Hello,
The most revealing fact about rural women is that they are repositories of knowledge on farming. Land being one of the most important and sometimes the only asset of many rural families, many women have spent `entire lives’ on land. Just like recognized scientists in modern laboratories, rural women are always carrying out experiments on the farm and publishing their findings in the next planting season or at the family kitchen. The difference is that the experiments of women family farm workers implemented in real life conditions. What more could society ask for?
Rural women have not only perfected the art of cultivating a variety of food crops to meet the food and nutritional needs of their families, but also to buffer the various crops from pests and vulnerabilities from changes in weather conditions. Majority of those women will provide details on reasons for inter-planting onions with other vegetables, reasons why once in a while she feeds her chicken on onion leaves, what type of beans do well when inter-cropped with maize, etc. Rural women as farmers and providers of food for families are best placed to tell relations between crops on the farm and the nutritional well-being of family members, the reason they grow a variety of vegetables, a variety of fruit trees on the farm, keep poultry and livestock on the limited land sizes.
One way to support rural women in their farming and nutritional endeavours is to engage them in policy formulation discussions. One other lesson I learned from working and learning with rural land users is how fast it is to generate policy documents based on the reality in the farms. That policy makers save time and other resources when they start with rural level meetings where the `real players’ will provide first-hand information on how current policies, for example on land tenure support or create problems in their farming tasks. For example, policy makers and scholars struggling with the finer details of a land tenure policy that provides access and control to women farmers could be surprised to hear from the women that the traditional land tenure systems were in their own sense private tenure and provided the required tenure security, compared to the current one of title registration which centralizes power over land with few individuals.
Achieving food and nutritional security goes back to the basics: when did `good food’ change from being what families grow on family farms, to what is sold in stores? As I have always asked, what type of information makes a loving mother to sell her harvest of eggs and bananas at the local market to purchase bread and soda for her children? In other words, sustainable food and nutrition asks that `we’ engage not only with policy makers, but with the private sector and their marketing arm.
My key message “ask members of the Open Working Group who have spent one year of their adult life in a rural area to stand up, tall”
Eileen Omosa