Food Security, Productivity, and Gender Inequality - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 285

the growing proportion of women in farming is likely to remain confined to low pro-
ductivity agriculture. Infrastructure development and other measures taken to revive
agriculture would fail to reach them. In turn, this would undercut world potential for
increasing agricultural output and ensuring food security. The situation would be exac-
erbated further by the predicted effects of climate change, which will impinge negatively
on the incomes and nutrition of millions of poor farmers, and specially on women and
children.
Women as Food Consumers and
Household Food Managers
The second face of food insecurity is the lack of access to food, despite aggregate avail-
ability. There are high inequalities in food access across countries, within countries, and
within households. By FAO's calculations for 2007-2010, there are an estimated 868 mil -
lion undernourished persons across the world, of which 852 million are in developing
countries, largely due to poverty (FAO 2012).
An increase in small-farm productivity can reduce poverty and increase food access
among such households. However, ensuring food security for agricultural laborers
and nonfarm workers who do not grow their own food will require enhancing their
economic resources and employment, so that they can buy adequate food; improv-
ing delivery systems, including rural roads, for transporting food where it is needed
most; reducing storage losses; and establishing public distribution systems that work.
Moreover, simply increasing household-level access is not enough, since there are
undernourished women and female children even within nonpoor families, due to well-
known intra household distributional inequalities in access to food and health care.
In addition, in many developing countries, nonmarketed foods gathered from forests
and commons provide an important supplement to diets and, hence, to food security.10
The degradation and decline of forests and commons, coupled with women's reduced
access to common pool resources, means a fall in such supplements, especially in the
diets of poor women (Agarwal 2010a). Food price spikes and climate change can further
exacerbate these gender inequalities.
All these factors point strongly to the need to reduce gendered inequalities in direct
access to the means to acquire food. This is important in itself, but, additionally, women's
enhanced access can bring intergenerational benefits. Mothers who are well nourished
during pregnancy and lactation enhance the life chances and growth abilities of their
children. Assets and incomes in mothers' hands are also found to have substantially
greater positive effects on the nutrition, health, and survival of children, than assets and
incomes in fathers' hands.11 Moreover, women owning land face significantly lower risk
of domestic violence, which, in turn, would reduce their own and their children's health
and nutrition risks linked with such violence (Agarwal and Panda 2007).