On March 3, Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, published an op-ed in the New York Times, entitled "The Feminization of Farming". In it, he points to longstanding gender discrimination and unremunerated domestic work as barriers to women's rise out of poverty and hunger, and calls for the removal of legal discrimination and the improvement of public services to reduce burdens on women farmers across the developing world. He points to a handful of examples across Asia, from Bangladesh to the Phillippines, where different initiatives have sought to decrease the domestic burden on women so that they can focus on farming and income generation. This op-ed comes at the same time that De Schutter presented his full report, entitled "Women's Rights and the Right to Food" to the UN Human Rights Council.
The full text of the op-ed article can be found here, and the full report can be found here.
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