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	Women farmers: voiceless pillars of African agriculture by Lindiwe Sibanda Food, Agriculture & Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network South Africa   Mar 2011   As we mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future, it is unfortunate that it is only those women that have a space and platform in academics, science, economics and politics that are celebrated and yet in Africa there is a deserving group of extraordinary women that still have no voice – the African women farmers.   Women farmers are the pillars of African agriculture. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, over two thirds of all women in Africa are employed in the agriculture sector and produce nearly 90 percent of food on the continent. They are responsible for growing, selling, buying and preparing food for their families.   Yet even as the guardians of food security, they are still marginalised in business relations and have minimal control over access to resources such as land, inputs such as improved seeds and fertilizer, credit and technology.   A combination of logistical, cultural, and economic factors, coupled with a lack of gender statistics in the agricultural sector, means that agricultural programs are rarely designed with women’s needs in mind. As a result, African women farmers have no voice in the development of agricultural policies designed to improve their productivity.   Engagement in policy processes is reserved for government and the literate, but literacy levels are as low as 40 percent in some African countries. In Malawi female literacy is at a low of 49.8 percent and in Mozambique it is even lower at 32.7 percent.   Africa has an oral culture and yet we do not talk enough – at local, national or regional levels. The dialogue concerning agricultural issues is happening at the international level, where a few speak for the majority, and not on behalf of the majority.   The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) is working to change this. Recognising the critical role that women farmers play in ensuring household food security, in July 2009 FANRPAN launched Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM), a three year pilot project supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which seeks to strengthen women farmers’ ability to advocate for appropriate agricultural policies and programmes in Malawi and Mozambique through an innovative tool, Theatre for Policy Advocacy (TPA).   Based on results of a FANRPAN commissioned input subsidy study done in Malawi and Mozambique, FANRPAN has developed a theatre script “The Winds of Change”. The play explores challenges rural women farmers face in accessing agricultural inputs, land, credit and extension services among other things.   In 2010, FANRPAN together with its partners took the play to rural communities in Malawi and Mozambique. The play was modified to suit the local context in each village. Following each performance, women, men, young people and local leaders were encouraged to participate in facilitated dialogues. These gave all community members, especially women, a chance to voice the difficulties they face and speak with local leaders and policy makers who represent their interests at national level.   During a dialogue session in Chimphedzu in Malawi, farmer Evelyn Machete asked the local District Agriculture Development Officer (DADO), “We no longer have agricultural extension workers based in our communities, and visiting us everyday, so how do you expect smallholder farmers like us to learn new farming technologies or to learn how to improve our agricultural enterprises?   Women farmers were grateful for the opportunity to engage in discussion with their local policymakers and development organisations. Another farmer, Martha Nyirenda from Sokele Village in Lilongwe District in Malawi, applauded the WARM initiative for having given her a platform to voice her agricultural concerns: “I have always wanted this kind of forum to raise my issues. My eyes have been opened. Now I know who to consult when I have issues concerning farm inputs”.   There is no doubt that the role of women in agriculture has been undervalued over the decades and their voices have not been heard. Renewed focus on agriculture as a means of ending poverty presents an excellent opportunity for a paradigm shift. It is high time African policy makers pay more attention to women - the architects of African rural livelihoods.   (Lindiwe Majele Sibanda is president and CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) based in Pretoria, South Africa, and is a spokesperson for the Farming First coalition) Visit the related web page
	Towards a Green Economy by United Nations Environment Programme   The current economic system, driven by dirty fossil fuels and reckless exploitation of natural resources, is unsustainable and unjust. Investing just two percent of global GDP could kick-start a transition towards a green economy as well as fighting poverty worldwide, says a report by UNEP.   Investing two per cent of global GDP into ten key sectors can kick-start a transition towards a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy a new report launched today says.   The sum, currently amounting to an average of around $1.3 trillion a year and backed by forward-looking national and international policies, would grow the global economy at around the same rate if not higher than those forecast, under current economic models.   But without rising risks, shocks, scarcities and crises increasingly inherent in the existing, resource-depleting, high carbon ‘brown’ economy, says the study.   As such, it comprehensively challenges the myth of a trade off between environmental investments and economic growth and instead points to a current “gross misallocation of capital”.   The report sees a Green Economy as not only relevant to more developed economies but as a key catalyst for growth and poverty eradication in developing ones too, where in some cases close to 90 per cent of the GDP of the poor is linked to nature or natural capital such as forests and freshwaters.   It cites India, where over 80 per cent of the $8 billion National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which underwrites at least 100 days of paid work for rural households, is invested in water conservation, irrigation and land development.   This has generated three billion working days-worth of employment benefiting close to 60 million households.   Two per cent of the combined GDP of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam is currently lost as a result of water-borne diseases due to inadequate sanitation.   Policies that re-direct over a tenth of a per cent of global GDP per year can assist in not only addressing the sanitation challenge but conserve freshwater by reducing water demand by a fifth by 2050 compared to projected trends.   The report has modeled the outcomes of policies that redirect around $1.3 trillion a year into green investments and across ten key sectors—roughly equivalent to two per cent of global GDP. To place this amount in perspective, it is less than one-tenth of the total annual investment in physical capital.   Currently, the world spends between one and two per cent of global GDP on a range of subsidies that often perpetuate unsustainable resources use in areas such as fossil fuels, agriculture, including pesticide subsidies, water and fisheries.   Many of these are contributing to environmental damage and inefficiencies in the global economy, and phasing them down or phasing them out would generate multiple benefits while freeing up resources to finance a Green Economy transition.   Incomes and Employment   In addition to higher growth, an overall transition to a Green Economy would realize per capita incomes higher than under current economic models, while reducing the ecological footprint by nearly 50 per cent in 2050, as compared to business as usual.   The Green Economy report acknowledges that in the short-term, job losses in some sectors—fisheries for example—are inevitable if they are to transition towards sustainability.   Investment, in some cases funded from cuts in harmful subsidies, will be required to re-skill and re-train some sections of the global workforce to ensure a fair and socially acceptable transition.   The report makes the case that over time the number of “new and decent jobs created” in sectors - ranging from renewable energies to more sustainable agriculture - will however offset those lost from the former “brown economy”.   For example, investing about one and a quarter per cent of global GDP each year in energy efficiency and renewable energies could cut global primary energy demand by nine per cent in 2020 and close to 40 per cent by 2050, it says.   Employment levels in the energy sector would be one-fifth higher than under a business as usual scenario as renewable energies take close to 30 per cent of the share of primary global energy demand by mid century.   Savings on capital and fuel costs in power generation would under a Green Economy scenario, be on average $760 billion a year between 2010 and 2050.   The report, Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication, also highlights enormous opportunities for decoupling waste generation from GDP growth, including in recovery and recycling.   The Republic of Korea has, through a policy of Extended Producer Responsibility, enforced regulations on products such as batteries and tyres to packaging like glass and paper, triggering a 14 per cent increase in recycling rates and an economic benefit of $1.6 billion.   Brazil’s recycling already generates returns of $2 billion a year, while avoiding 10 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions; a fully recycling economy there would be worth 0.3 per cent of GDP.   The report, compiled by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), in collaboration with economists and experts worldwide, takes meeting and sustaining the UN’s Millennium Development Goals - ranging from halving the proportion of people in hunger to halving the proportion without access to safe drinking water - as one aim.   Bringing down emissions of greenhouse gases to the much safer levels of 450 parts per million by 2050 is another overarching target.   The findings were presented to environment ministers from over 100 countries at the UNEP Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum.   The report, part of a bigger macro-economic study published online, is aimed at accelerating sustainable development and forms part of UNEP’s contribution to the preparation of the Rio+20 conference scheduled in Brazil next year.   The full report is available online from today and countries are encouraged to submit further Green Economy examples.   Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said: “The world is again on the Road to Rio, but in a world very different to the one of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992.”   “Rio 2012 comes against a backdrop of rapidly diminishing natural resources and accelerating environmental change—from the loss of coral reefs and forests to the rising scarcity of productive land; from the urgent need to feed and fuel economies and the likely impacts of unchecked climate change,” he added.   “The Green Economy as documented and illustrated in UNEP’s report offers a focused and pragmatic assessment of how countries, communities and corporations have begun to make a transition towards a more sustainable pattern of consumption and production. It is rooted in the sustainability principles agreed at Rio in 1992, while recognizing that the fundamental signals driving our economies must evolve in terms of public policy and market responses,” he said.   “We must move beyond the polarities of the past, such as development versus environment, state versus market, and North versus South,” said Mr. Steiner.   “With 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day and with more than two billion people being added to the global population by 2050, it is clear that we must continue to develop and grow our economies. But this development cannot come at the expense of the very life support systems on land, in the oceans or in our atmosphere that sustain our economies, and thus, the lives of each and everyone of us,” he added.   “The Green Economy provides a vital part of the answer of how to keep humanity’s ecological footprint within planetary boundaries. It aims to link the environmental imperatives for changing course to economic and social outcomes—in particular economic development, jobs and equity,” said Mr. Steiner.   Pavan Sukhdev, on secondment from Deutsche Bank and head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative, said: “Governments have a central role in changing laws and policies, and in investing public money in public wealth to make the transition possible. By doing so, they can also unleash the trillions of dollars of private capital in favour of a Green Economy.”   “Misallocation of capital is at the centre of the world’s current dilemmas and there are fast actions that can be taken starting literally today—from phasing down and phasing out the over $600 billion in global fossil fuel subsidizes to re-directing the more than $20 billion subsidies perversely rewarding those involved in unsustainable fisheries,” he said.   “A Green Economy is not about stifling growth and prosperity, it is about reconnecting with what is real wealth; re-investing in rather than just mining natural capital; and, favouring the many over the few. It is also about a global economy that recognizes the intergenerational responsibility of nations to hand over a healthy, functioning and productive planet to the young people of today and those yet to be born,” added Mr. Sukhdev. Visit the related web page
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