A lot of people, when they think of a farmer, usually think of a man. But in fact, women farmers play a huge role in producing the world’s food.

Get this: rural women are responsible for half of the world's food production and produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries.

In general, men plough the fields and drive draught animals while women do the major share of sowing, weeding, applying fertilizer and pesticides, harvesting and threshing. Men look after the cash crops, while women tend household gardens.

Women’s work often doesn’t figure in economic statistics, but it is extremely important to family nutrition and health. Since women often use a wide variety of wild plants for food and medicine for their families, they have valuable understanding of local biodiversity.

In many parts of the developing world, especially Africa, the role of women in food production is increasing. War, the AIDS epidemic and pressure to find better-paying work in the city has created a situation where many husbands and fathers are simply not around. In southern Africa, about one-third of households with children are female-headed.

So now that you’ve got some basic information. Why not take our women and agriculture quiz?

Discrimination brings hunger

Discrimination against women begins at a very early age. Girls, especially rural girls, often don’t get the same chance at an education as boys. In South Asia, the level of school attendance by girls is only 60 percent of that of boys. In Africa, it’s more like 68 percent.

Get this: studies have indicated that increasing primary schooling for girls could raise agricultural output by 24 percent. It would also significantly improve household health and nutrition and lower child mortality rates.

Find out more about FAO’s activities in education.

In many countries in the developing world, women farmers often don’t have the right to own land or inherit property. And even when they do have rights on paper, they’re not enforced in practice.

Illiteracy combined with a lack of full legal status means that rural women often cannot get loans to pay for supplies and hired labour, or become members of agricultural cooperatives or other farmers’ support groups.

It also means that women and girls can face extreme poverty after the death of their partners or parents. In some countries, women whose male partners die of AIDS are stripped of their belongings by their spouses’ relatives. This puts them into even greater poverty and makes them vulnerable to sexual exploitation and violence.

Find out more about women and AIDS.

So what’s FAO doing about it?

Because women’s farm work often goes unpaid and their production doesn’t show up in economic data, a lot of people think it doesn’t “count”. So there’s a real lack of information about the contributions women make to food production and the services they need. FAO is helping countries gather more accurate information about the role of women in food production so they can improve their rural development policies.

FAO is also helping governments, agricultural cooperatives and other farmers’ organizations to improve services so that rural women receive the support they need.

FAO also works on the ground to study how different communities protect or fail to protect the rights of women. It has organized international conferences to find ways of making land and property rights fairer for women. It is working with governments and local legal aid centres to raise awareness in rural communities about women's rights and how they can be protected.