*First International Conference to Comprehensively Examine the Gender
Gap in Agriculture
13-15 March, 2012, NASC Complex, New Delhi, India.
*India President H.E. Pratibha Devisingh Patil Expected to Attend
**********************************************************************
Next month, hundreds of participants, including ministers, World Food
Prize Laureates, farmers, gender experts, leading scientists,
community development organizations and innovators will gather in New
Delhi, India for the first international conference to comprehensively
address the gender gap in agriculture.
Though women comprise 43 percent of the agricultural labor force of
developing countries, they face rampant restrictions on their ability
to buy, sell or inherit land; open a savings account; borrow money; or
sell their crops at market. Their ability to produce food is further
hampered by a lack of access to rudimentary basics of farming such as
fertilizers, water, tillers, transport, extension services, and mobile
phones, along with an unnecessary amount of drudgery.
The Global Conference on Women in Agriculture comes about one year
after the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(FAO) released a report finding that opening up access to such
“productive resources” used to produce, process, and take food to
market could increase yields on women’s farms by 20 to 30 percent.
Turning around this crop yield gap, could raise total agriculture
output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent and thus reduce the
number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent or by some
100 to150 million people.
The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) is organizing the
conference as part of the Gender in Agriculture Partnership, a global
program addressing gender and agriculture. It is co-sponsored by the
Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Asia-Pacific
Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI).
WHO:
For a full list of speakers, please see the latest program here.
Several speakers are listed at the bottom of this advisory.
WHEN: March 13-15, 2012
WHERE: NASC Complex, New Delhi, India
Gender inequality is closely linked to hunger, given that women are
responsible for household nutrition. And while India had seen the
second fastest GDP growth rate in the world from 2000 to 2008, it has
a low ranking on gender in social indicator indexes across the
board–and more than 350 million people who are undernourished.
According to the recent FAO report, when women control additional
income, they spend more than men do on food, health, clothing and
education for their children; increasing men’s income doesn’t
necessarily translate into increased welfare for everyone.
Unfortunately, many policies on agricultural production do not take
into account who controls the income.
Western agricultural norms deployed in developing countries have
generally categorized agricultural production as a male area and food
knowledge or nutrition as a female area, and this has also had
detrimental effects in developing countries where nutrition has been
devalued, according to researchers.
The conference will provide examples of innovations that can address
these problems, including ways of strengthening women’s empowerment,
access to resources, services, and markets; innovations to reduce
drudgery and improve nutrition, as well as addressing climate change.
Ensuring we can feed a total of nine billion people by 2050 with crops
ravaged by drought, floods, and other weather extremes is the single
greatest challenge of our time. An estimated 925 million people across
the world, the majority of them in developing countries, were
undernourished in 2010. Two and a half billion smallholder farmers are
the key for boosting global food production. However, a global
agriculture system and agricultural innovations that do not pay
attention to the needs of women are holding back smallholder farms and
ultimately robbing millions from having enough to eat.
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Speakers at the Global Conference on Women in Agriculture, include:
H.E. Pratibha Devisingh Patil, President of India
Bina Agarwal, Director & Professor of Economics, University of Delhi
S. Ayyappan, Secretary, Department of Agriculture Research and
Education (DARE), and Director General of the Indian Council of
Agricultural Research (ICAR)
Lynn Brown, Chief Food Security and Safety Nets, World Food Programme (WFP)
Matia Chowdhury, Agriculture Minister, Bangladesh
Mark Holderness, Executive Secretary, Global Forum on Agricultural
Research (GFAR)
Monty Jones, World Food Prize Laureate, Chairman of the Global Forum
on Agricultural Research (GFAR)
Uma Lele, Independent Scholar, Former Economist and Policy Advisor at
the World Bank
Haven Ley, Senior Program Officer, Agriculture Development, Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation
Jo Luck, World Food Prize Laureate, Board Member, USAID Board for
International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD)
Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy
Research Institute (IFPRI)
Raj Paroda, Executive Secretary, Asia-Pacific Association of
Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI)
Sharad Pawar, Union Minister of Agriculture and Food Processing
Industries, Government of India
Esther Penunia, Secretary General, Asian Farmers’ Association for
Sustainable and Rural Development (AFA)
Yvonne Pinto, Director, Agricultural Learning and Impacts Network
(ALINe) – Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex
Nafis Sadik, Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General and UN
Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia-Pacific
Idah Sithole-Niang, Steering Committee, African Agricultural
Technology Foundation (AATF, Kenya) and Associate Professor,
University of Zimbabwe
M.S. Swaminthan, World Food Prize Laureate, Member of Parliament, India
Gülden Türköz-Cosslett, Director, Programme Support Division, UN Women