On the occasion of World Food Day, women farmers from different parts of the country, in collaboration with ActionAid Pakistan, held an innovative stunt activity to highlight the impact of increasing food prices on small farmers, particularly women who were denied the right to own land despite the fact that they produced more than 60% of the food but (collectively) owned merely 1-2% of land.
Dressed in different costumes, female farmers performed a play in front of the National Press Club that highlighted the discrimination being meted out to them at local, national and global levels.
Nazeeran Jemali, a woman farmer from Balochistan said, “Women work hard in fields to produced food for all but are not acknowledged as farmers. Female farmers are not rewarded for the labour input and aren’t even given a share in the crop. They are essential to the farming sector but the government has doing nothing to protect their rights. We ask the government to acknowledge women as farmers and allocate land to them to ward off the threat of food security and to earn a dignified livelihood.”
Following the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) announcement that almost 870 million people remained chronically undernourished globally, ActionAid collaborated with media to launch a campaign on women’s right to own land and to promoting sustainable agriculture. Large scale land acquisitions by national and international investors have an adverse impact on food insecurity in poor countries.
Nasir Aziz, Food Rights Officer at ActionAid Pakistan said that women farmers in Pakistan produced more than 60% of the food and comprised the majority of labour force on farms, but their right to land was not acknowledged by the society at large or the government. He said that many institutions and individuals like landlords, bureaucrats, policy makers and parliamentarians did not like the idea of awarding land rights to women and hence women farmers were faced with unending injustice and discrimination.
ActionAid believes that domestic responses should involve strengthening transparent, accountable and accessible national land governance and advocates for securing women’s access to land. Women are often denied rights to access, use or control of land but are the backbone of rural agricultural economies.
Women face barriers in securing their rights to land while national legislation tends not to be implemented or is ignored in practice. For instance, in the case of women farmers from Sindh, access to government allocated land is still a challenge. Despite the important roles women play in promoting food security, women control less than 2% of land globally. Unless women have the right to own and farm land, food insecurity in developing countries will not improve, and women will most likely go hungry.
