State Department adds $5 million gender program
October 07, 2011 | 06:49 PM | Filed in: Food security
The State Department has allocated $5 million for a new gender program within “Feed the Future,” the Obama administration’s global food security initiative, and is encouraging developing countries to give women more equitable land ownership rights.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the allocation last month at a panel discussion during the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, citing the need to increase agricultural productivity.
“Women make up the majority of the agricultural workforce in many developing countries. They’re involved in every aspect of agricultural production, from planting seeds to weeding fields to harvesting crops,” Clinton said.
“Yet women farmers are 30 percent less productive than male farmers, for one reason: they have access to fewer resources. They certainly work as hard and they, like farmers everywhere, are at the mercy of nature,” she said. “But these women have less fertilizer, fewer tools, poorer quality seeds, less access to training and the ownership of land. As a result, they grow fewer crops, which means less food is available at markets, more people go hungry, farmers earn less money, and we’re back in to that vicious cycle.”
Clinton said that land reform is “one of the most challenging issues that demands major political commitment.”
“If we do not have land reform that gives women co-ownership rights, gives women inheritance rights, we won’t crack the code on greater agricultural productivity because the women need to have more financial security, to be protected in case they’re widowed,” she continued.
“Some of the saddest stories that I’ve encountered in 20-plus years of doing this work are widows who are pushed off the lands that they tilled with their husbands,” Clinton said. “And if we don’t protect against theft and give greater investment incentives, then we won’t get the productivity that is promised. So Feed the Future will work on land reform. Feed the Future will also support entrepreneurship development to encourage agricultural growth sector.”
Clinton said there is already progress in providing women access to finance and land tenure. In Mali, she said, “Feed the Future” has provided training in financial management and completing loan applications. In Ethiopia, the government is instituting joint land titles with names and photos of both husbands and wives.
During the panel, which Clinton invited, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete acknowledged that in polygamist cultures such as his country’s, women “don’t own the land; the husband owns the land. The women work on the land. So what we really need to do to help the women, one is make sure that women have access to property.”
Kikwete said that, while the local courts still adhere to the cultural traditions, the national courts are more modern. He added that fewer younger men practice polygamy.
Jose Graziano da Silva, a Brazilian who headed that country’s “Zero Hunger” program and is the incoming director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said that his country provides cash transfers under that program to mothers rather than fathers to make sure that children get the food.
Graziano da Silva also noted that the Brazilian government had consulted with the country’s supreme court to write the law giving preference to mothers so that it would not be challenged.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the allocation last month at a panel discussion during the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, citing the need to increase agricultural productivity.
“Women make up the majority of the agricultural workforce in many developing countries. They’re involved in every aspect of agricultural production, from planting seeds to weeding fields to harvesting crops,” Clinton said.
“Yet women farmers are 30 percent less productive than male farmers, for one reason: they have access to fewer resources. They certainly work as hard and they, like farmers everywhere, are at the mercy of nature,” she said. “But these women have less fertilizer, fewer tools, poorer quality seeds, less access to training and the ownership of land. As a result, they grow fewer crops, which means less food is available at markets, more people go hungry, farmers earn less money, and we’re back in to that vicious cycle.”
Clinton said that land reform is “one of the most challenging issues that demands major political commitment.”
“If we do not have land reform that gives women co-ownership rights, gives women inheritance rights, we won’t crack the code on greater agricultural productivity because the women need to have more financial security, to be protected in case they’re widowed,” she continued.
“Some of the saddest stories that I’ve encountered in 20-plus years of doing this work are widows who are pushed off the lands that they tilled with their husbands,” Clinton said. “And if we don’t protect against theft and give greater investment incentives, then we won’t get the productivity that is promised. So Feed the Future will work on land reform. Feed the Future will also support entrepreneurship development to encourage agricultural growth sector.”
Clinton said there is already progress in providing women access to finance and land tenure. In Mali, she said, “Feed the Future” has provided training in financial management and completing loan applications. In Ethiopia, the government is instituting joint land titles with names and photos of both husbands and wives.
During the panel, which Clinton invited, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete acknowledged that in polygamist cultures such as his country’s, women “don’t own the land; the husband owns the land. The women work on the land. So what we really need to do to help the women, one is make sure that women have access to property.”
Kikwete said that, while the local courts still adhere to the cultural traditions, the national courts are more modern. He added that fewer younger men practice polygamy.
Jose Graziano da Silva, a Brazilian who headed that country’s “Zero Hunger” program and is the incoming director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said that his country provides cash transfers under that program to mothers rather than fathers to make sure that children get the food.
Graziano da Silva also noted that the Brazilian government had consulted with the country’s supreme court to write the law giving preference to mothers so that it would not be challenged.
