paddies of Asia, women toil in most of the world’s fields. Yet many do not own they land they work.
Without land ownership for rural women, experts warn, women farmers are doomed to remain impoverished, and the developing world’s food supply precarious.
Delegates at the World Summit on Sustainable Development were discussing how gender issues affected poverty. How bringing a water tap to a village could save women hours of daily walking to bring water home. How using solar energy to cook food could save them from having to collect firewood. How giving them access to education or title to land could help them prosper and focus on their families.
“Empowering women guarantees more of the desired results for children and if you believe children are the future for sustainable development … than this is an important thing,” said Remi Paris, a poverty reduction expert for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Bisi Ogunleye, like her mother before her, is a farmer. Like her father, she is also a chief, an unusual honour for a Nigerian woman.
She laughs as she tells the story of her birth, on the side of the road as her mother returned from the corn fields.
“I’m a farmer from birth and I’m still a farmer,” said Ogunleye. “But African women in Nigeria, we have no right to land, we can only access (land) through our husbands or sons.”
In Nigeria, where she says up to 90 percent of agricultural work is done by women, she has formed an association of female farmers lobbying the government to reform traditional land laws.
As in many countries, land in Nigeria is inherited by men. And like in most agricultural societies, land is power.
“It means injustice because if women are the ones planting, working, and producing food and have no right to land (so) they have no right to work in their full capacity,” said Ogunleye, a solid woman with a hearty voice, robed in a light blue embroidered gown and wearing an indigo headwrap.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is pushing for equal access to the land at the summit, arguing that it is key to maintaining and expanding the world’s food supply.
Getting credit and loans is virtually impossible for women who don’t have title to their farms to use as collateral, said Eve Crowley, an expert on poverty alleviation and rural development for the FAO.
Without that access to funds, women cannot improve or invest in the land, she said. Often the land they farm is less productive and they are restricted to so called “women’s crops” that feed the family but do not provide cash income.
“When access is insecure … you feel less reason to invest in it,” Crowley said.
Most cash crops require long-term investment, such as the planting of fruit trees or coffee plants, Paris said. When people don’t have land security they don’t plan long term, he said, and they never make the money that can lead them to prosperity.
In many indigenous societies, women have long been the pillars of agricultural production because the men worked as warriors or hunters.
In recent years, women have been assuming a greater role in agriculture as men migrated to cities in search of work and the deadly AIDS virus ripped apart many families.
About 80 percent of indigenous women now work as farmers, said Vicky Cali-Corpuz, who is representing the indigenous peoples of Asia at the summit.
But their livelihoods are threatened, she said, in part because of cheap produce imports by wealthier nations.
Traditional farming methods are also being undermined by governments pushing for more high-tech agriculture, said Cali-Corpuz.
“(The women) should just be left alone,” she said.
