A report on ‘Women’s rights and the right to food’ has been submitted to the Human Rights Council by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter. The report discusses the threats to women’s right to food, identifying the areas that demand the most urgent attention. It examines successively the obstacles women face in access to employment, social protection and the productive resources needed for food production, food processing and value chain development.
‘Sharing power with women is a shortcut to reducing hunger and malnutrition, and is the single most effective step to realizing the right to food,’ said the Special Rapporteur, who also urged governments to adopt transformative food security strategies that address cultural constraints and redistribute roles betweenwomen and men.
The report recommends that States should:
(a) make the investments required to relieve women of the burden of the household choresthey currently shoulder;
(b) recognize the need to accommodate the specific time and mobility constraints on women as a result of their role in the ‘care’ economy, while at the same time redistributing the gender roles by a transformative approach to employment and social protection;
(c) mainstream concern for gender in all laws, policies and programmes, where appropriate, by developing incentives that reward public administrations which make progress in setting and reaching targets in this regard; and
(d) adopt multisector and multi-year strategies that move towards full equality for women, under the supervision of an independent body to monitor progress, relying on gender-disaggregated data in all areas relating to the achievement of food security.
