Rural women are vital to global food systems

As the United Nations Women Watch's overview on food security identifies, rural women not only act as food producers and agricultural entrepreneurs, they also informally facilitate food security and stability in their households and communities (another post on women in farming is here). Expanding on the latter point, both the UN Women's research on rural women and girls and a 2019 Root Capital article, "How Climate Change Impacts Women Farmers," suggests that rural women are well positioned to foster resilient agricultural hubs, due to demonstrated skill at community networking, mobilization, and adaption in the face of environmental threats and economic crises. 

Over the past few years, the International Day of Rural Women has consistently endeavored to draw attention to this often unappreciated reality. In 2021 the theme, "Rural Women Cultivating Good Food for All," spotlighted how investing in rural women engaged in agribusiness could help alleviate global food insecurity. Food insecurity, which has been exacerbated by recent climate crises (discussed here) and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (discussed here), affects upwards of 800 million people worldwide, including over 33 million Americans, who are disproportionately from communities of color and in rural areas (previous posts on food insecurity in the U.S. here and here). 

The premise, as informed by National Geographic's article, "Empowering female farmers to feed the world," is that gender-specific barriers, such as discriminatory practices, limited access to resources, and misogynistic social norms, prevent rural women from maximizing their agricultural and economic potentials. Consider, despite equivalent competency, on average women-run farms tend to produce smaller crop yields and generate less profit than those run by men. If barriers were eliminated, rural women might be able to close the gap between them and their male counterparts, in ways that would also strategically amplify their existing contributions to global poverty and hunger reduction. Citing the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the National Geographic article estimates that if women farmers were provided equal access to resources, then global food production by women could increase by up to 30%, providing food to roughly 150 million additional people. 

While obstacles to rural women farmers vary depending on regional particularities, certain impediments can be identified fairly consistently across contexts. Specifically, as discussed in a 2018 World Bank story, "Breaking the 'Grass Ceiling': Empowering Women Farmers," inequitable access to both land rights and financing opportunities, influenced by historic and ongoing gender-bias, emerges as a common limiting phenomenon. Synthesizing the World Bank story and the National Geographic article, this can be seen in certain developing countries where women comprise half of the agricultural labor force, but only make up 10% of landowners. Without autonomy over the land they are farming, women cannot structure land use and farming agreements to maximize their benefit. As a related matter, smallholder women farmers in these areas can struggle to access credit in the face of insufficient collateral and sexist cultural norms. Accordingly, they must operate under a funding deficit that can place advanced tools and techniques capable of improving production out of reach.

Focusing now on rural America, one can see that parallel limitations similarly inhibit women farmers. On one hand, as noted by the American Farmland Trust's 2021 report on "Women in Agriculture," women are currently outpacing men in agricultural education programs throughout the country (at UC Davis, in 2019-2020, 75% of students who earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture-related majors were women). Despite this, women are the principle operator on only 14% of U.S. farming operations. The American Farmland Trust report contextualizes this statistic within additional research documenting women farmers' obstacles to obtaining land, including exclusion from networks, challenges accessing credit and obtaining conservation support, and patriarchal norms that prioritize male heirs.

The American Farmland Trust report further notes that disparities in access to loans and capital hit women farmers of color the hardest. This is, in part, a result of women and farmers of color tending to run relatively smaller operations with lower revenues and weaker credit histories, but also the product of implicit bias in resource and loan provision. Additionally, as theorized in a 2022 National Institute of Health study, "Decolonizing agriculture in the United States," the predominant agricultural narrative in the U.S. has been constructed around white masculinity in ways that exclude women and people of color from our cultural imaginary of who a farmer is and should be. 

Juxtaposition of two feminist projects grappling with these issues shows a range of approaches being employed to support women farmers in the United States. The first, a One Earth-backed project, "Supporting Black Women farmers working to expand regenerative agriculture in the Southeastern US," embodies concrete resource-based programmatic support that must be paramount. Specifically, this project will expand on the American Farmland Trust's existing partnership with the Black Family Land Trust in order to promote land access, enhanced viability, and increased resilience for black women farmers. The second, FarmHer, a social media campaign initiated by Marji Guyler-Alaniz in 2013, represents a supplementary resistance strategy. This internet-based photo project aims to update modern conceptions of farmers in ways that recognize, celebrate, and recruit women.

Beyond these select examples, SeedChange, an organization committed to supporting farmers and combatting hunger, poverty, and climate change, provides broader recommendations for empowering women farmers. Specifically, its publication, "Women Seed Change," advocates for the following actions:

(1) strengthen women's leadership by funding women-led farmer organizations ... (2) prioritize women's knowledge and agency in climate resilient agriculture ... (3) invest in women farmers, including youth and indigenous women ... (4) develop gender equity frameworks to guide policies ... (5) enhance women's agency, decision-making power and rights over land and productive resources [and] (6) uphold the rights of women ...    

In short, rural women in agriculture are vital to global food systems, and they need robust support from a range of domestic and international institutions.