On October 29, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health held a hearing, “A Call to Action on Food Security: The Administration’s Global Strategy.”
Dr. Helene Gayle, president and chief executive officer of CARE USA, explained the importance of women to the global strategy on food security, as well as in the decision-making process. “Women are critical in efforts to improve food security, as they make up the majority of agricultural producers in developing countries and the vast majority of primary caregivers. Women make up an estimated 70 percent of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 60 percent globally. Rural women produce half of the world’s food and, in developing countries, between 60 and 80 percent of food crops, yet they own only one percent of registered land. Gender must be a crosscutting element of any successful food security initiative. Programs that empower women, specifically addressing the needs of women farmers and helping them build their capacity, are extremely important. These include providing new market opportunities for women’s farmer co-ops or helping women learn new techniques to increase the value of their goods through post-harvest activities. It is also important that approaches to combating food insecurity consider the roles of both women and men and address gender-specific barriers to accessing resources, like education, credit, and land tenure. Interventions should be designed, monitored, and evaluated through a gender lens to ensure that dynamics at the community and household level are well understood and interventions are designed and implemented accordingly.”
With regard to the development of programs and strategies, Dr. Gayle said, “Women are, unfortunately, too often left out of decision-making bodies and gender inequality needs to be recognized as one of the key challenges to improving food security. Programs that empower women, specifically addressing the needs of women and helping them build their capacity, are extremely important. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)’s 2009 Hunger Index Report, documenting that hunger and food insecurity [are] often greatest in countries where there is gender inequality in education, health, and nutrition, only further solidifies the argument that without addressing gender inequality in a country specific context food security interventions will not be as effective. Women’s access to, and control over, key assets, especially land, is critical. Specifically, CARE supports the concept of linking women and the very poor to new opportunities throughout agriculture and market value chains. CARE has paid a great deal of attention to this issue and is working to scale up our work in value chains with the goal of empowering 10 million vulnerable women and girls and their families to lift themselves out of poverty.”
According to the Department of State, the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative provides a “comprehensive approach to food security based on country and community-led planning and collaboration.” The Initiative pays particular attention to the challenges facing women in countries where food insecurity is greatest and recognizes that they are “key contributors of agriculture-led growth.” In order to increase women’s participation in economic growth, the Initiative will, among other provisions, “[a]dapt or target interventions – including access to financial services, agricultural inputs, and knowledge – to the needs of women and the very poor; [p]rioritize labor-saving technologies where water and labor constraints prevent women and the very poor from expanding agricultural production; and [e]ngage in dialogue at all levels (community, national, regional, and global) to raise awareness of the value of women and the very poor to foster greater agricultural growth.”
In outlining his support for the Initiative, Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World and co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, said, “The Initiative is remarkable for its vision. It recognizes that a comprehensive strategy to address hunger must go beyond simply increasing agricultural production, and that improving maternal and child nutrition is a central component of the administration’s plan. Focusing our agriculture and food security investments on improving the nutrition of women and children will shape better, more targeted programs that have a lasting development impact. The primary measures of success of the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative must be reductions in poverty and maternal and child under-nutrition. We will be better able to assess the effectiveness of our investments in agriculture and food security by focusing on whether nutrition is improving within a country or population. And, because nutrition is affected by other factors such as access to basic health care services and the protection of women and girls, measuring the impact of U.S. investments on the nutritional status of women and children will also tell us how well our overall development efforts are working.”
Rev. Beckmann added, “The long-term damage inflicted by under-nutrition on young children is a moral outrage. Last year under-nutrition took the lives of nearly three million children under five years of age. Tens of millions more children who are malnourished will suffer permanent physical and cognitive damage as a result of not getting enough of the right food to eat and clean water to drink. These children will be less productive workers in the future, resulting in long-term negative consequences for the economic development of communities and countries. Where under-nutrition persists, the economic consequences are as high as two to three percent of lost GDP [gross domestic product] annually. In countries like Ethiopia or Burkina Faso, long-term poverty reduction will simply never be possible unless we take steps to improve child nutrition. The Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative provides an opportunity for the United States to scale up the kinds of proven interventions that will make such progress against poverty possible.”
Dr. Thomas Melito, director of International Affairs and Trade at the Government Accountability Office, Dr. Julie Howard, executive director of the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, and Richard Leach, senior advisor for Public Policy at Friends of the World Food Program, also testified.
