FAO says gender equality will eliminate hunger for 45 million people

Gender equality can lead to food insecurity 45 million people, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

The State of Women in Agriculture and Food Systems report indicates that with this closure in gender gap in agriculture, global gross domestic product (GDP) will also increase by 1%.

The study, the first by FAO in this area since 2010, analyzes the situation of women in the agri-food sector worldwide and highlights the severe social and economic inequalities they face.

Thus, global agricultural production is negatively affected by inequality this affects women in different ways and creates a vicious cycle that negatively affects the entire society, impoverishing it and slowing down its progress.

“There is a negative gender gap of 24% in land productivity on farms of the same size run by women compared to farms run by men,” FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero told EFE.

While equality would help increase global GDP and reduce the 828 million food insecure people, the gap between men and women in this situation widened from 1.7 percentage points in 2019 to 4.3 percentage points in 2021 .

The difficulties that women Access to education, land ownership, agricultural machinery and other essential tools for rural harvesting in many countries means that the bulk of the labor force in the food chain sees their opportunities for development and production as limited.

“Improving women’s rights to own agricultural land has a positive impact on empowerment, investment, natural resource management, access to services and institutions, sustainability and food security, and poverty reduction.” .

However, the gender gap in access to knowledge and agricultural technology, irrigated farming and livestock production has barely narrowed over the past decade, although FAO has identified improvements in the use of financial services and mobile phones.

The economist says the meager progress on equality masks “a lack of policies on a sufficient scale to address inequalities and eliminate social norms that discriminate against women.”

(According to the EFE agency).