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Women Farmers Feed the World
In West Africa, women’s resistance to the new Green Revolution shows that the question of agricultural sustainability is also a question of equality.
It's harvest season in Burkina Faso. Throughout the West African nation's rural regions, small farmers—mostly women—are harvesting millet, rice, and sorghum to feed large families. After a full day gathering grains, each wife will continue the work, tending her own small garden to feed her children.
The harvest marks the end of the "lean season," the dangerous months after the year's food supply has dwindled and the next crops have not yet arrived—a time that leaves many women foraging for their children.
West Africa—and much of the rest of the world—is facing a food crisis. Nearly one billion people are hungry, according to the World Hunger Education Service, and farmers throughout the Global South are experiencing escalating anxiety over the appropriation and control of land, seeds, and farming techniques by foreign governments and corporations—manifested in "land-grabbing," seed monopolization, genetic modification, and the imposition of high-tech, water-, chemical-, and energy-intensive monocrops.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is a Gates Foundation-funded initiative based in Nairobi and spearheaded by Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the U.N. It's a multimillion-dollar project that seeks to increase food production in Africa by implementing vigorous Western-style agricultural techniques, promising high-yield results for food-insecure populations.
According to the Gates Foundation and other supporters, it's an African-led endeavor, modeled on the previous Green Revolutions of Latin America and the Indian sub-continent but placed in the hands of Africans. It sounds like a good idea.
But a growing movement of local farmers—largely led by women—argue that the surest path to food security is securing food sovereignty. It's a concept that was put forward in the early 90's by Via Campesina, an international alliance of peasant, indigenous, and women's organizations that advocates for communities' control over how food is produced, and who gets to eat it.
The original Green Revolution, beginning in the 1940's, pushed widespread use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and equipment whose expense was out of reach for most peasant farmers. Critics point out that years of water-intensive farming has depleted water tables, while increased use of chemicals has severely damaged soil in some areas. And while new seeds and tools may bring higher production in the short term, many Africans fear the consolidated control corporations exercise over the food supply, the precarious dependence on large amounts of water and energy inputs, and the environmental toll such methods may eventually take.
The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), sponsored by the U.N. and published in 2009, found that the adoption of agrochemicals and monocropping, among other technologies, have harmed more than the land. They've also hurt local communities and economies, benefiting transnational corporations with "near-total control" of food production.
Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, lead author of the IAASTD report, emphasizes instead the importance of agroecological farming, an approach that supports localized farming and draws on traditional agricultural knowledge. It not only considers productivity, sustainability, and resilience, but also equity.
This is good news for women. Women, according to Ishii-Eiteman, make up a huge percentage of the world's small food producers (who, she says, together grow about 70 percent of the food supply). They do the most to get food on the table, and they're usually the last to eat it.
Fatou Batta works with Groundswell International, an organization that partners with small-farmer groups across the world, including in Burkina Faso. She's helping to lead a broad grassroots alliance that shows that small farmers‚ and especially women, can feed the world if we give them the resources to control their food, and the right to eat it too.
This article was originally written by Martin Wright and published by Yes! Magazine.
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