World Food Day: Govts, Donors Failing Women Farmers– Oxfam

Women farmers are not getting the resources they need to be able to feed their families and communities as well as adapt to climate change, Oxfam said its analysis of policies and public investments in six countries has shown.

This shortfall, the international humanitarian agency said, “exposes a sham in the rhetoric and commitments by countries and donors” to strengthen the agricultural sector and lend support to women farmers.

Oxfam made this declaration in a statement issued over the weekend as part of events commemorating the 2017 World Food Day, describing the year as one of “rising hunger fuelled by conflicts and super charged weather events.”

Oxfam said findings showed that agricultural policies and public investments in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania created the twin problems of little money going to support for small-scale farmers against climate change and an uncertainty surrounding the amount reaching women farmers.

The body said the countries investigated are all struggling to get enough climate adaptation funding with one of such, Pakistan, investing 26 percent of the $1.17 billion climate finance it received in 2014 to adaptation.

“Worse still, as of this May, Nigeria has received only $15 million for adaptation—a sliver of what others have had,” it lamented. “As of last year, multilateral adaptation funding for small-scale farmers totaled just $345 million.” Oxfam said the amount was far short of the many billions that estimates show developing countries will need to fight climate change.

“Climate change is not some far-off threat, it’s here now and putting lives in danger,” said the Head of Oxfam’s GROW campaign, Rashmi Mistry. “Governments are breaking their promises to give more resources to farmers. Women on the front lines of climate change can’t continue to struggle on while waiting for money to trickle down to them. Investing directly in women farmers not only helps them and their families, it bolsters the food security for entire communities.”

Oxfam, therefore, called on donor governments to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and step up funding aimed at helping communities adapt to climate change, as it also urged the developing countries to increase funding specifically for women farmers.  African countries, it also noted, must honor the Maputo Declaration that commits 10 per cent of all government spending to agriculture.

It said such commitments would offer huge benefits but “discriminatory attitudes and policies mean women farmers produce about 20 to 30 percent less than men” and that closing the gap would lift millions out of hunger and poverty.

The statement said further that findings also showed that governments “do almost nothing to make sure women farmers benefit from these insufficient amounts of climate and agriculture funding” as climate adaptation policies only “encourage” Nigerian women to participate in initiatives but go no further.

“We assume our governments are also worried about worsening global hunger and the inequality and poverty that drives it. But the kind of mealy-mouthed, underfunded policies that Oxfam has investigated will only make people begin to seriously doubt it,” said Mistry.

In Nigeria, volatility of prices, weather/climate change, conflict have made access to food particularly harmful for vulnerable people and this has led to hunger and malnutrition, noted Head of Influencing and Public Engagement, Oxfam in Nigeria, Abdulazeez Musa.

 “You know Nigeria accounts for 15 percent of under-five child mortalities worldwide, and in the Northern part of the country starvation has wiped out this age group entirely,” Musa said as he added that the country has many policies in place that could theoretically support small scale farmers.

He listed the Vision 20:20, the Anchor Borrowers program and the National Agricultural Resilience Framework (NARF) a  s policies are commendable.