FAO Liaison Office with the United Nations in New York

ECOSOC HAS side-event: From Rhetoric to Action: Women and Girls Leading in Humanitarian Food Security Responses

Dervla Cleary, Emergency and Rehabilitation Officer, FAO

24/06/2024

Thank you, Ambassador Carty, and thank you everyone for inviting us.

As you said, FAO has a different experience. When we talk about food, food security and women, we like to remind people that food comes from agriculture and agrifood systems. It tends to be neglected, so thank you IOM for referencing our work, together.

Agrifood systems aren’t just a main source of food and employment for men, but also for women. I think it is important to remember that even in the most extreme crisis, people are producing food, they are processing food, they are selling food and they are sharing food. So, our solutions need to take that into account.

Women have an important role to play in agrifood systems, but as in many other sectors, their role is not always equal to men. They often have marginalized positions, and climate change and disasters are worsening this.

This report that was recently issued, the Unjust Climate Report, shows that extreme weather events affect women and women-headed households far more severely than they are affecting men and male-headed households. So, its not just that girls eat last, and women eat least, they also work harder.

In climate extreme events, women are taking on an additional work burden compared to men, and at the same time, losing more opportunities for income. The evidence shows that heat stress – something that we’ve all been experiencing in the last few days – widens the income gap between female- and male-headed households by USD 37 billion a year, and floods by USD 16 billion a year. That’s a gap that’s already wide and is being driven even wider.

But we can, we can reduce the number of food insecure people. Another FAO report last year, indicated that we could in fact reduce the number of food insecure people by 45 million people if we close the gender gap in agrifood systems.

By focusing on small-scale producers and empowering women, we can increase the resilience of an additional 235 million people. But we need to be far more intentional on how we do this, especially in humanitarian response.

Above all, this requires increasing women’s access to resources, services and capacities. In the short-term response, it means that cash programmes, cash-for-work and food-for-work are properly adapted to women’s experience, women’s labour burden.

We also need to formulate nutrition interventions that equally engage women as proactive leaders in addressing hunger in their households and communities. As Betty said, ‘women know their needs and know their experiences – they can be leaders in the response’.

FAO, for example, we are training women to process Tom Brown – which is not a guy, it is a highly nutritious porridge that is made from local materials in northeast Nigeria! And the women are now managing (I think we have) 14 processing plants set up, which are being managed by the women themselves (they are displaced women). They are then providing that Tom Brown to breastfeeding, pregnant women and young children to address the fairly staggering acute malnutrition rates in their area.

At the same time, we have to recognize that food security is not independent of the world around us, and that there are opportunities within the food security responses to improve women’s empowerment and strengthen their voices.

FAO has successfully used the Dimitra club model to this end. The clubs offer safe spaces for both men and women to discuss sensitive issues and jointly identify solutions. A really interesting example at the moment that we are piloting (with the UK actually) is using the Dimitra clubs to address violence against women at the household level.

In Homs and Rural Damascus, the clubs engage both men and women, couples, local influencers and community leaders who facilitate discussions that focus on community-led responses and solutions to early marriage and GBV. More interestingly, they also include facilitated household sessions, where both the husband and wife speak about the role of the women in the household and her importance to the household – giving them the encouragement and the feeling they can speak not only at home, but also in their wider community.

In other words, when we give women the equal opportunity (that men have) to have a say in their own lives, and the productive resources and services to make their own choices, we have a much better chance to sustainably reduce high levels of acute food insecurity. That includes capacity building in climate-smart agriculture, providing also the relevant inputs and enabling them to take charge of their own futures.

Thank you.