The Future that Women Want: No Time to Waste A Vision of Sustainable Development for All (2-3)

Rio+20 provides an opportunity for leaders to strengthen the foundation laid 20 years ago at the 1992 Earth Summit to build a path towards a sustainable future. Twenty years ago, UN Member States unanimously agreed that “women have a vital role in environmental management and development. Their full participation is therefore essential to achieve sustainable development”. UN Women presented a report to the 2012 Summit highlighting the priorities needed for the empowerment and participation of women in sustainable development.

Local women’s organizations are expectedly at the front of creating awareness of women‘s rights to access and control productive resources such as land—among all groups of stakeholders, and among women themselves. Women’s groups and cooperatives such as the Huairou Commission and GROOTS have put pressure on land administrations to promote land rights reform. In Rwanda, women’s non-governmental organizations have promoted marriage registration, oral and holographic wills and memory books to remedy the lack of identification cards, a majorobstacle for women’s acquisition of land title.
Governments are also providing financial and technical assistance. Women farmers in Fiji are adopting eco-friendly farming methods with support from three separate government departments (in charge of fisheries, cooperatives and women’s issues), who have partnered to promote women’s engagement in cultivating seaweed and producing virgin coconut oil, honey and pearls. The Government of Timor-Leste has supplied 2,305 agricultural groups—37 per cent of whose membership are women—with agricultural equipment including tractors, power threshers and rice millers.
Food Policy Research Institute concluded that despite extensive study, “evidence of pro-male biases in food consumption is scarce”.
In contrast, women and girls have physiologically different food requirements, where lower quantities are balanced out by the need for a higher concentration of nutrients such as, for example, iron. Women also have increased nutritional requirements during pregnancy.
Poverty, lack of access to or availability of appropriately nutritious foods, and often lack of education puts women at an increased risk of malnutrition; many simply do not know their own nutritional needs.
Children of mothers involved in agriculture are at a similar disadvantage. There is evidence that women who balance long days of farm work with household responsibilities have little time and energy to tend to and prepare nutritious family meals or weaning foods.
Smaller children particularly suffer when the demand for agricultural labour is high.
Data also reveals a correlation between women’s rights and child welfare: countries where women lack land ownership rights have 60 per cent more malnourished children; countries that restrict women’s access to credit have 85 per cent more.

The way forward

There is a strong case for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment in agriculture. Evidence suggests that investing in women-owned food and agricultural enterprises could narrow the resource gap and increase agricultural yields to reduce the number of hungry people by 100 to 150 million. Hunger will only be exacerbated if the global society does not adopt a more sustainable approach to food cultivation. Rising population numbers are expected to require 70 per cent more food production globally by 2050, compared to 2009. This increase can be as high as 100 percent for developing countries, which already suffer from land and water scarcity to a greater degree than the rest of the world: availability of cultivated land per capita in low-income countries is half that of high income states, and the quality—and, therefore, the yield—of such land is typically lower.
In this context, empowering rural women and girls to collectively take on the challenge of future food production becomes all the more important. As a first step, legislative reform and public policy measures are needed to ensure women are afforded the rights and capacity to own the means of production, such as land, technology and other inputs. In parallel, the development community and national government will need to address issues of access—to financial services, infrastructure, technology and transportation—and build women’s and girls’ capacities by providing networking and educational opportunities and training to enable women to benefit from previously unfamiliar business and economic concepts and markets (such as, for example, fair trade).
Women’s initiatives water equity
• Safe water and sanitation
• Food security and sustainable agriculture
• Energy access, efficiency and sustainability
• Sustainable cities
• Decent work in a green economy
• Health
• Education
• Safe water and sanitation
• Food security and sustainable agriculture
• Energy access, efficiency and sustainability
• Sustainable cities
• Decent work in a green economy
• Health
• Education
• Safe water and sanitation
• Food security and sustainable agriculture
• Energy access, efficiency and sustainability
• Sustainable cities
• Decent work in a green economy
• Health
• Education
• Safe water and sanitation
• Food security and sustainable agriculture
• Energy access, efficiency and sustainability
• Sustainable cities
• Decent work in a green economy
• Health
• Education local initiatives
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