Breakout session: Key role of women in achieving food security

43% of all smallholder farmers in developing countries are women. And owing to the difficulty of obtaining land, loans and marketing channels, they are about 15-20 percent less productive than male farmers. Improving women farmers’ roles in agricultural development would mean giving a boost to food security.

At the Forum on Rural Development, a breakout session was devoted to the key role of women in achieving food security. Participants were quickly convinced that women farmers’ issues cannot be seen in isolation, but should rather be seen as an economic and social issue – and participants stressed that the focus on “women issues” should be dropped in favor of a broader perspective on “gender issues”.

One of the main solutions of how to approach the gender issue is to give women a stronger political voice through women farmers’ associations. These could not only unite women behind a common cause and serve as a forum for education and discussion, but also enable them to go beyond the mere production of crops and into processing of food.

Some of the concrete measures that the breakout session came up with included giving women access to ICTs, supporting them while taking into consideration their multiple roles in the family and society, and targeting investment in women’s knowledge, training, innovation, capacity building for decision-making.

Most importantly, however, participants agreed that women needed to be able to raise their voice – and if necessary, to confront the interests of men who have stakes to lose.

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Speaker blip: Laura Drewett, ESOKO

ESOKO is a market information platform working with smallholder farmers in Africa. In this video, ESOKO Partner Director Laura Drewett, a speaker at the Rural Forum, explains how the ESOKO approach works.

http://vimeo.com/21709631

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Afternoon plenary prepares breakout sessions

The afternoon session at the European Forum on Rural Development set the path for six breakout session (download their programmes here) that are to commence tomorrow, Wednesday morning. They will focus on

• Institutions and policies for effective governance of rural development
• Ecologically efficient agricultural systems for smallholder farmers
• Access to land and other natural resources
• Food Security and Social Protection
• Role of rural women in achieving food security and
• Linking smallholder farmers to efficient markets.

Within the area of food security and social protection, speakers highlighted that social transfers have an important role in lifting people out of poverty and to provide most basic access to food. Admittedly, many states do not see the logic of providing unemployment benefits yet, and tax systems in many countries do not allow for comprehensive, state-funded social protection. However, in some developing countries like South Africa, discussions about a basic income have been put on the agenda.

To give smallholder farmers a stronger voice, speakers stressed the need to establish production associations between farmers with a view to share information and to build a farmers’ union. ICTs are an important part in this regard, said Élodie Maître d’Hôtel from CIRAN.  She established a list of challenges faced by small farmers, among them high barriers to entry into the market, high marketing cost, high transaction cost and a lack of bargaining power. Most of them can be attenuated by forming a union, but not all of them.  The breakout sessions will go into further detail on the measures that can be taken.

Another important aspect of the discussions on Tuesday afternoon was the integration of women into the markets. As pointed out in the morning by Soraya Rodríguez, Secretary of State for Development Cooperation, women are often more productive than men, but they are more likely to be disowned of their land if they discontinue farming to engage in other projects. Alexandra Spieldoch from Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture & NRM (WOCAN) fully supported this view. She suggested that developing countries respect women’s interest in their policies and enable women to be better represented and involved into policy-making.

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ICTs and their role in agriculture

At a side event of the CTA, policy-makers and field experts debated the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in rural development. 80 participants followed panel debates on ICTs policies, promoting extension services to farmers and improving market access for farmers.

Speakers agreed that ICTs are fundamental for achieving rural, agricultural and economic development, beginning with the sharing of experiences and best practices over large distances, and ending with automated SMS updates to obtain market development information.

Laura Drewett, Partner Director of the company Esoko, highlighted that information is vital for smallholder farmers. When traders come to buy their production, information about the current world market price for crops allows farmers to negotiate better prices and to receive a fair share of the revenue.

Dion Jerling from ConnectAfrica, a company providing communication infrastructures to countries in Southern Africa, showed the potential of ICTs. ConnectAfrica is looking into ways of how technology can benefit smallholder farmers, starting with wireless internet and ending with satellites. It is possible, for example, to install a sensor in a silo that measures temperature and other indicators important to the farmer. This information could be regularly sent to the farmer via email or via SMS. Energy is an important question to achieve this, however. Access to energy allows for ICTs to work in the first place. Therefore, more efforts both by private and public actors are needed to provide stable energy supply to smallholder farmers.

In general, reality shows that ICTs provide many opportunities for development, summarized CTA Director Michael Hailu, who chaired the discussions. How to scale them and how to provide them is another question, he added. A question that needs further research and further efforts, Hailu stressed.

Watch a video interview with Mr Hailu here.

http://vimeo.com/21712663

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Participants’ expectations of the Forum

Most participants of the Rural Forum have arrived yesterday and are eager to start into three days of plenaries, discussions and workshops. We talked to some of them and learned what they expect of the Forum in Palencia.

Dorothy Okello, for example, is the coordinator of the Women in Uganda Network (WOUGNET) and is excited to learn more about the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and its potential in the marketing of WOUGNET. “ICTs help our farmers to improve their productivity,” she says. “By sharing information through email or other means of communication, we try to become more sustainable as a whole.” Watch a short video interview with her below.

http://vimeo.com/21698800

T.K. Omana has traveled to Palencia from Kalpetta in India. She hopes that the Forum will not only give her new insights into technologies and best practices, but also give her the opportunity to network with participants from all over the world. “Everybody comes from a different background and has a different experience,” she stressed. “It will be interesting to learn more about their different approaches.” See a short video interview of her in following.

http://vimeo.com/21699766

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