ABSTRACT
The food crisis of 2008 was not an isolated incident or unique event from which the world economy and food security has now restabilized. Calculations of individuals living in hunger and with food and nutrition insecurity range from 870 million to over one billion.1 But although estimates of food insecurity differ, the geography and sociodemographic profile of the food insecure remains unaltered (FAO, WFP, and IFAD 2012). The most food and nutrition insecure groups comprise peasant farmers, small landholders, landless workers, fisherfolk, and hunters and gatherers (HRC 2010; see also Scherr 2003, table 3.1).2 As a crosscutting category of these groups, women and girls face violations of their right to adequate food and nutrition more often than do boys and men; they comprise about 60 percent of the hungry (ECOSOC 2007) and 70 percent of the poor (World Bank, FAO, and IFAD 2009; HRC 2012a). Paradoxically, not only are women’s and girls’ rights protected through a wide range of human rights instruments (HRC 2012a, para. 1), it has furthermore long since been established that women are key to food security and well-being at the household level (Smith and Haddad 2000; Kent 2002; IFPRI 2005; Quisumbing and Smith 2007; see also Maxwell and Smith 1992; Lemke, Bellows, and Heumann 2009), and that composite indicators for gender discrimination are positively correlated with hunger and social instability at the national level (UN 2002; von Grebmer et al. 2009).3
