Rural women across globe ask for land to end hunger
One World
Oct 15, 2008
15 October, New Delhi: Rural women across the globe joined today to demand agricultural land as the most tangible means to addressing poverty and hunger to mark the World Rural Women's Day today, ahead of the World Food Day as a part of ActionAid's HungerFREE campaign.
Everjoice Win, ActionAid's Head of Women's Rights, said:
"There is no quick fix to ending hunger, but there is a long-term solution. In poor countries, it is women who grow most of the food and feed their families. But their rights to access and control the means to do so are not provided and in some cases are violated outright. States can be more food secure by implementing and upholding new laws that give women more secure rights to own, or access land in their own right as citizens."
"The world's leaders failing to take action to end the crisis at recent United Nations and World Bank summits, women enaged in agriculture are taking action by demand and claiming land rights to fight hunger and poverty," she adds.
In the village of Nuaput, in Koraput district of Orissa women from tribal community have made significant gains by evoking right to land titles to address issue of independent livelihood and food security. Supported by ActionAid through local organisation SPREAD, villagers here applied for joint pattas (land titles) so that both husband and wife have a legal claim on the land they use.
Kamala Matan explains the significance:
"This patta gives us strength. We don't fear the men now - they can't threaten us with throwing us out (of the home) now," she says, "Other people can learn from us... When we get the patta we can claim land and after us, our children will inherit."
Initially, she explains the men were reluctant, but the women persisted:
"We convinced the men to sign the patta application in joint names. At the women's group, we told our husbands that we also have daughters as well as sons. If in-laws divorce them then they have the same problems as all women. If we all sign the patta application together, this will help them. So they signed."
In India the need for action is clear. Some 70% of the female workforce is engaged in agriculture yet only 10% of women farmers own land. At the same time one in four Indians go to bed hungry. India's Land Reform Act passed in 1954 shortly after independence, addresses land rights for dalits and other marginalised groups. But this makes scant mention of women and anyway has not been implemented.
Even before the current crisis women made up 60% of the world's chronically hungry people. Discrimination against women within the household means that they are often the last to eat and have the least nutritious food. In times of crisis, women will forego food to ensure that others in the household can eat.
Women's lack of access to land underpins their hunger. Without secure tenure it is difficult for women to borrow small amounts of money to buy seeds and other essential inputs such as fertilizer. Women are also often excluded from training. In many cases women have their rights to use land taken away from them at divorce or when they are widowed.
In the Shivpuri district of Madhya Pradesh, 35-year-old Rambati an emerging leader in the poverty-stricken Sahariya community (a primitive tribal group in which men typically marry twice) shares her concerns:
"If the government doesn't give ownership of land to women, what will happen to the first wife if the husband marries again or deserts the wife ? How will she manage her and her children's lives?"
ActionAid's HungerFREE campaign is calling for governments, like that of India and other developing countries, to review their national laws related to women's land and property rights and collective land ownership, accompanied by affirmative action to implement policies and practices that will help women tackle poverty and hunger.