The Chicago Council’s campaign, “Healthy Food for a Healthy World,” builds awareness about the important role food can play in promoting health and alleviating malnutrition. We publish a blog post weekly exploring these issues and the series will culminate in the release of a new Chicago Council report at the Global Food Security Symposium 2015 on April 16. Look for a new post each Wednesday, join the discussion using #GlobalAg, and tune in to the Symposium live steam on April 16.
By Louise Iverson, Research Associate, Global Agriculture & Food, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs
As mothers, as the heads of household who purchase and prepare food, and as nearly 50 percent of the world’s farmers, women are crucial to feeding a healthy world. Improving nutrition will require empowering women with the knowledge and means to obtain more nutritious foods for themselves and their families and encouraging women farmers around the world to cultivate nutritious foods to be sold at market.
As mothers, women determine the nutritional status of their children. At the start of life, a child’s nutrition depends on his or her mother being well-nourished before, during, and after her pregnancy. When a woman is malnourished before and during pregnancy and while breastfeeding, her child may confront inhibited mental and physical development and face the risk of lifelong physical and economic consequences as a result.
The valuable role of mothers in ensuring their children’s nutrition continues well past early childhood: Studies have shown that women are more likely to devote income to nutrition and health, compared with men. Many times, however, women in developing countries either cannot afford or don’t have access to nutritious foods and information about how to properly prepare these foods.
As farmers, women shape global nutrition. Women constitute 43 percent of the world’s farmers, often cultivating the healthy foods that can alleviate malnutrition, and also provide an income to purchase nutritious foods for their households. Today, however, approximately 1.1 billion women farmers in developing countries lack access to land, credit, information, and crucial inputs compared with their male counterparts, and are underproducing as a result. Closing this gender gap by making productive resources available to both men and women could increase women farmers’ yields by 20-30 percent. This could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent. Such increased output would reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 12 to 17 percent, improving the nutrition of 150 million people, more than the populations of France and the United Kingdom combined.
Video courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Investments in women by governments, NGOs, and businesses worldwide are already underway in order to improve global nutrition. Scaling Up Nutrition is a network of 54 countries’ governments, along with the United Nations, civil society leaders, businesses, and others, working in a collective effort that empowers mothers with the information and ability to ensure that they and their families have nutritious diets. To increase women’s access to nutritious foods at a local level, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) has launched the Marketplace for Nutritious Foods, which serves to strengthen local innovations in order to bring nutritious foods to market. The program supports entrepreneurs in Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania to bring approaches that improve nutrition to market, through an Innovation Accelerator that provides technical and financial assistance to small and medium private sector enterprises.
To help close the gender gap in agriculture, Cargill, for example, has over 800 Women’s Clubs for women farmers in Zambia, which serve to empower these women by providing key inputs such as seeds, technology, credit, and training to invest in their farms. These kinds of efforts, like other efforts underway, can help empower women to alleviate global malnutrition within households, communities, and the marketplace.
References:
- Black, Robert E., et al. "Maternal and child undernutrition and overweight in low-income and middle-income countries." The Lancet 382, no. 9890. (2013): 427-51.
- Cargill. “Female farmers – the change agents of African agriculture.” Accessed February 16, 2015.
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The State of Food and Agriculture 2010-2011. Women in Agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development. Rome: FAO, 2011.
- Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). “Marketplace for Nutritious Foods.” Accessed March 1, 2015.
- Haddad, Lawrence and John Hoddinott. “Women's income and boy-girl anthropometric status in the Côte d'Ivoire.” World Development 22, no. 4 (April 1994): 543-53.
- Scaling Up Nutrition. “What is SUN?” Accessed February 16, 2015.
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