"Women - key to food security" FAO publication

[Knowledge base]

FAO AT WORK
2010-2011

"Many of the world’s poorest countries and regions will see their populations double in the years from 2000 to 2050, with Africa, for example, climbing from 820 million to two billion. Men and women farmers in Africa and other developing nations will therefore need to produce more than twice as much food. This life-and-death challenge is made even more daunting by a number of constraints, including climate change with increasing temperatures, droughts and floods that displace farmers and destroy livelihoods...

FAO’s research shows that women farmers are 20-30 percent less productive than men, but not because they manage their farms less well, or work less hard. The main reason for the gap between men’s and women’s performance is that the former have access to resources seldom available to female farmers – including land, financing and technology, among other things. In addition, women do not share fairly in benefits such as training, information and knowledge"

 Source: fao.org (PDF)

 URL: http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/am719e/am719e00.pdf