On International Women’s Day (Tuesday 8th March), women farmers and their representatives from all over the world have drawn attention to the continuing inequality in the farming sector.

Initially called International Working Women’s Day, the International Day has been celebrated on 8th March since the early 1900s; it was first held by the Socialist Party of America in 1909.

Worldwide, though women take on a huge amount of farm work, they are still under represented as farm owners. The aim of this year’s International Day is to push for equal representation for women by 2030 under the banner ‘Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality.’

According to Food Tank - a US-based sustainable agriculture think tank - Women farmers' yields can be 20–30 percent lower than men’s, due to a lack of access to banking, financial services and other inputs. Last Autumn, Food Tank, CARE International and CGIAR agricultural research network released a report on this inequality, and its impacts on climate change adaptation work.

In Whitehall, environment secretary Liz Truss will be joined by prominent women farmers to discuss issues including the barriers women continue to face when starting and building a career in the industry. In Britain, women make up 28 percent of the agricultural workforce, but only represent around ten percent of those running farms.

On Tuesday, Truss said, “With agriculture often perceived as a male-dominated industry, it’s important we recognise the leading role women are playing. Now I want to see the industry build on this and more women taking on jobs in farming.”

NGOs call for action on hazards faced by women

In Europe, the coalition Women in Europe for a Common Future (WECF) has produced a report, outlining the hazards women workers face through contact with chemicals. The group points out that, in modern societies, women and men are all continually exposed to hazardous chemicals in their every day lives, but women are often differently exposed due to their (entrenched) gender roles and because of biological susceptibilities and health impacts.

WECF - a network of civil society organisations working for a healthy environment and gender-just society in over 50 countries - published its ‘Women and Chemicals’ report to coincide with  the International Day. the report looks at the effects of pesticides and endocrine disrupting chemicals on the health of women workers.

It was developed with support and expertise from the UN and various scientific institutes.
 
Corinne Lepage, Former French environment minister and chair of the WECF Board of Trustees, commented on the report’s release, “I am worried especially about hormone disrupting chemicals. Although we know about the threat to environment and human health, the EU Commission so far has not been able to regulate EDCs. In particular women and men who are planning to have children, need to be better protected from and informed about EDCs. This report is a good starting point to show the linkage between chemical exposure of women and increasing rates of diseases and that political action is needed now.”
 
Ahead of Tuesday’s celebrations and commitments, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) outlined its work to improve equality, pointing out that women are more likely to go hungry than men, despite the fact that worldwide, women do most agricultural and food preparation work. WFP said, “Through paid and unpaid work, women make as significant a contribution to rural economies as men, and we believe that they are central to combating and preventing world hunger.”

The UN organisation said it is working to give women equal access to resources and opportunities, and an equal say in the decisions that shape their world. This includes work on access to education, putting women in charge of food distribution, and improving women’s access to tools, seeds and farming inputs; WFP said its pilot programmes in these areas had seen more women take up positions of leadership.

In addition to UN events to mark International Women’s Day, peasant farmers’ movement La Via Campesina called for “Action against capitalist violence all over the world.” The organisation called for demonstrations and organising by local groups - a network of which exist across the world - and mourned the death of Berta Cáceres, a peasant leader in Honduras who was recently assassinated. The group is demanding an end to “the historical oppression and violation of the basic rights of women peasants, farmers, and farmworkers, landless women, indigenous women and black women” and promoting work towards “building a just society, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.”