Food Security And Gender Equality: CARE
A report was released named “Food Security and Gender Equality: A synergistic understudied symphony”, which highlighted a global link between Gender Inequality and Food Insecurity.
- The Report was released by CARE, which is an international humanitarian organisation fighting global poverty and world hunger by working alongside women and girls.
Findings of the Report:
- The gap between men and women’s food security is growing worldwide.
- As many as 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021. Among them, 150 million more women were food insecure than men.
- Across 109 countries, as gender inequality goes up, food security goes down.
- Between 2018 and 2021, the number of hungry women versus hungry men grew 8.4 times, with a staggering 150 million more women than men hungry in 2021.
- Gender equality is highly connected to food and nutrition security at a local, national, and global level.
- The more gender inequality in a country, the hungrier and more malnourished people are.
- Nations with high gender inequality, such as Yemen, Sierra Leone and Chad, experienced the lowest food security and nutrition.
- Even when both men and women are technically food insecure, women often bear bigger burdens, in this situation men are found eating smaller meals and women are found skipping meals.
- In Lebanon, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, 85% of people reduced the number of meals they ate. At the time, 85% of women were eating smaller portions, compared to only 57 % of men.
- When women are employed and earning money or when they are directly involved in farming, they are less likely to experience food insecurity.
- Women are more likely than men to live in extreme poverty, because their work is underpaid or not paid at all.
- Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, women took on three times as much unpaid work as men.
