The Feminization of Farming

That is the title of Professor Olivier De Schutter's op-ed in the New York Times today, but it reminds me of another catchy (if depressing) phrase feminists coined a few decades ago:  the feminization of poverty.

As it turns out, De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the the right to food, brings together issues of gender equality and food security in his op-ed in a way that shows the link of both to, you guessed it, poverty.  As most of us know, women are more likely than men to be living in poverty, wherever they are in the world.  Turns out, according to De Shutter, as women get more and more responsibility for growing food in the developing world--partly as a result of male migration for work--women's poverty and hunger, along with that of their families, is exacerbated, not eliminated.

Specifically, De Schutter discusses a report released today to the United Nations Human Rights Council in which he calls for a "comprehensive, rights-based approach focused on removing legal discrimination and on improving public services — child care, water supplies, sanitation and energy sources — to reduce the burden on women who farm."

Noting women's increasing roles "on the front lines of the fight to sustain family farms," De Schutter asserts that gender discrimination and stereotyping lead to pervasive discrimination against women, hindering their ability to overcome poverty and hunger.  Some manifestations of this discrimination "den[y] small-scale female farmers the same access men have to fertilizer, seeds, credit membership in cooperatives and unions, and technical assistance."  Just as problematic, if not more so according to De Schutter, are the burdens associated with traditional gender roles that leave women expected to do "unremunerated household chores like cooking, cleaning, fetching water, collecting firewood and caring for the very young and the elderly." De Schutter notes that these activities are equivalent "to as much as 63 percent of gross domestic product in India and Tanzania," and that these endless tasks keep women from having the time they need to "attend classes, travel to markets to sell produce or do other activities to improve their economic prospects."

De Schutter provides success stories from Bangladesh, the Philippines and China, mostly about programs that look at first blush unrelated to farming and food.  These programs have, among other things, provided obstetric and other health services, educated women about domestic violence, enhanced education for children, supplied clean water and latrines, and employed women on rural road maintenance crews.  Yet as apparently unrelated to farming as these programs are, all of these have had the knock on effect of enhancing women's farm productivity and helping to alleviate hunger.

De Schutter does not mention the role that CEDAW--which includes specific rights for rural women--can play in all of this, but that is a topic I have written about extensively here, here, and here.  This article is about empowerment of India's rural populations in particular.

Kudos to De Schutter--and the United Nations--for seeing food security as part of a much wider web that implicates women's agency and well-being.  

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism.

India Considers Reform of its Failed Food System

Amartya Sen asserted 30 years ago that hunger is not due to scarcity, but rather to poverty, inequality, and poor management of resources.  (Sen, Poverty and Famines:  An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation 1981).

That assertion appears to be borne out by Vikas Bajaj's recent story in the New York Times, "As Grain Piles Up, India's Poor Still Goes Hungry." The hunger problem in India, it seems, is largely attributable to a failed distribution system--a substantial part of the failure attributable to corruption.  (I have written some about these issues in relation to India's rural poor and rural development here).

Bajaj writes of rotting grain surpluses in the north of India, while slum dwellers in New Delhi go hungry.  He provides this context:

Spurred by agricultural innovation and generous farm subsidies, India now grows so much food that it has a bigger grain stockpile than any country except China, and it exports some of it to countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia.  Yet one-fifth of its people are malnourished--double the rate of other developing countries like Vietnam and China--because of pervasive corruption, mismanagement and waste in the programs that are supposed to distribute food to the poor.  

Currently, India's federal government buys and stores grain, and each state takes grain from these stocks, with the amount determined by the number of the state's residents who are poor.  The grain goes to subsidized "fair price" shops, and the states decide who is permitted to buy the cheap grain there.  The government spends 750 billion rupees ($13.6 billion) annually on the program, about 1% of the national GDP.        

Now, however, the Government of India is considering a new "food security law."  Indeed, the alternative headline for Bajaj's story is "A Failed Food System in India Prompts an Intense Review."  The new law would cost the government as much as 2 trillion rupees a year, more than twice the current expenditure.   Critics warn, however, that it will successfully alleviate hunger and poverty only if corruption in the distribution pipeline is checked, or other means are devised for getting the food assistance to those in need.  According to a recent World Bank report, just 41% of the grain that the federal government purchases reaches Indian homes.  Not only is a lot of grain diverted from the distribution pipeline, a substantial portion of it rots because it is not properly stored.    

Some reformers advocate cash payments or the use of food stamps, systems that would lead the government to buy only enough grain to ensure against bad harvests.  Such systems would also give beneficiaries food choices other than grains.  Others, however, are concerned that such a system would disserve the needy because "men would trade [food stamps] for liquor or tobacco" rather than feed their families.    

Bajaj quotes a man who advises India's Supreme Court on food issues.

The reason we are facing this problem is our refusal to distribute the grain that we buy from farmers to the people who need it.  The only place the this grain deserves to be is in the stomachs of the people who are hungry.    

What's more interesting to me than what the expert says (predictable, right?) is his role:  advisor to the Supreme Court.  Imagine an advisor on "food issues" to the U.S. Supreme Court.  I suppose this says something about the differing (or lack of) separation of powers of India, as well as a difference in advocacy systems and roles.  In the U.S., we expect parties before the Court, as well as amici, to do the advising.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Rural Women and the Limits of Law: Reflections on CSW 56

The United Nations 56^th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 56) featured as its priority theme this year “the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.” This focus on rural women is long overdue, given that rural women comprise a quarter of the world’s population. Further, women provide 43% of the world’s agricultural labor, and they produce half of the world’s food for direct consumption. In fact, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) discovered some time ago that women—whom many refer to as the “architects of food security”—are key agents of development. One reason for this is that when women and girls receive income, they reinvest 90% of it in their families. In spite of their transformative potential to reduce hunger and poverty, women own less than 2% of land worldwide and they receive less than 10% of available credit.

As one whose scholarship focuses on rural livelihoods in both the United States and abroad, I was pleased to attend three days of the two-week CSW 56 event (February 27-March 9) as an observer for the American Society of International Law. As a former gender consultant for the United Nations, I was prepared for some of what I saw (e.g., bureaucracy), but the experience also held a few surprises. One thing that intrigued me about the “Session”—which is not a session at all but a dizzying array of “high-level round tables” and other meetings, panel discussions, “side events,” and “parallel events”—is that discussion of law was relatively absent.Furthermore, relatively little of the substance of these gatherings focused on rural women in a way that went beyond adding the modifier “rural” to whatever issue was being discussed.Rather than engaging with the circumstances that often distinguish rural women’s lives from those of their urban counterparts, many of the sessions seemed merely to “add rural women and stir” in relation to a well-recognized (and admittedly very important) women’s issue (e.g., female genital mutilation, child marriage). (Photo below left is of a panel on forced child marriage, which featured Marta Santos Pais, Special Representative of UN Secretary-General on Violence against Children and a victim of forced marriage from Sierra Leone). Other sessions did take up issues more central to rural livelihoods, including spatial removal from services and agents of the state, and women’s roles in agricultural production. The lack of significant engagement with the particular challenges facing rural women is reflected in the fact that none of the resolutions adopted by the Commission was about rural women. Nor did the Commission adopt any agreed conclusions on the priority theme of the 56^th Session.

In contrast to CSW’s somewhat anemic approach to the priority theme, Article 14 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) addresses the rights of rural women as a group. Indeed, CEDAW is the first human rights treaty to recognize rural difference, to acknowledge rural populations. While Article 14 guarantees to rural women all the rights enumerated elsewhere in CEDAW, the article also addresses rights specific to rural women. These include the right:

• to be involved in “development planning at all levels”;
• to benefit from “all community and extension services” among other types of education;
• to “organize self-help groups and cooperatives in order to obtain equal access to economic opportunities”;
• “to have access to agricultural credit and loans, marketing facilities, appropriate technologyand equal treatment in land and agrarian reform, as well as in land resettlement schemes”; and
• “to enjoy adequate living conditions, particularly in relation to housing, sanitation, electricity and water supply, transport and communications.”

Read more about Article 14, its history, and its implementation here, here, and here. Given the particular focus on rural women in this germinal women’s rights treaty, one might have anticipated considerable attention to the provision and its potential at CSW 56. Not so at the sessions I attended. I heard Article 14 mentioned only a couple of times.

It is a common bias among lawyers to presume law can solve problems and should be used to do so. Lawyers may be more skeptical about whether international law is effective at solving problems, attributing failures to the lack of enforceability of international law and the lack of respect for the rule of law, particularly in the developing world. As a ruralist, I have asserted that law is less effective at addressing problems in rural locales for some similar reasons. That is, when legal institutions and legal actors (including lawyers) are literally less present, laws on the books are less potent and the rule of law withers. All of these issues related to the relevance, authority, and efficacy of law were in play—sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly—in the attention CSW 56 gave to rural women.

Many of the participants in CSW 56 were not lawyers—nor were they UN or national officials.Rather, the vast majority of participants were associated with NGOs that have consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Indeed, on each morning of CSW 56, officials with UN Women held a briefing for NGO representatives (also referred to as “civil society”). By the middle of the first week, UN Women announced that 1,598 NGO representatives from 358 NGOs were engaged in the annual gathering.

At these daily briefings, UN Women officials offered affirmations to NGO representatives, assuring them of the importance of their efforts. The UN officials also offered updates on what was happening at the “high-level meetings” that few NGO representatives had permission to attend. In spite of their exclusion from many of the events where member states were in direct talks, NGOs presented a robust and varied array of panel discussions. A tiny sampling of the topics and their sponsors follows:

• Women and Corruption: Grassroots Experiences and Strategies, Huairou Commission, UN Development Program

• Empowering Caregivers to Build Healthy Sustainable Communities, Huairou Commission, GROOTS International, International Council of Women

• Rural Women's Groups and Key Stakeholders Frame Joint Actions, Government of Norway, Huairou Commission, GROOTS International, UN Women, UN-Non Governmental Liaison Service, Baha'i International Community, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, World Food Program, Landesa

• Rural Women Speak: Land, Health and Rights in Africa, FEMNET

• Rural Girls and Urban Migration: The Role of Communications for Development in Bridging the Divide, UN-HABITAT, Plan International, UNESCO, Women in Cities International

• Measuring Change for Rural Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, Global Fund for Women

Here is a link to the official programming, and a full listing of the NGO programming is here.

While most commentators in these parallel and side events presumed developing world contexts, a few offered reminders that biases against women persist in the developed world, too, including in relation to agriculture. In other words, Australia, Canada, the United States (just to name a few) all have work to do to empower women, including those in rural areas. (To be clear, unlike these other nations, the U.S. has never ratified CEDAW and is not bound by it).

This sampling of events demonstrates my earlier points about both the relative absence of attention to law’s role in solving the problems of rural women (and perhaps, by implication, all women), and also the shortage of programming regarding issues unique to rural women. To the extent that the particular concerns and circumstances of rural women were center stage, the focus typically related to agriculture. Among these were issues such as access to credit and means of marketing their products, the relative merits of “sustainable” agriculture versus intensive production agriculture, and an issue that more squarely implicates law: women’s right to own land. Officials from UN Women reported that diplomats participating in CSW 56 were sharing examples of legislation that would achieve land reform and improve land distribution schemes, but in the next breath they acknowledged the challenge of getting these laws implemented and enforced.

The need for legal reform arose in other contexts, too, but so did law’s limitations. For every comment I heard about the utility of Article 14 of CEDAW (or some other progressive national or international law) and the importance of legal and policy environments that were conducive to women’s empowerment, I also heard words of caution about the limits of law. Government and UN officials were more likely to tout the power of law, while NGOs were more likely to focus on village realities that often undermine the rule of law. Among those offering caveats regarding the potency of law were those who noted that many will be reluctant to invoke it—including criminal laws—in relation, for example, to forced child marriage. One African NGO representative stated,

Face reality ... be honest. Even in America, who tells the law? Maybe [the victims and their families] are illiterate ... [child marriage] is their custom. Who goes to tell the law except the child? And how can the child go tell the law?

This is where all of us come in ... if your NGO is interested in solving these problems. You go [to the village], watch the ways things are done and then talk to the educated locals [so that they begin to see the social and economic costs of the practice, e.g., child marriage]. And they will know they must do something.

This woman, like many others I heard over three days, extolled the importance of grassroots efforts to achieve the empowerment of women.

Wherever one might strike the balance between formal law on the one hand and local, grassroots efforts to educate and achieve cultural change on the other, few coming out of CSW 56 would dispute that both have significant roles in empowering not only rural women, but indeed all women.

Originally posted to Jurist.org; cross-posted to Legal Ruralism, IntLawGrrls, and the UC Davis Faculty Blog.