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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

She is the answer -Bina Agarwal
-The Indian Express

Gender equality is key to food security. But policymakers don’t seem to recognise that

Countries globally, including India, have agreed to fulfil the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), launched by the UNDP in 2016 as “a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity”. Among the 17 goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030, SDG 5 on gender equality is seen as a key goal, both in itself and for achieving other goals. Many even claim that all SDGs depend on the achievement of “Goal 5”. Is this claim justified? Household food security provides a lens to examine this. As argued below, and detailed in my 2018 paper in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, SDG 5 holds substantial potential for promoting food security but also has serious limitations. For success, it will need to create synergies with several other goals.
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Women play key roles in food provisioning as producers, home food managers, and consumers. As producers, they constitute a high and growing proportion of farmers. In India, 35 per cent of agricultural workers are women (NSSO 2011-12) and women farm operators grew from 12.8 per cent to 13.9 per cent between 2010-11 and 2015-16 (agricultural censuses), not counting women working on male-managed farms. But women’s productivity depends crucially on access to land, which is highly gender unequal due to male bias in inheritance, government land transfers, and market access. Even in the southern states of Karnataka and Kerala, only 19-20 per cent of landowners are women. They also have poor access to credit, irrigation, inputs, technology and markets.

Moreover, as agriculture gets feminised, the challenge of dealing with climate change, which is predicted to greatly lower food-crop yields, will increasing fall on women. But few of them have access to technical advances such as heat-resistant crops or water-conserving practices. And higher temperatures will increase their labour in food processing and preservation. A fall in household food will also affect females more than males due to unequal intra-household allocations, as evident in anthropometric and malnourishment measures, and female anaemia — 53 per cent of Indian women are anaemic as compared to 22 per cent men in the 15-49 age group. Besides, as family food managers, women’s autonomy in food allocation decisions is adversely affected by their limited asset ownership: Child survival, nutrition and health are found to be notably better if the mother also has assets.

Women also contribute to food systems through forests and fisheries. One in six persons globally depends on forests for supplementary food, green manure, fodder, firewood, etc. Women and girls are the main gatherers of forest products, especially food and firewood; the latter continues to be the primary cooking fuel in most of rural India, cooking energy is essential for food security. Over time, we must shift to cleaner fuels, given the ill-effects of kitchen smoke from unprocessed biofuels on human health, but in the short term women need more firewood through greater access to forests and commons.

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