Actions to combat poverty in rural areas, where over 70% of the world's 1.4 billion extremely poor people live, will be crucial if the aspiration of the Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty is to be met.
Rural women play an essential role in ensuring household food security and nutrition. However, they face both gender-specific challenges, including unequal access to productive resources such as financing and land, and discrimination in rural labour markets.
Although about three quarters of employed women in the Least Developed Countries work in agriculture, women farmers produce on average consistently less per hectare than their male counterparts. Even more crucially, gender constraints obstruct and delay the dynamic potential of the rural economy in developing countries.
These obstacles must be identified and addressed to increase rural productivity while also creating opportunities for rural economic diversification.
UNCTAD suggests a twin-track approach to rural development centered on the one hand on promoting small-scale agriculture, and on the other supporting the development of women's non-agricultural enterprises in rural areas and to strengthen the synergies between them. This would kick start a virtuous circle leading towards sustainable rural development and accelerated poverty reduction.
UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi addressed the issue at a Ministerial Round Table on Women as Agents for Economic Change: Smallholder Farming, Food Security, Agricultural Upgrading and Rural Economic Diversification in LDCs during UNCTAD 14 in Nairobi in July 2016.
"We all share a common understanding that offering more opportunities to rural women it is not only a way to empower women economically and socially, but it is also a means to unleashing the potential they hold in empowering the whole economy," he said.
Rural women stand at the centre of the 2030 Development Agenda where issues of poverty, sustainability, food security and gender equality are interlaced.
"Agenda 2030 is impossible to realize without unleashing the power that women hold, the potential that they have," Dr. Kituyi said.
Trade liberalization does not have unambiguously positive or negative effects on women in agriculture. For example, cheap food imports as a result of trade liberalization benefit women as consumers. Yet, cheap food imports may at the same time erode rural women's already meagre earnings as producers in the sector.
Trade expansion is typically associated with the trend toward commercialization and agricultural diversification, which can present new opportunities but also challenges for rural women.
Trade expansion may favour commercially-oriented farmers who have easier access to inputs and marketing networks and crowd out poor small-scale producers, including female farmers.
However, it can also provide significant openings for women, if large processors, traders or retailers support a reorganization of the chain beyond gender stereotypes.
Importers and processors also buy and sell the stories and relationships behind the product they trade. The empowerment of women can become a centrepiece for their preferred supplier programmes.
