Transcript of The Right to Food, Gender Equality and Economic Policy

the reason it's important to think about the right to food gender equality and macroeconomic policy together is because these three issues intersect in so many ways so i am olivia de shuter i'm the un special reporter on rite of food and my role consists in providing governments with recommendations as to how to improve the right to food at all levels i truly believe that gender empowerment and and women's rights are an absolute key part of the solutions that we're looking for to ensure better protections right to food and my role is really to collect the best evidence that can show this and to provide governments with studies data that can show them that it it is important to invest in women well links are obvious women produce close to half of the world's food but they're often the first to go hungry in any food crisis and even on a daily basis if you look at who's going hungry in the world today uh 60 of the the people who are getting less than 1800 calories a day are women or girls so the hunger is not an innocent occurrence it has a right in its heart it's an incredibly gendered phenomenon the issue of food rights is is related to the fact that what every single big human being needs is to be able to meet their material needs before they meet their goals of self-actualization and self-expression so food rights is absolutely fundamental to them i think in looking at the rocky food and women and access to food it is essential to remember and in this sense it is essential to invest in those policies the institutional frameworks that are the foundations of what we call amazing environment there is no reason globally for there to be anyone who is malnourished and without food it seems that the international level globally we have one-size-fits-all but that is not it we realized that the developed countries kicked the ladder after they have attained a certain level of development which the poor ones have not been able to attain the policy space around the right to food has been really dominated by uh uh dominated by men um the whole agricultural policy discourse has been dominated by men um trade policy discussions around trade policy around agricultural policy this is really a male-dominated space and there's been very little room for women's rights perspectives on these issues the government's role to guarantee rights for women or for for citizens for that matter has been relegated to or has been subjugated by the higher level economic discourse and market oriented programs and policies and my hope is that governments can start to be influenced much more seriously to think more importantly about their citizens than about the profits and the market and the coverage and that the focus and the attention the priorities of governments can be shifted so that the rights of the merchandise the poor and especially the women can be prioritized again one of the things that's happened with the financial crisis is that speculators have moved from the real estate arena to trying to find new places for them to invest money that will give them profits and one of the main places that they've found is speculating on food and by speculating on food the price of food goes up the volatility of the prices go up and down and because of that people's access to food is reduced and when the price of food goes up it's it's women who bear a huge amount of the brunt of one not being able to buy the food at the right prices or having to increase the amount of unpaid work they do to either grow their own food or buy food that is not as quick to cook or forego food in because the prices are too high even though social safety nets exist usually women are least targeted by these initiatives and are least likely to benefit from them in times of food crisis economies are gendered institutions and economic policy always has a gender content the right to food is related entirely to macroeconomic policy and economic policy more generally and if you only look at the right to food and not look at the macroeconomic issues of financialization of food but if you only look at those two components you miss a huge part of the gender implications of these kind of macroeconomic policy issues that often don't get talked about in terms of gender equality there has been an extraordinary increase in research that we call feminist economics but feminist insofar as it's not only concerned with gender equality in women but also with economic systems that are equitable that create the conditions for everybody to provide for their families and themselves with dignity some of the key issues that i think came out of this meeting that were particularly interesting really involved seeing food policy and food prices and issues around those in a whole new light seeing them as an integral part of broader discussions of economic policy and human rights discussion not as kind of a specialized marginal topic but as a centerpiece for thinking about formulating economic policies in order to realize human rights we hope that these meetings will eventually form a larger group of people who are thinking about these issues in their own countries as well as come together to influence international policy so both at the national and and regional and international levels so that a human rights perspective on economic policy that is from a feminist perspective gets foregrounded because often they get divided into their own silos and what we're trying to do is to break those silos to bring these issues together in one place you