27 May 2010

Helping Women Farmers Increases Yields to Society

U.S. initiative reflects belief that women farmers can bring food security

By Charles W. Corey and Analeed Marcus
Staff Writers

Washington — To strengthen agriculture as a community and family enterprise, development experts must talk to men and women farmers separately, says Ritu Sharma.

Sharma, president of Women Thrive Worldwide, is a leading voice on women’s issues as they relate to U.S. foreign policy. She spoke to the Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security in Washington on May 20. The symposium focused on helping countries that struggle to produce or purchase enough food for their populations.

Members of the U.S. Congress and agriculture and humanitarian-aid experts participated. U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah, who agrees with Sharma about the importance of women farmers, delivered the keynote speech.

“The people who matter most aren’t the financiers, the [agriculture] ministers or the aid workers,” Shah said. “They are the female farmers who are the under-tapped solution to this problem [of food availability]. …When women control gains in income, they are more likely to spend those gains on family needs.”

Shah used the symposium as a platform to unveil a U.S. initiative called “Feed the Future,” a plan to reduce hunger by helping to develop the agriculture sectors in a number of poor countries.

To succeed, specialists agreed, barriers that hinder family farms from greater success must be knocked down. In the world’s poorest regions, women produce 80 percent of the food supply but receive less than 10 percent of credit going to farmers, according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme.

“We know a lot about what the possible barriers are,” Sharma said. She listed several: lack of credit and banking services; lack of “inputs” such as fertilizer, seed and equipment; bans on women owning land; poor infrastructure, such as few roads or no other transportation systems; and unavailability of insurance for crops.

Many of the barriers especially harm women farmers. In some places, for example, banks do not allow women to open accounts and women are not permitted by law to own land. Women also have strength limitations for farm work and carrying equipment, according to Sharma, a fact that needs to be taken into consideration by those helping to develop better resources for them.

The Feed the Future initiative plans to invest $3.5 billion through the next three years in agriculture in some 20 potential focus countries. One of the goals is to increase 40 million people’s incomes during the next 10 years, Shah said.

And that includes women’s incomes.

“We are focusing on women in everything we do,” by targeting financial aid on what are traditionally women-grown crops such as sweet potatoes and legumes and by providing fellowships to women pursuing agricultural degrees, Shah said.

“There have been a lot of agricultural business initiatives before, but none of them have focused on agriculture, women and children, and that’s sort of the unique factor here,” said Ambassador William Garvelink, who is coordinating the U.S. government’s Feed the Future efforts.

Sharma, a first-generation American whose family left the Punjab region of India and immigrated to the United States, said she is pleased with the administration’s focus. She noted that she is always impressed when talking to women farmers because of their grasp of the markets. As an advocate for the empowerment of women, Sharma’s organization aims to institutionalize gender-sensitive principles so that they become part of the fabric of how all development institutions work.

WOMEN-OWNED FARMS AS ECONOMIC ENGINES

To show the ways women farmers can wield economic power, Sharma described five determined Honduran women who have only primary school educations.

The women banded together, bought land and started growing coffee in an attempt to reduce domestic violence. These women believed they needed economic independence to stop the violence, and they saw coffee farming as the way to get that independence.

At first, “they could not own the land,” she said, “but they managed to overcome that. Then they could not own coffee plants. They managed to overcome that. Then they had to get inputs. Then they needed to expand and then to increase the [coffee’s] quality.”

The women’s co-op now exports 10,000 tons of fair-trade coffee a year to Europe.

To learn more about the Feed the Future initiative, which is supported by several U.S. agencies, including USAID, the departments of Agriculture and Treasury, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Peace Corps, see the initiative website.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)