Page 32 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.81, # 2, 2024, pp. 30-59

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development held in June 2012, known as Rio+20,
also stressed the importance of the empowerment of women in rural areas as key players
for improving agrarian and rural development as well as food and nutritional security
(A/CONF.216/L1., 2009).Moreover, the specific UN organizations for the fight against
poverty and hunger, namely the (FAO, 2009), the (IFAD, 2009) and the (WFP, 2009),
undertake initiatives which specifically highlight the important role of rural women in
reducing hunger and poverty. Examples of such measures are the ‘Sourcebook on
Gender in Agriculture’ (World Bank, 2009) published by the World Bank, FAO and
IFAD along with the FAO report on ‘The State of Food and Agriculture, 2010-2011’,
focusing on the need to close the gender gap for the benefit of development and
underlining that achieving gender equality and empowering women is not only the right
thing to do but also crucial for agricultural development and food security.

Hunger is persistently on the rise with food crisis hurting the poor all over the world,
hitting the landless and women the hardest. As such, the vast majority of urban and
rural households in the developing world rely on food purchases for most of their food
and stand to lose from high food prices. The sharpest rise came in 2007 with an
increase of 75 million hungry since the period of 2003 to 2005. Asia-Pacific and sub-
Saharan Africa accounted for 750 million of the hungry people in the world from 2003
to 2005. As a result of the global food crisis, an additional 41 million people in Asia-
Pacific and another 24 million in sub-Saharan Africa have been plunged into hunger
(FAO, 2009). But no continent or country has been spared; even in the United States
for example, more than 38 million people were struggling to put food on the table as
of 2006 (Learner, 2006). In this light, development agencies often focus on then
availability of food through increased food production and laid emphasis on
improving yields and high-potential productive areas to achieve and maintain
sufficient food production to feed the growing world population. Such have however
been regarded as misguided agricultural and trade policies which contributed to the
food crisis, because of the failure to recognise women’s crucial roles in agricultural
production and household food security.

The case of sub-Saharan Africa underscores this claim as women grow up 80 to 90% of
the continents’ food (UNDP, 2013). The food crisis in this region has attracted attention
to the recognition that human resources relating to issue of gender generally reflect an
under-resourced subsistence sector that is female dominated (World Bank, 2009). Here,
women and men farm separate plots, and women farmers have traditionally been
responsible for food production. Estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nation (FAO), show that women account for more than half of the labour
required to produce the food consumed in the developing world (FAO, 2009).

32