Rural women rise for food, land and rights! Protect women who feed the world! End neoliberal food systems!

On International Women’s Day, the Asian Rural Women’s Coalition (ARWC) stands in solidarity with all rural women in the region and across the world against the worsening global food crisis caused by neoliberal agriculture systems.

The global crisis continues to escalate in 2023. As conflicts, climate change and sky-rocketing costs of food and other basic commodities wreak havoc worldwide, we brace for yet another year of unprecedented global food crisis and insecurity.

In crisis-ridden Sri Lanka, landlessness and poverty have worsened. Access to land has become more limited, with only an estimated 16% of private lands owned by women. Because they do not have land to cultivate, women have resorted to working as workers in tea and rubber plantations under slave-like conditions and wages. The situation is so dire that women now have to cook collectively in order to budget their food for entire villages.

Meanwhile, Dalit women in India suffer sicknesses due to malnutrition and hunger. According to Society for Rural Education and Development, 60% of Dalit women in Tamil Nadu are anemic and weak due to hunger and lack of nutritious food. The state’s public distribution program only distributed rice during the height of lockdowns, and has recently stopped even that. Rural women are paid a mere USD 60 for 100-days worth of work under the state’s employment program, so more and more women are being driven to migrate to look for additional income for food.

Among ASEAN countries, the Philippines has the second highest number of people who cannot afford a healthy meal or 69% percent of the population. Rural women in particular grapple with increasing household and farming costs due to inflation and dependence on imported fertilizers and commercial seeds. Local produce fetches low farmgate prices because of agricultural importation. Meanwhile, peasant women who oppose neoliberal policies such as the Rice Liberalization Law are persecuted. According to AMIHAN Federation of Peasant Women, there are currently 97 peasant women political prisoners in the Philippines who must be immediately released.

The World Food Programme estimates 828 million people are hungry, with those already experiencing dire food insecurity doubling from 135 million to 345 million since 2019. People in 49 countries are presently on the threshold of famine. Global inflation is at its worst. Increasing prices of grains and other food commodities, fuel, and agricultural inputs remain a grave concern. While the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Food Price Index went down to 135.7 in November 2022 from 159.7 in March 2022, it remains more than 40 points above 2019 level, before the Covid-19 pandemic. Incomes of the poorest of households cannot keep up with surging prices and will most likely make food insecurity and poverty worse than ever in the region and globally.

But instead of reversing neoliberal policies and monopoly corporate control over food systems, nation states in Asia aim to further deregulate and liberalize their food markets at the expense of small- and medium-scale farmers, and contributing to already rising debt levels that burden low- and middle-income countries.

This situation could become even more perilous for rural women in Asia. Rural women belong to the ranks of most vulnerable sectors – among them farmers, agricultural workers, indigenous peoples and displaced peoples. It is imperative in the face of heightening multiple crises of an unprecedented scale that rural women speak out and rise up to confront the food crisis, oppose neoliberal policies and fight gender-based exploitation and violence.

As rural women face more and more conditions of landlessness, land-grabbing and land conversion, gender-based exploitation and occupational hazards, climate injustice, lack of social protection and other neoliberal attacks on their rights and welfare, they are awakening to the realities of inequalities and social injustice.

ARWC calls on all women’s movements and defenders of women’s rights across Asia in commemorating 2023 International Women’s Day and Women’s Month to unite against worsening discrimination, exploitation and social injustice. ARWC calls on all rural women to unite and assert people’s food sovereignty amid the worsening global food crisis, land and resource grabbing and climate catastrophe. ###