Each 15 October is celebrated as United Nations (UN) International Day of Rural Women.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the life and activities of rural women.
The UN website explains:
The Invaluable Contribution of Rural Women to Development
Achieving gender equality and empowering women is not only the right thing to do but is a critical ingredient in the fight against extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition.
Women account for a substantial proportion of the agricultural labor force, including informal work, and perform the bulk of unpaid care and domestic work within families and households in rural areas. They make significant contributions to agricultural production, food security and nutrition, land and natural resource management, and building climate resilience.
Even so, women and girls in rural areas suffer disproportionately from multi-dimensional poverty. They may be as productive and enterprising as their male counterparts but are less able to access land, credit, agricultural inputs, markets, and high-value agrifood chains and obtain lower prices for their crops.
Structural barriers and discriminatory social norms continue to constrain women’s decision-making power and political participation in rural households and communities. Women and girls in rural areas lack equal access to productive resources and assets, public services, such as education and health care, and infrastructure, including water and sanitation, while much of their labor remains invisible and unpaid, even as their workloads become increasingly heavy due to the out-migration of men. Globally, with few exceptions, every gender and development indicator for which data are available reveals that rural women fare worse than rural men and urban women and that they disproportionately experience poverty, exclusion, and the effects of climate change.
This International Day, let’s recognize the work of these heroines in the food systems of the world, and let’s claim rural areas with equal opportunities for all.
War in Ukraine and its worldwide impact on rural women
Global food and energy markets are feeling the strain of the war. As the conflict disrupts production and export processes, these essential commodities are becoming less and less available. Producing is more expensive, and food prices are spiking abruptly, affecting significantly and disproportionally women and girls living in rural areas. In a new policy paper, UN Women explores the interrelated crises being driven and exacerbated by the war. […]
Soaring prices are contributing to a global cost-of-living crisis, the impacts of which are falling disproportionately on developing countries. Communities across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have been hit hard, with already vulnerable households paying the highest price.
Women and girls are being impacted more—and differently.
Systemic inequality makes women more vulnerable to crises. Both within Ukraine and globally, shortages and price hikes are leaving women and girls behind—and putting them in increasing danger.
Even before the war, women’s access to food and energy was more precarious than men’s. The global gender gap in food insecurity, which sat at 1.7 per cent in 2019, rose to over 4 per cent in 2021. And around the world, women and girls are disproportionately affected by energy poverty.
In Ukraine, women-headed households were already more likely to be food insecure. With less access to resources like land and credit as well as to formal employment, and with gender gaps in pay and pensions at 22 per cent and 32 per cent respectively, Ukrainian women have less to fall back on in times of crisis. […]
Women and girls are also going hungrier. When there’s not enough food to go around, women typically pay the highest price—cutting down their own intake to save food for other members of the household. This trend is visible in Ukraine and across other conflict-affected areas, driving worsening malnutrition and anaemia among women.
Heightened domestic workloads, too, are falling disproportionately on women. It takes more time and effort to obtain food and fuel when they’re scarce—an added burden that exacerbates existing inequalities at home.
In Ukraine and elsewhere, intersecting forms of discrimination compound gender inequality, putting already vulnerable groups at even greater risk.
It’s (past) time to rethink our global food and energy systems.
As the war in Ukraine compounds with other crises, its impacts are revealing major weaknesses in global food and energy systems.
Food insecurity was already on the rise before the outbreak of the war, with an estimated 44 million people at the brink of famine due to COVID-19, climate change and conflict. In total, roughly 345 million people across 82 countries are facing acute food insecurity or high risk of it in 2022—almost 200 million more than before the pandemic.
Energy poverty also remains pervasive, with much recent progress wiped out during COVID-19. As of 2020, 733 million people still lacked access to electricity. A whopping 2.4 billion people lack access to clean cooking, a driver of household air pollution that causes 3.2 premature deaths per year, mostly among women and children. And roughly 1 billion people are served by healthcare facilities that don’t have reliable electricity—meaning price hikes and service disruptions can compromise medical care.
The vulnerability of global food and energy systems is due in large part to our reliance on fossil fuels. As long as energy security is tied to oil and gas, it will remain susceptible to market volatility and price shocks: many who lost energy access during COVID-19 simply couldn’t afford to pay. And the role of fossil fuels in agricultural production and distribution—for example, natural gas’s role in the production of nitrogen-based fertilizers—means that oil price shocks also drive increased volatility in food prices.
Against the backdrop of worsening climate and environmental crises, the war in Ukraine underscores the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels. Yet, soaring oil and gas prices may ultimately drive increased investment in fossil fuel-based energy: windfall profits to the fossil fuel industry, will make change more difficult. Without intervention, the world may see a reversal of decarbonization—on which progress is already moving too slowly.
We need sustainable, gender-responsive solutions.
Gender equality must be a key consideration in response, recovery and peace-building efforts in Ukraine—but so far, most have failed to incorporate it at all. The same is true for other crises, such as COVID-19 and climate change, where gender-responsive action has been insufficient at best and non-existent at worst.
Adopting sustainable alternatives to fossil fuel-based energy and agriculture is a crucial step toward global gender equality. It will help to close gender gaps in food and energy security, reduce deaths via air pollution and reduce unpaid care and domestic workloads. It will also mean new green jobs for women and a potential increase in the productivity of women’s small-scale farming.
This kind of systemic change requires significant resources. Windfall taxes on oil and gas companies, as well as the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies—on which the world spends an annual USD$423 billion—can help to reallocate funds away from the fossil fuel industry and toward the creation of new gender-responsive, sustainable systems.
Above all, women must be included in all decision-making processes. It is only with women’s participation and leadership that the world will find solutions to the many crises it faces.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)