This paper connects three different areas of inquiry – climate change, gender and nutrition – by exploring whether women’s empowerment in agricultural production leads to increased diversification in the use of farmland. Specifically, the authors use a series of econometric techniques to evaluate whether there is sufficient evidence to claim that higher levels of empowerment lead to greater diversity in the allocation of farmland to agricultural crops. The results reveal that indeed some aspects of women empowerment, but not all, lead to a more diversified use of farmland and to a transition for cereal production to other uses like vegetables and fruits. These findings provide some possible pathways for gender-sensitive interventions that promote crop diversity as a risk management tool and as a way to improve the availability of nutritious crops.
Authors: Alessandro De Pinto, Greg Seymour, Elizabeth Bryan and Prapti Bhandari
Source: IFPRI
