Food


Chapter 1 GLOBAL GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK Chapter 4: Water


Energy


female farmers tend to favour aspects such as taste, quality, and the ease of farming herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops. Women (and also children) saved significant time because less weeding (a traditional female responsibility) was required (Gouse et al. 2016).


Chapter 2


Despite intense commercial pressure from GM producers and repeated assurances of the safety of GM food, there are public concerns in most countries about introducing this new technology, especially in regard to long-term health and environmental consequences (Box 2.1.8). These concerns, widely shared by policy- makers, have resulted in heavy regulatory actions: far more countries ban or heavily restrict the importation, production and sale of GM seeds than allow them (Adenle 2011).


Patenting of food seeds, which is integral to the profitability of GM technology, has also raised concerns, including among small farmers (particularly women farmers) who have traditionally been the keepers of the world’s seed diversity. Vandana Shiva, an Indian scientist who is highly critical of GM technology, predicts that the spread of GM agriculture will have destructive effects on both biodiversity and many women’s livelihoods (Shiva 2016a; Shiva 2016b; Shiva 1999). Many agricultural analysts in developing countries view the turn to GM food as primarily driven by developed country needs: the 2006 African Environmental Outlook notes that the high level of investment needed in GM research and its application has constrained African participation, has led to research that primarily focuses on developed country needs and, further, that “terminator technologies” will lead to increased African dependence on industrialized nations and domination of food production by a few multinational companies.


Gender roles in livestock tending: Of the world’s 1 billion livestock tenders, almost two-thirds are rural women. Women generally manage poultry, small dairy animals, and other livestock housed and fed


within a homestead, while men are more prominent in the management of grazing and larger animals such as cattle, horses and camels. The gender balance of ownership, decision-making, livestock management and marketing of livestock products is highly variable. Sometimes women own (generally small) livestock, have control over the use and marketing of products such as eggs, milk and poultry meat, and make management decisions; in other cases men exercise these functions (Staal et al. 2014). When livestock-based production is scaled up, control over decision-making and income often shifts to men. Male-headed households generally have larger livestock holdings (FAO 2016; FAO 2011).


Climate change is affecting gender roles in livestock tending. In the Lake Faguibine area of northern Mali, for example, as the lake has dried up men have migrated as an adaptive strategy. Women who stay behind have perceived this change as increasing their vulnerability since livestock herding, which has become more risky due to climatic changes, has been added to their workloads (Djoudi and Brockhaus 2011). An earlier study in Africa’s Sahel region showed that as men migrated and women took over livestock management, the herd composition shifted away from cattle towards the smaller ruminants, goats and sheep, resulting in less damage to vegetation and lower methane emissions (Turner 1999).


Animal rights in industrializing livestock production: In developed countries an increasing share of the food supply is produced in industrialized, high- intensity agricultural operations. At the same time that animals are being treated as industrial commodities in large-scale food production systems, scientific research is increasingly establishing that non-human animals are sentient beings with complex emotional and cognitive lives (Berkoff 2013). This convergence is reinvigorating the animal rights movement. Although animal rights movements are sometimes criticized as developed world liberalism (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011), in developing countries animal welfare and


Box 2.1.8: Gender differences in perceptions of GM foods 40


Where data exist, women are revealed to be generally more sceptical than men about the safety of GM food. In the United States, a survey in 2015 identified significant racial and gender differences: 47% of men but only 28% of women believed eating GM foods was safe; 41% of white Americans, 32% of Hispanics and 24% of African Americans believed it was safe (Pew Research Centre 2015). In a 2003 global survey, 73% of Canadian women believed “genetic foods are bad” compared to 52% of men; in Japan 82% of women and 69% of men believed GM foods were “bad” (Pew Global Attitudes).


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