Female farmers in 90 nations face discriminatory land laws

TORONTO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Women in more than 90 countries still lack equal rights to own land, hurting food production and efforts to tackle poverty, Rwanda's former agriculture minister said.


Nations in eastern and southern Africa have considerably improved their laws to grant land ownership rights to female farmers, Agnes Kalibata said.


But many states in North Africa and South Asia continue to treat women as second class citizens when it comes to land ownership, she said.


"In Africa, six out of 10 women depend on the land for their livelihoods," Kalibata told the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of International Women's Day on Tuesday.


"They must have access to the means of production - the land itself. If we are going to have development across the globe, women need equal access to the land."


Up to 30 percent of women have land access in eastern and southern Africa, compared to less than 10 percent in northern and central Africa, she said.


Without formal land titles, women have a harder time feeding and educating their children.


Agricultural productivity also suffers as female farmers are less likely to invest in improving the land without formal ownership, making it harder to feed the 795 million hungry people worldwide.


During her tenure as Rwanda's agriculture minister which ended in 2014, Kalibata helped enact legal changes that give a woman ownership of half the land her family owns. In many other developing countries, land titles are kept in the husband's name.


She also made it easier for widows to inherit family plots when their husbands died.


"Incredible things are going on in Rwanda when it comes to women's land rights," said Rena Singer, spokeswoman for the Washington-based rights group Landesa.


"If women can't inherit land, we see the continuation of inequality between genders. The only way most poor people get resources in their lifetime is to inherit - they don't have the money to purchase land."


Even in countries like Rwanda with good land laws, lax enforcement and patriarchal customs can make it harder for female farmers to control their incomes, Kalibata said.


Governments need to invest in education, so rural women understand they have the right to own valuable land assets, she said, as many remain unaware of new laws granting them access.


Data on women's land ownership is limited, but statistics from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization indicate women control less than a quarter of agricultural land holdings in developing countries.


(Reporting by Chris Arsenault, editing by Alisa Tang. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, and climate change. Visit news.trust.org/)

 

I think that it's extremely sad that we are in the 21st century and women are still discriminated. I wish we would have equality, there is no real reason so that difference is being made.

 

Well, it's predominantly Africa. Enough said.

 

I ain't no racist, don't get me wrong. It's proven that those countries are underdeveloped and need a drastic improvement. It's no surprise they have serious flaws in their legal system. Don't expect much from them.

 

In Africa the rights for women and minorities aren't respected, that is a fact. I wonder how long it will take before that change. In some countries of Asia the same still happens.

 

First and foremost, forget about the Islamic part of Asia and Africa. It would take forever. It's another reality with its own worldview. Reminiscent of the Middle Ages.

 

It's easy to say to forget, but there are people there suffering. Even the non-islamic part has extreme poverty and many times people as individuals are not even respected as such.

 

Reading posts like this always makes sad, and then I wonder 'what can I do to change things?' Sometimes, there are things we can do, like boycott certain companies, products etc, until whoever is responsible eventually gets the message that what they are doing is unacceptable. However, when reading something like this, I feel doubly frustrated simply because there is nothing I can do to make things better, not even in a small way.

 

No, it ain't easy. When it comes to Africa, I never think of it as of something rich. It never was. And, probably, it will never be. No one is interested in getting those countries to the world's top. Especially nowadays.

 

There is a lot of corruption and the leader are filthy rich while the population is staggering poor, but if we think of it the same is happening in all the countries in a different scale.

 

Corruption has always been like cancer.

 

Yeah, but it's sad that a few get filthy rich while other work hard and still live poor, doesn't seem fair or rational.