Agrarian Trust

Women Farmers Need More Rights

An article by Eleanor Goldberg in the Huffington Post addresses the rights of women farmers across the globe.

Across the globe, 805 million people are struggling with hunger. But that figure could be significantly reduced if female farmers just had the same rights as their male counterparts.

Now that more men in rural areas are taking jobs in cities, about half of all farmers are women who produce more than half the world’s food, according to World Watch.Yet, despite their increasing roles, women farmers are often deprived of such basic rights as land ownership, which keeps them from producing to their full potential.

The situation is so uneven, in fact, that if male and female farmers had equal access to resources, food output would increase to a point that it could pull 100 to 150 million people out of hunger, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO) concluded in a report released in 2011.