In view of the 2012 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s thematic focus on rural women’s empowerment, the gender team at the Development Centre has launched an issues paper, “Do discriminatory social institutions matter for food security?”.

Increasingly, economists are examining how the dynamics within households affect the outcomes of household decisions. This paper uses data from the 1991/92 and the 1998/99 Ghana Living Standards Surveys to examine how the share of assets owned by women in Ghanaian households affects household expenditure patterns. In this analysis, assets include business assets, savings, and farmland. The results indicate that women’s share of assets do have an impact on household budget shares for a number of expenditure categories in each time period.

In the present report, submitted to the Human Rights Council in accordance with Council resolution 13/4, the Special Rapporteur on the right to food discusses the threats to women's right to food, identifying the areas that demand the most urgent attention. The report 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.

This paper starts by reflecting on the concept and measurement of women’s empowerment and then reviews some of the structural interventions that aim to influence underlying gender norms in society and eradicate gender discrimination. It then proceeds to review the evidence of the impact of three types of interventions—cash transfer programs, agricultural interventions, and microfinance programs—on women’s empowerment, nutrition, or both.

We use data from the 2007 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey to examine the relationship between women’s status and nutrition in Bangladesh using indicators of empowerment such as mobility, decisionmaking power, and attitudes toward verbal and physical abuse. We also examine the role of variables reflecting maternal education and height, in relation to child nutrition. All models control for age and sex of the child, household wealth, and region.

Women play important roles as producers of food, managers of natural resources, income earners, and caretakers of household food and nutrition security. Giving women the same access to physical and human resources as men could increase agricultural productivity, just as increases in women’s education and improvements in women’s status over the past quarter century have contributed to more than half of the reduction in the rate of child malnutrition.

Climate change is a significant and growing threat to food security—already affecting vulnerable populations in many developing countries, and expected to affect ever more people in more places, unless action is taken beginning today. Current scenarios for business-as-usual farming under climate change project growing food security challenges by 2050. Worst hit will be underdeveloped regions of the world where food insecurity is already a problem and populations are vulnerable to shocks (Rosegrant et al. 2014).

The surge in food prices in the last years, following a century of decline, has been the most marked of the past century in its magnitude, duration and the number of commodity groups whose prices have increased. The ensuing crisis has resulted in a 50–200% increase in selected commodity prices, driven 110 million people into poverty and added 44 million more to the undernourished.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) addresses the challenge of meeting the growing demand for food, fibre and fuel, despite the changing climate and fewer opportunities for agricultural expansion on additional lands. CSA focuses on contributing to economic development, poverty reduction and food security; maintaining and enhancing the productivity and resilience of natural and agricultural ecosystem functions, thus building natural capital; and reducing trade-offs involved in meeting these goals.

Agriculture is considered to be “climate-smart” when it contributes to increasing food security, adaptation and mitigation in a sustainable way. This new concept now dominates current discussions in agricultural development because of its capacity to unite the agendas of the agriculture, development and climate change communities under one brand.

Considering the figures given in the foreword and found in the literature about the on-going and increasing degradation of land and land-based ecosystems and their productivity, this indicates a pressing need to re-design current policies and clearly defined guidance for future action for sustainable land management.

Taking the Jiuquan City, Guansu Provice, China as an example, according to the 1997-2007 Gansu Statistical Yearbook, Jiuquan Statistical Yearbook, the Second National Land Investigation in Jiuquan City and other relevant statistical data, models of minimum cultivated area per capita and pressure index of cultivated land are used based on food security.