• Food security
• Food aid
  • Food aid
  • Conflict-related food aid
  • Food in emergencies
• Food policy
• Food security and gender
  • Food security and gender
  • Gender, agriculture and food security
  • Gender , access and control of food in the household
  • Gender and nutrition
  • Tools and methodologies
• Food statistics, situation reports and crop forecasts
• Households, livelihoods, and assets
  • Households, livelihoods, and assets
  • Agricultural assets
  • Household responses
  • Migration
  • Natural resource management
• IPRs and food security
• Right to food
• Social protection and safety nets
  • Social protection and safety nets
  • Food programmes
  • Resource transfers
• Urban issues
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  • Websites
  • Food aid
  • Gender and food security
  • Households, livelihoods, and assets
  • Social protection and safety nets
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• Livelihoods and food security

Food security

Despite the progress in food production and availability, nutrition levels of women and children in South Asia remain exceptionally low. This paper explores various aspects of the relationship between women and food security in the region that may contribute to this discrepancy. It finds that embedded social values negatively impact on women’s economic contribution to society, her nutrition and her health status, and by extension, that of her family and society at large. Adequate nutrition outcomes cannot be assured without breaking down the complexities of the gender-food security link. Women’s acceptance of their status as inferior members of the family and society underlie the deep inequity in access to nutrition therefore the key to resolving the hunger challenge in South Asia is gender empowerment.

Issues requiring urgent focus are highlighted in the paper. These include:

• women’s lacking entitlement to productive resources, such as land and livestock, that remain a major obstacle in the productivity of female farmers and consequently the maintenance and sustainability of cultivable land
• gender wage disparities, sharpest in the least developed agricultural areas
• the rising proportion of female-headed households below the poverty line, and the challenges this poses to ensuring household food security
• women’s access to and control over household income for the improvement of household food and nutrition levels
• the role of education, as it is the single most important factor affecting individual food and nutrition security.

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