Anantpur, India / BARIND TRACT, Bangladesh, February 25, 2012 (IPS) - Agriculture today provides a livelihood for about 1.3 billion smallholders and landless workers, of whom nearly half - about 560 million - are women.
The vast majority of these women live in a cliff, where small changes in their environment can result in chronic hunger and extreme poverty.
Given the unprecedented scale of climate change, which has caused massive food insecurity this year, rural women are not only extremely vulnerable, but unfortunately ignored by governments and policy makers to define top-down strategies to eradicate hunger and poverty.
In response, the United Nations session 56 of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), scheduled to run from 27 February to 9 March at UN headquarters in New York, appears empowerment rural women as one of its priority issues for the year.
"If rural women had the same access to productive resources, agricultural production could reduce the number of chronically hungry people between 100 and 150 million," according to a press release issued Thursday by UN Women.
CSW this year promises to examine the "empowerment of rural women and their role in the eradication of poverty and hunger, sustainable development and current challenges (and) agree on the urgent measures necessary to make a real difference the lives of millions of rural women. "
But while the UN is just beginning its session on rural women, women farmers worldwide are already deeply in the struggle to secure their environment from the impacts of climate change destablising using their traditional role community leaders and ingenious farmers to sow seeds of hope for their future.
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