A feminist methodology for implementing the right to food in agrarian communities: reflections from Cambodia and Ghana

Abstract

In Cambodia and Ghana, the promotion of women's equal rights to food and land has occurred in parallel with processes of trade liberalization and agricultural commercialization. This article considers how a feminist methodology that foregrounds the right to food and inter-related human rights could identify the inequalities engendered and sustained in rural communities through neo-liberal agricultural development. An explicitly feminist approach to the implementation of the right to food demands that we focus on dynamic, intersectional and contexualized relations of power to go beyond the top-down, apolitical and technical focus of mainstream laws and policies on gender and agriculture.

“Now the Forest Is Over”: Transforming the Commons and Remaking Gender in Cambodia's Uplands

“…We analyse lived experiences of gendered transformations of the commons through the lens of feminist political ecology rather than explicitly framing our approach using the language of human rights, because rights discourse appeared to have little resonance for the majority of rural people who participated in our research. Cambodia's post-conflict Constitution, which was adopted under the auspices of the United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC) in 1993, contains a number of provisions on gender equality in the context of rights to an adequate standard of living, social security, work, land ownership and inheritance (Bourke Martignoni, 2021). In practice, these formal legal guarantees remain contingent upon the gendered, class-based and racialized patronage relationships that determine who is able to assert private ownership and usufruct rights over land and natural resources in the neoliberal economy (Kent, 2016;Brickell, 2020).…”

“…While the 2001 Cambodian Land Law recognizes limited communal land rights through provisions on Indigenous Communal Land Title, in practice, few indigenous communities have successfully upheld their rights to common forest, grazing and water resources against the claims of private corporate investors backed by the government and, in some instances, by multilateral development institutions (Joshi, 2020b). Although some local and transnational civil society groups continue to invoke human rights-based arguments in their advocacy on access to land and natural resources, the authoritarian dimensions of Cambodia's political system means that the use of traditional human rights strategies including litigation, public participation in legislative and policy reforms, open debate in the media and public protests has frequently proven both counterproductive and dangerous for rural people (Bourke Martignoni, 2021).…”