Old habits die hard: The need for feminist rethinking in global food and agricultural policies

Abstract

<p>A number of global initiatives designed in recent years address global food security and aim to reduce the vulnerability of small-scale and peasant farmers in the face of expanded transnational investment in large-scale agriculture and land acquisition. While there have been efforts to consider women within such initiatives, global governance institutions often overlook the complex gendered dimensions of food systems alongside agricultural land and labour markets. Although institutions emphasize the need for “women’s empowerment”, few policy recommendations have considered its practical application. Indeed, many governance initiatives that address food security or promote land security tend to depoliticize inequalities, which shows the importance of feminist food studies from the perspective of global food and land policy. Integrating a feminist food studies lens to the global governance of food and agriculture allows us to explore the complexities of gendered relations in agricultural practices. A more complete understanding of everyday material, socio-cultural and corporeal experiences within agricultural practices provides a greater understanding of the mechanisms by which gender relations structure food production, land ownership, resource access and governance processes. By using a feminist food studies lens we see a more complete picture of the realities of local resource management and the potential implications for global policymakers such as the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Committee for World Food Security (CFS). Through this framework, I illustrate how feminist analyses challenge conventional approaches to gender in global policymaking related to food and agricultural production. </p>

Food activism and negotiating the gendered dynamics of public cultures of care

“…Within the first few months of her work with the PCFA, Teresa noticed public care work being performed mostly by women activists. The prevalence of women in urban agriculture contexts has been observed in prior research (Allen & Sachs, 2007;Martin, 2019;Trauger et al, 2017), despite the fact that women continue to be marginalized in farming more generally (Collins, 2018;Trevilla-Espinal et al, 2021;Portman, 2018;Shisler & Sbicca, 2019). We suggest here that the chronic failure of neoliberal capitalism to bring chemical-free, fresh, and healthy foods to low-income neighborhoods (Agyeman & McEntee, 2014) has resulted in the interpellation of a new, public form of food procurement that relies largely on gendered subjects to perform the majority of its unpaid work.…”

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

“…While CEDAW and other human rights institutions are gradually moving towards a more nuanced and reflexive approach to the rights of rural women, their proposed solutions to gender inequalities within food and agricultural systems still tend to fall back on standardized, top down technical interventions that focus on the empowerment of individual women through family law reform, temporary special measures including public sector employment quotas, private land titling, and facilitated access to credit, markets and education (Collins 2018;CSM 2018;Bourke Martignoni 2019). Although international human rights bodies emphasize the importance of women's full participation in political, economic and social institutions in Cambodia and Ghana, the discussion tends to be limited to the ways in which women can be inserted into existing, unequal structures without examining the need for more radical, grassroots-led reforms (UN CEDAW 2013, 2015UN CCPR 2016a, 2016b.…”