Food Security, Productivity, and Gender Inequality - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 286

Increasing women's direct access to food would, however, require a range of measures,
such as raising the productivity of women farmers, improving the capacity of nonfarm
women to buy food by enhancing their incomes and assets, formulating policies to
increase women's access to food gathered from common pool resources, and initiating
schemes that directly raise food availability for women in poor households.
Increasing Women's Farm Productivity
Increasing the productivity of women farmers is likely to need a range of measures, such
as the following:
• Recognizingwomenasfarmersandnotsimplyasfarmhelpers.
• Improvingwomen'sdirectaccesstolandandtenuresecurity.
• Increasingwomen'sdirectaccesstoproductioncredit,agriculturalinputs,tech-
nology, information on improved agricultural practices, storage and marketing
outlets.
• Directingmoreagriculturalresearchanddevelopmenttocropsthatwomenculti-
vate, based on a better understanding of women's farming systems.
• Promotinginstitutionalinnovations,suchaspromotingagroupapproachtofarm
investment and cultivation.
Let us consider each aspect in turn.
First, the dominant perception of women as farm wives/helpers rather than farm-
ers can seriously affect the way in which assets, information, and productive inputs are
directed to farming families. Based on this perception, farm-related services tend to
be directed to household men rather than to women farmers themselves. Perception
changes could be facilitated by gender-sensitization in the training of government offi-
cials who deliver the services. In such sensitization, NGOs and the media could also play
a role.
Second, improving women's direct access to land and assets will require acting on
three major sources of land: the family (via gift, inheritance, or transfer of usufruct
rights), the state (via land transfers), and the market (via purchase or lease). Access via
families depends especially on inheritance laws and their effective implementation.
Such laws are gender equal or moving in that direction in many countries, especially
in Asia and Latin America,12 but they remain unequal in others. In India, for instance,
where inheritance laws vary by religion, the 2005 amendment of the Hindu Succession
Act made inheritance laws relating to all property, including agricultural land, gender
equal, for over 80% of Indian women who are Hindus (Agarwal 2005a). Laws relating
to Christians and Parsis had already been amended to make them gender equal, but
inequalities remain for Muslims and tribal communities (Agarwal 2005b). There are