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EDITING WIKIPEDIA ASSIGNMENT – GENDER AND FOOD SECURITY

First of all, considering the how crucial the “gender and food security” issue is for women particularly in developing countries, we decided to make this section as a separate page. We plan to give a hyperlink and a short summary to the “gender and food security” sub-section in the existing “food security” article.

The existing “food security” article is too long to bring attention to “gender and food security” subsection. In addition, when we review the talk page of the article, we realized that there are some projections to edit the complete article and to shorten the “gender and food security” sub-section, which is quite extensive in comparison to the entire article. We have already mentioned our intent to edit the “gender and food security” sub-section and make it as a separate page to the talk page.

According to the FAO, the widely accepted World Food Summit (1996) definition reinforces the multidimensional nature of food security and includes food access, availability, food use and stability. In the existing article, we realized an excessive focus on “availability” and other elements are quite under-developed.

In line with the recent changes in the article, we decided to take these 4 elements as our departure point and structure the article as follows. (We are currently in the process of creating more striking and relevant sub-headlines) On the other hand, we realized that the existing subsection of “gender and food security” mainly relies on liberal perspective; therefore, we plan to bring attention other perspectives.

Availability— women as food producers: These include access to land; access to inputs, technology, and services; and access to markets.

Access – women as food consumers: These include access to employment and fair work conditions, unpaid work, social and economic programs such as cash transfer programs, credit schemes, public initiatives.

Utilization – women as food managers in households: These include women’s nutritional status as an input to child nutrition and girls, biased nutritional distribution within households. (There is a need to consider the overlap with the “women” section of the malnutrition article)

Stability – women affected by exogenous shocks: These include financial crises, climate change, increase in food prices.

While elaborating these sub-sections of our article, we are planning to address to global policy responses as well as regional and national initiatives.

References

"Women, Food Security and Agriculture in a Global Market Place" International Center for Research on Women

ADB, FAO. 2013. “Gender Equality and Food Security: Women’s Empowerment as a Tool against Hunger”

Agnes R. Quisumbing, Lawrence Haddad, Ruth Meinzen-Dick & Lynn R. Brown. 1998. “Gender Issues for Food Security in Developing Countries: Implications for Project Design and Implementation”. Canadian Journal of Development Studies

Agarwal, Bina. 2012. “Food Security, Productivity and Gender Inequality”. https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:163107&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF .

Ajani, Olubunmi Idowu Yetunde. 2009. „Gender dimensions of agriculture, poverty, nutrition and food security in Nigeria“, IFPRI

De Schutter, Olivier. "Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food" Human Rights Council, Twenty-second session 24 December 2012

MDG Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Progress Chart 2010

Mehra, R. and M. Hill Rojas. 2008. “Women, food security and agriculture in a global market place”

Parvin, Gulsan Ara. 2012. “Role of Microfinance Institutions to Enhance Food Security in the Climate Change Context: Gender based analysis of rural poor community of Bangladesh”, CGIAR

Quisumbing et al. 1995. “Women: The Key to Food Security”, The International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C., August 1995

Rao, Nitya. 2006. “Land Rights, gender equality and household food security: Exploring the conceptual links in the case of India”, Food Policy, Volume 31, Issue 2, April 2006, Pages 180–193

Sarapura, Silvia. “Innovating Agriculture through Gender Lenses” http://www.academia.edu/254531/Innovating_Agriculture_through_Gender_Lenses

Spieldoch, A. 2007. “A row to hoe: the gender impact of trade liberalization on our food system, agricultural markets and women’s human rights”, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Geneva _______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________

My contributions: (sometimes I forgot to log in and edit with IP address 195.70.24.21) Cleaned up the summary of our article on the old Food security page and moved the subsection on Gender and food security to our new page / Added categories to the new page / Rewrote Access to markets section under Availability / Wrote Stability section (around 800 words) / Made 8 comments on talk page

Summary on the Food Security page:

Gender and food security

Main article: Gender and food security

Female farmers in Kenya

Gender inequality both leads to and is a result of food insecurity. According to estimates women and girls make up 60% of the world's chronically hungry and little progress has been made in ensuring the equal right to food for women enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Women face discrimination both in education and employment opportunities and within the household, where their bargaining power is lower. On the other hand, gender equality is described as instrumental to ending malnutrition and hunger. Women tend to be responsible for food preparation and childcare within the family and are more likely to be spent their income on food and their children’s needs. Women also play an important role in food production, processing, distribution and marketing. They often work as unpaid family workers, are involved in subsistence farming and represent about 43% of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, varying from 20% in Latin America to 50% in Eastern and Southeastern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, women face discrimination in access to land, credit, technologies, finance and other services. Empirical studies suggest that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, women could boost their yields by 20–30%; raising the overall agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4%. While those are rough estimates, the significant positive impact of closing the gender gap on agricultural productivity cannot be denied. The gendered aspects of food security are visible along the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilization and stability, as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

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Parts on the new page: Cleaned up the old section on crop types, changed it into access to markets and expanded on it:

Access to markets

Constraints to mobility and time, gendered divisions of labor as well as cultural and social norms hamper the access of women to markets. Women tend to be engaged in the production of traditional and subsistence crops offering less opportunities to benefit from market income, however, self-consumption might also be a conscious choice. Within the household women often have little decision-making power related to marketing and selling activities as well as over the spending of the money earned, although they often contribute considerably amounts of time to the production. For example, in parts of India women have to ask permission of their husbands to follow market activities. Engaging in markets offers opportunities like organic agriculture and collectives of landless women in Kenya used revenues from selling bananas and vegetables on local markets to compensate for shortfalls in their wages at coffee plantations. But reliance on markets also increases exposure to international market fluctuations, while women farmers are mainly smallholders and often unable to profit from export opportunities. In the Philippines, potato farmers, felt the negative impacts of global market integration when imported potatoes cut market prices by half.

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Created new section on Stability:

Stability

Stability refers to adequate access to food for populations, households, or individuals that is stable over time. Both shocks and cyclical events can influence stability negatively. Limited access to resources, increasing care and time burdens and less decision-making power for women resulting from gendered roles in society lead to differential experiences of and coping mechanisms for instability.

Climate change

Women and boys at a well in Ethiopia

See also Climate change and gender

Research findings suggest that gender roles in society and gendered access to resources will result in differential affects, coping and adaptation strategies for women and men in response to climate change. Representing increasing shares of smallholders and working on marginal lands declining agricultural yields will be felt disproportionally by women as producers. Additionally, women’s access to resources and information is often more limited. For example, in South Africa male fishers were warned about El Niño, while women were not. In drought-prone regions in India women have less access to agricultural information and services to adapt to climate change, and coping strategies vary by gender: women tend to seek local wage labor, while men migrate. For women geographic mobility is often limited, and they are left with the additional burden of the work priorly done by the men after those migrate. As consumers women are likely to feel increased prices stronger because of lower purchasing power and unequal bargaining power within households. Another reason for differential impacts is the distribution of labor within households: with climate change water and fuelwood scarcity as well as negative health effects on children and other dependents can put additional time constraints on females. Women often lack a voice in decision making at local and international levels, but climate change could also be an opportunity for renegotiation of gender roles and female empowerment.

Food-price shocks

Poor households are more at risk from food price spikes and increased food price volatility, because food expenditures account for a large proportion of their income, up to 67% for the extreme poor in Bangladesh. High dependency ratios and discrimination, among others regarding employment, access to land, and social transfers make female-headed households especially vulnerable to rising food prices. In Bangladesh 38% of female-headed compared to 23% of male-headed households were found to be food-insecure in 2009 and in Ethiopia female-headed households were more vulnerable to the 2007–08 world food price crisis. In Bangladesh female workers in the textile industry were hit hard by the food price crisis of 2008, because their wages did not adjust to rising food prices. IFPRI found that only few countries introduce safety nets in response to food crisis, and these are seldom targeted towards women. Within households women often act as shock-absorbers increasing their work load and decreasing their consumption. Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable, with negative repercussions on their and their children’s future prospects, and girls are often the first ones to be taken out of school.

Financial and economic crisis

The impacts of past crises, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico and structural adjustment in Africa, have differed by gender. This pattern has also been confirmed in the most recent financial crisis of 2007–08. For example, in the US subprime mortgages were targeted towards female-headed households and females are often the first ones to be dismissed. In a global survey 40% of respondents agreed that men have more right to employment in case of scarce employment opportunities. In Asia women were overrepresented in export, low-skilled, low-wage and informal sectors and consequently felt the crisis more severely. In addition, working hours are likely to increase and wages to decrease for those remaining in employment. Disaggregated data by gender is rare, but research suggests that as a result of the Asian crisis of 1997-99 childhood anemia rose by 50%-65%, and maternal anemia by 15%-19% in Indonesia, while maternal anemia increased by 22% in Thailand.

Conflict and natural disasters

Gender and age are the two most important determinants of the impacts of conflict and natural disasters on individuals. Women are more likely to be displaced, the task of females in catching firewood has contributed to rape and equal access to food aid after crisis can be undermined by corruption, local militias or distances. In addition men are more likely to die in conflict or migrate, leaving women in charge of the household and increasing the burden on women. Country experiences from Somalia show that women’s contribution to household income has increased during the conflict as well as their influence on decision-making. Other problems, are that in conflict situations women are not always able to claim the land priorly owned by their husbands, and in Cambodia women received marginal lands in redistribution following conflict, partly because they were more likely to be illiterate. Similarly, natural disasters, triggered by climate change or other factors, have been found to put additional care burdens on women post-disaster, while limited mobility and work opportunities outside of the home reduce their range of coping strategies. Especially in unequal societies limited access to resources compounds women's vulnerability to natural disasters.

References