Food security and the right to food

The concept of food security is closely related to the right to adequate food and the realization of the right to food is often viewed as a precondition for the achievement of food security (FAO 2004, para. 19; UN FAO 2006a, 2006b). The UN FAO defines food security as being achieved

Feminist interpretations of the right to food

Human rights-based gender equality demands have the potential to make visible and disrupt unequal power relations and provide a variety of mechanisms through which structural injustices in access to food, land and other natural resources might be observed and redressed. To date, the primary engagement of most rural development actors has been with the forms of discrimination and inequality that women face in accessing food in the ‘private’ and ‘local’ spheres of the family and community without convincingly connecting these to global inequalities in food systems (Agarwal 2003; Bourke Martignoni 2019). The prevailing gender equality paradigm being promoted through inter-governmental initiatives – including the UN Sustainable Development Goals – in connection with food and agriculture is ostensibly apolitical. However, scholars critical of neo-liberalism have pointed out that behind this ‘neutrality’ lies an agenda that implicitly privileges support for global capital accumulation (Linarelli, Salomon, and Sornarajah 2018). As a result, many of the suggested solutions to gender and sex discrimination in food systems adopt an approach that focuses on increasing the productivity of individual women in agriculture and integrating them into commodities and credit markets, rather than examining the systems of power and domination that create and reproduce these unequal gender relations within families, agribusinesses, markets and farmers’ organizations (Prügl and Joshi 2020). Another problematic aspect of mainstream food security discourses around gender in food, nutrition and agriculture is that they unquestionably reproduce and reinforce essentialist stereotypes about women as ‘virtuous’ mothers and food providers or as helpless ‘victims’ of poverty and disadvantage (Bourke Martignoni 2019; Prügl and Joshi 2020).

Feminist human rights-based initiatives focus on the broader dynamics of gender inequality, including the role of global trade relations, international financial institutions and corporate actors in undermining the right to food (Bourke Martignoni 2019). The Montréal Principles on women's economic, social and cultural rights, which were adopted by a group of experts in 2002, identify a number of inter-connected structural barriers to women’s equal exercise and enjoyment of human rights, which include: social norms and customs that legitimize women's inequality; failure to take account of women’s distinct experiences when designing laws or measures to implement economic, social, and cultural rights; restrictions on access to legal or administrative remedies for rights violations; women’s under-representation in decision making processes; the failure to recognize women’s unremunerated work in the family and community; and the gender-differentiated effects of economic globalization (Montréal Principles 2004). In a similar vein, as mentioned above, in its interpretive General Recommendation no. 34 on the rights of rural women, the CEDAW also adopts some elements of a feminist approach to the right to food with its emphasis on inclusive political participation and the need to identify and challenge the discriminatory norms and institutions that influence food systems at different levels of governance. The General Recommendation specifically acknowledges the ‘macroeconomic roots of gender inequality’ and notes the obligations of states to address the ‘negative and differential impacts of economic policies, including agricultural and general trade liberalization, privatization and commodification of land, water and natural resources, on the lives of rural women and fulfilment of their rights’ (CEDAW 2016, paras 10–11). While the Committee's recommendations refer to feminist political economy and mention food sovereignty and agro-ecology as alternatives to the dominant agro-industrial food systems approach, the solutions that it proposes to address the ‘root causes’ of gender inequalities in relation to the right to food and sustainable access to natural resources remain conservative rather than transformative in nature (Linarelli, Salomon, and Sornarajah 2018; Bourke Martignoni 2019).

Peasant women and their allies within social movements have also repeatedly made linkages between gender-based discrimination within the family and community and the global political and economic trends that influence food, agriculture, labour and land. Unlike many of the inter-governmental institutions involved in the governance of food and agriculture, these peasant feminists call for a far-reaching overhaul of existing political, social, cultural and economic institutions (Via Campesina 2017; CSM 2018; FIAN 2019). The food sovereignty agendas envisioned by feminist members of la Via Campesina and other social movements encompass personal sovereignty, including bodily and sexual autonomy, and draw attention to the continuum of gender-based violence that extends from the home and community to corporate economic and environmental violence (Via Campesina 2013; Bellows et al. 2015; Bellows et al. 2016; Lentz 2018). These feminist voices within the food sovereignty movement have also underlined the need for an intersectional approach to the right to food that acknowledges that lived or immanent experiences of gendered inequalities in food systems will also be conditioned by factors such as socio-economic class, geographic location, ethnic identity, age, gender identity and sexual orientation (CSM 2018). The Declaration of the 5th Women's Assembly of la Via Campesina states:

In spite of this strong articulation of a feminist agenda by rural social movements, there is an awareness that feminism continues to be regarded by many people in agrarian communities as a radical and foreign concept (Via Campesina 2013). A lot of these fears are related to the idea that equality claims might destabilize the traditional small holder family farming unit, which forms an integral part of the peasant identity that has been constructed in opposition to the neo-liberal model of commercial agriculture. While some social movement actors have pushed for a more critical and inclusive approach to gender as a category of analysis within peasant organizing – in particular in relation to the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) persons – this has not, so far, achieved widespread support within la Via Campesina (ARROW 2019; FIAN 2019). In this regard, it has been noted that the relatively timid references to gender equality and the rights of rural women that were retained in the final version of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants will need to be interpreted using an explicitly feminist and intersectional framing in order to ensure that the instrument fulfils its emancipatory promise (Moreno Cadena 2020, 61; Bourke Martignoni and Claeys 2021).

How have international human rights institutions engaged with Cambodia and Ghana on women's rights in relation to agriculture, food and land?

Cambodia and Ghana are parties to many international human rights instruments that contain guarantees of non-discrimination and the right to food.³ The UN treaty monitoring bodies and Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council have identified a number of issues and made recommendations to each of the countries with respect to gender equality and the rights to food, land and natural resources (see Appendix 1).

Many of the observations by international human rights institutions about gender inequality in both countries focus on the discriminatory impacts of customary and traditional laws and practices as well as statutory family laws in the area of inheritance. The solution that they suggest is to urge states to ‘harmonise’ their legal systems in line with human rights standards so that women can effectively exercise equal rights to access, control and use agricultural land and other property (Appendix 1). This diagnosis of the problem has also led to an emphasis on improving the accessibility of justice systems through the extension of legal aid and legal literacy programmes aimed at women (Appendix 1). The recommendations issued by CEDAW and other bodies to each country have evolved over the last two decades from initially being almost exclusively centred on formal gender equality and legal reform to now encompassing discussions of the underlying economic, social, cultural and political conditions that create and reinforce unequal power relations in food and agricultural systems. Conceptual linkages are increasingly made between gender inequality, violence against women, conditions of employment, social security and the right to food as well as the protection of land rights defenders and the accountability of corporate actors (Appendix 1).

Several international human rights bodies have drawn attention to the unsustainable and unequal nature of ‘extractivist’ models of neo-liberal development, even in cases where revenue from land-based investments has been used to finance social spending (De Schutter 2010; CEDAW 2016; Achiume 2019; UN Special Rapporteur on Cambodia 2019). During its 2013 visit to Ghana, the Working Group on Business and Human Rightspointed out that the government has obligations to regulate the activities of corporate agribusiness actors. The Working Group also noted that businesses are responsible for ensuring that they do not discriminate against female workers and that they develop appropriate grievance procedures as well as free, prior and informed consent processes in relation to agricultural development (Appendix 1; UN Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business entreprises 2013). The issues of over-indebtedness and corruption in land and commodities markets have also been evoked by some of the human rights bodies, although there has not been any detailed attempt to explore the gender dimensions of these phenomena (Appendix 1). As a general rule, the international human rights institutions have not engaged in a systematic analysis of the role of private contract and investment law on the political economy of food systems (Chadwick 2019). Human rights bodies have also failed to convincingly make connections between the macro-economic structures that create and deepen gender and other inequalities and the ways in which these are replicated and reinforced at the level of the family and community (Marks 2011; Bourke Martignoni 2019).

While CEDAW and other human rights institutions are gradually moving towards a more nuanced and reflexive approach to the rights of rural women, their proposed solutions to gender inequalities within food and agricultural systems still tend to fall back on standardized, top down technical interventions that focus on the empowerment of individual women through family law reform, temporary special measures including public sector employment quotas, private land titling, and facilitated access to credit, markets and education (Collins 2018; CSM 2018; Bourke Martignoni 2019). Although international human rights bodies emphasize the importance of women's full participation in political, economic and social institutions in Cambodia and Ghana, the discussion tends to be limited to the ways in which women can be inserted into existing, unequal structures without examining the need for more radical, grassroots-led reforms (UN CEDAW 2013, 2015; UN CCPR 2016a, 2016b). The following section compiles observations from the DEMETER research in Cambodia and Ghana to highlight some areas in which a feminist perspective could potentially provide new insights into the impact of land and agricultural commercialization on the right to food and the processes and institutions that it may be necessary to establish in order to ensure that all people have sustainable access to adequate food at all times.

Popular participation in food policy-making

The participation of women's rights activists in food and agricultural policy-making is crucial both for revealing the ways in which gendered international, national and local institutions may violate the right to food, but also for ensuring that theories, norms and practices of rights are fully informed by diverse, contradictory and intersectional experiences ‘from below’ (Ackerly 2008; Monsalve Suárez 2013; Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition 2017; CSM 2018).

 In Cambodia and Ghana, while there are policy frameworks that seek to mainstream gender equality into agriculture and nutrition, there are few institutionalized and transparent mechanisms for popular input into legislative and policy-making processes (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). In 2016, the drafting of the new agricultural law in Cambodia was opened up for consultations with civil society – including a number of women's rights organizations – but there has seemingly been no communication or public dialogue about the adoption of the legislation since that time (DEMETER 2020). In Ghana, the DEMETER research has highlighted the role that agri-business actors in the cocoa and oil palm sectors are increasingly playing in shaping agricultural policies at the District level, a phenomenon that appears at odds with the aim of expanded grassroots political participation that is at the core of the country's decentralization agenda (Adu-Ankrah, Tsikata, and Dzanku 2019). The absence of accessible and effective formal processes and institutions for smallholder farmers and agricultural labourers to influence the design, implementation and monitoring of policies and legislation has led to a reliance on social movements to bring issues related to inequalities in food systems onto local, national and international agendas.

There are civil society groups in each state that advocate for women's rights and, to a lesser extent, the right to food (Maffii 2016; Amoah-Boampong 2018; Adu-Ankrah, Tsikata, and Dzanku 2019). Over the last decade, women have been on the frontlines of protests against land grabbing and large scale development projects in Cambodia (Park 2019, 44). Demonstrations, direct action and other more intimate forms of resistance to agricultural commercialization – including through practices such as homestead food production, foraging for wild vegetables or participation in labour exchanges – provide opportunities for the contestation of gendered social norms and give women a platform through which they can work collectively for greater equality and the right to food in rural communities (Maffii 2016; FIAN 2019). A wave of women's rights activism during the 1990s led to the development by a national coalition of individuals and organizations of the Women's Manifesto (2004) (Amoah-Boampong 2018). The Manifesto made crucial linkages between women's political representation and their economic self-reliance through land rights, legislation and policies to eliminate violence against women and the more equal distribution of reproductive labour (Amoah-Boampong 2018). Since that time, while some of the demands contained in the Women's Manifesto have been implemented by the government, it has proven difficult for women's rights networks to maintain momentum for collective action on gender equality, particularly in rural areas (Amoah-Boampong 2018; DEMETER 2020). In both countries, our qualitative interviews indicate a widespread perception that women are more adept than men at negotiating peaceful settlements to conflicts over land and natural resources (DEMETER 2020). This view that women are less likely to intensify social conflict persists, in spite of evidence from Cambodia that the government frequently employs various forms of violence to suppress land rights claims from smallholder farmers, even when these are advanced by women (Beban, Schoenberger, and Lamb 2019; Park 2019; Joshi 2020).

In general, social resistance to agricultural and land commercialization in each country has tended to be ad hoc and localized in nature and has not yet served as a springboard for broader discussions at the national level, or even within communities and families, concerning gender equal rights to food and land (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020; Joshi 2020). In Cambodia, government repression of civil society means that many forms of human rights-based organizing such as contributions to legislative and policy processes, legal challenges, peaceful protests and public debate are not available to women's rights groups working on issues of food, land and natural resources (Lamb et al. 2017; Beban, Schoenberger, and Lamb 2019; DEMETER 2020). Although Cambodia and Ghana both have policy frameworks that seek to mainstream gender into the food and agricultural sectors, these have been largely developed through top-down technical processes with little reference to lived realities or to broader questions of socio-economic justice (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). The DEMETER research highlights the need to create formal and informal spaces and mechanisms to allow diverse voices to contribute in a variety of ways to food and agricultural policies, including through political discussion, as a key component of feminist food practice.

Revendicating the right to food in legal practice

The right to food is not explicitly recognized in constitutional law or in framework legislation in Cambodia and Ghana. This situation means that it is difficult to secure legal accountability for violations of the right to food in each country and that it is also more onerous for civil society to pursue strategic litigation in order to demand its implementation (Monsalve Suárez 2013). Another consequence of the absence of direct legal recognition of most economic, social and cultural rights in Ghana and Cambodia is that there are relatively low levels of awareness of the right to food amongst local communities and civil society organizations working on other women's rights issues in each of our study countries (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). In Cambodia, litigation-based strategies for claiming human rights in domestic courts have proven dangerous, counter-productive or ineffective for people without connections to the ruling political élite (Adler and So 2012; Brickell and Springer 2017; Joshi 2020). In Ghana, while courts have recognized the rights of local communities to access fisheries and other food resources as a component of the right to life, these cases have not acted as catalysts for larger advocacy campaigns about gender equality in relation to food and land rights (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020; Atudiwe 2014). A further issue that may hamper the use of law-based strategies in gender equality and right to food claims in both countries is an absence of accessible legal aid schemes and this situation is particularly acute for women living in poverty in rural areas (Appendix 1).

Agricultural commercialization and the land scarcity that has accompanied it have thrown traditional patterns of land inheritance and the allocation of usufruct rights into flux in many rural communities in Cambodia and Ghana (Gironde et al. 2021; Dzanku, Tsikata, and Adu-Ankrah 2020). Our research has shown that formal legal guarantees of equality in land ownership and presumptive joint titling schemes have not resulted in greater substantive equality for women in terms of their use and control of farming land and natural resources (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). In Ghana, commercial pressures on agricultural land have led to the remaking of matrilineal inheritance practices, which may be eroding some of the status that women in these communities previously held as land owners (Oxfam 2019b; Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). These gendered inequalities in land ownership and use are even more marked for widowed and divorced women if they do not have strong family support structures (Baaz, Lilja, and Allison Östlund 2017; DEMETER 2020).

Negotiating plural legal systems in each of our case study areas has proved difficult in relation to the collective land rights of indigenous populations, as well as for many women in rural areas in connection with customary laws governing land and property inheritance, ownership and access rights (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). Traditional and customary legal norms may promote the recognition of collective use and ownership rights over common pool resources, however, these same norms can also be used to limit women's equal rights to inherit, own, control and use land and other resources (Atudiwe 2014; Bourke Martignoni 2019). Human rights bodies and the qualitative research carried out in the DEMETER project have demonstrated the ways in which customary law has been invoked in Ghana to restrict women's rights to inherit agricultural land and this situation has become even more critical in light of the new pressures on farming land occurring as a result of commercialization (Appendix 1; Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). There is also evidence from Cambodia that shows that indigenous women are often excluded from participation in decision-making structures related to land and natural resources (Maffii 2016; Joshi 2019; Smith 2019). Importantly, however, a number of our interview respondents from indigenous families in Northeastern Cambodia that practice matrilineal land inheritance stated that despite the formal legal systems’ provisions on gender equal land inheritance, they were determined to continue with their existing customs that favour women's status as land holders (DEMETER 2020).⁴

Feminist strategizing around legal change to promote the realization of the right to food and other human rights should lead to critical reflection on the gaps and contradictions in international and national legal frameworks – including norms emanating from customary and other non-formal sources – as they relate to women's lived experiences (Ackerly 2008). This requires the building of alliances between social movements advocating for law reform in areas such as global trade and sustainable development, as well as a willingness to engage in debate about how human rights norms might be transformed through feminist practices of contextualizing and vernacularization, dialogue and critical enquiry (Claeys and Edelman 2020; Engle Merry 2006).

Socio-economic inequalities and gendered institutions

According to country-level indicators, poverty has decreased in Cambodia and Ghana over the past decade, however, intensive agricultural and land development along with periodic economic downturns appear to be accentuating inequalities in rural communities (FAO 2019; Dzanku and Tsikata 2021; Gironde et al. 2021). Trade and fiscal policies in each state, often designed on the basis of advice from International Financial Institutions (IFIs), are generally extractive in nature and favourable to private investors in the agricultural sector without providing mechanisms to ensure that local farmers and communities equally share in the benefits of rural development (Appendix 1; Adu-Ankrah, Tsikata, and Dzanku 2019). As noted above, the trade-offs that have been made by different authorities in each country interested in promoting land and resource commercialization as a development strategy have frequently resulted in conflicts over control of natural resources and the dispossession of smallholder farmers (De Schutter 2009; Alston 2018; Oxfam 2019a). Corruption, particularly in connection with commodities markets, food pricing, development planning, land and resource governance has been identified in Ghana and Cambodia as a barrier to the gender equal implementation of the right to food and related social security programmes, including conditional cash transfers (Economist Intelligence Unit 2019; Freedom House 2019; Transparency International 2019).

The Equal Measures 2030 index which tracks progress in the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals related to gender equality highlights the fact that Cambodia only spends a small amount (2.9%) of its GDP on social services, while in Ghana there is even less resource allocation to social expenditure (1.9%) (EM2030; Appendix 1). In each of our DEMETER study communities, respondents noted that the heavy burden of women's reproductive labour might be alleviated through effective social security systems and the provision of accessible child care, education and health services which would enable women to participate more fully in farming and other community activities (Adu-Ankrah, Tsikata, and Dzanku 2019; Joshi 2019). The low levels of funding available for sub-national and national governance institutions also undermines their potential to improve the implementation and monitoring of human rights guarantees, including gender equality (Appendix 1; Adu-Ankrah, Tsikata, and Dzanku 2019). In Cambodia there are a number of civil society initiatives that seek to promote alternative, more equitable rural economies through the establishment of community farming associations, however, the development of these groups has been curtailed by arrests, threats and intimidation from government authorities and agribusinesses (Beban 2021). There are examples in our Ghanaian study areas of women serving in leadership roles in cocoa farming unions, although the sector still tends to be male-dominated and the bargaining power held by smaller farming cooperatives is dwarfed by large agribusiness actors (Adu-Ankrah, Tsikata, and Dzanku 2019).

Feminist approaches to economic, social and cultural rights – including the rights to food, land, decent work and social security – draw attention to their interdependence as well as their crucial importance in women's daily lives (Montréal Principles 2004; CSM 2018; la Via Campesina 2017). The DEMETER research in rural communities in Cambodia and Ghana highlights the gendered implications of neo-liberal rural development, including its exploitation of the unpaid reproductive and agricultural labour predominantly performed by women and the impact that this has on the realization of the right to food (Adu-Ankrah et al. 2020). By making these connections between multi-scalar systems of power and inequality, popular peasant feminism has the potential to make a significant theoretical and practical contribution to discussions about the practices of human rights locally and globally (CSM 2018; la Via Campesina 2017; Federici 2019).