Gender equality and food security in rural South Asia: A holistic approach to the SDGs (New Security Beat)

New Security Beat (Wilson Center) published an article on food security, land ownership, and gender.  In South Asia, food security and nutrition have not improved significantly despite the region’s economic growth. Importantly, both are deeply influenced by gender relations in the agricultural sector. Enforcing women’s access to land and other productive assets, accounting for rural women’s growing work burdens, as well as targeting childcare, poverty, and equal education are just as essential. Senior Research Fellow Agnes Quisumbing stated that it is important to keep in mind that increasing access to land and other assets does not always translate to economic or social empowerment. Rather, often when you ask a woman to be more involved in agriculture, she ends up spending more time working, and the increase in workload may have not great impacts on her. Policymakers in South Asia need to take a holistic approach to empowering women in agriculture; supporting women on all fronts is critical to ensuring that individual policies are truly effective.