An all-women contingent protested in front of the Department of Agriculture in Quezon City today as part of Asia-wide demonstrations on the International Day of Rural Women. The demonstrations, led by the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD), were also held in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Indonesia in the wake of a monsoon season that has devastated South and Southeast Asia. Protesters called for the recognition of women as food producers in policies and programs for food systems, equal access to land, water, seeds, and resources, and the protection of women and their communities from climate impacts.
Nearly one in four women worldwide will be moderately to severely food insecure by 2030, and this will only worsen as the climate crisis intensifies. In a scenario where global temperature rise exceeds the current path, 240 million more women and girls will go hungry, compared to 131 million more men and boys.
“The food and climate crises are not gender-neutral. Rural women in the Global South suffer disproportionately from climate change, and they are usually the first to go hungry in a crisis. Research has shown that rural women eat last and least within their own households, while being responsible for securing food, water, and fuel for their families,” says Flora Asiddao-Santos, president of Oriang Women’s Movement.
Women and girls in the Global South are disproportionately responsible for water collection, with UNICEF estimating that women and girls spend 200 million hours every day collecting water. As the climate crisis increases the frequency of droughts, women are traveling farther to find water, with women in India walking as far as 10 kilometers.
Protesters called on their governments to ensure the right to food for all peoples across Asia, including the people of Gaza, where the right to food has been fundamentally eroded over the past 24 months. The right to food is a legally binding entitlement under international law that requires food to be available, accessible, adequate, and sustainable.
“In the Philippines, 51 million people struggle to access adequate, safe, and nutritious food,” says Oyette Zacate of Oriang. “Across Asia, dominant food systems are profit-driven and focused on the production of commodities for export, at the expense of peoples’ needs. National policies must prioritize the production of staple food for domestic consumption over the demands of the global market. As the climate crisis hits the agricultural sector and depletes our staple food supply, national governments must put the needs of its people over profit.”
Despite contributing little to global emissions, small farmers and fishers are most affected by escalating climate impacts. Small-scale food producers worldwide spend $368 billion of their own money each year to adapt to climate change.
“Filipino farmers and fishers are the poorest sector in the nation. They cannot and should not shoulder the cost of climate adaptation. Our food systems must be transformed and adapted, and under the UN Climate Convention, rich governments must fund this transformation with public, grants-based climate finance,” says climate activist and APMDD coordinator Lidy Nacpil. “Financing the transformation of our food systems is the legal and ethical obligation of rich governments, but these governments continuously fail to provide adequate financing. The governments of the Global North must cover the costs of climate action in the Global South, and the transformation of our food systems is no exception.”
Tomorrow, World Food Day also marks the 80th anniversary of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has been criticized for enabling the destruction of food systems throughout Asia. Since the 1960s, the FAO has promoted industrial agriculture, which produces a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, as a solution to the “low-yielding” indigenous varieties and unmechanized agricultural systems of the Global South.
According to Angelica Rayel of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice: “As the FAO celebrates 80 years, we must remember that industrial agriculture has not eliminated hunger in the Global South, but it has destroyed indigenous food systems, degraded land and water resources, displaced small-scale farmers, and produced massive greenhouse gas emissions that have brought us to the brink of ecological collapse.”
Photos by Guia Mistades and Jimmy A Domingo
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