World Desertification Day 2023: Granting equal land rights to women can reduce world hunger significantly, says UN

Subject: Environment

Section: International conventions

Context:

Ensuring women can own and inherit land is imperative for reducing desertification and achieving the land degradation neutrality (LDN) 2030 agenda, world leaders highlighted at the global observance event ahead of World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on 17 June.

Details:

Desertification threatens the world with food insecurity and impedes climate change mitigation.
Unsustainable agriculture is a primary cause and erodes soil 100 times faster than it can be restored naturally.
As much as 40 per cent of the world’s land is degraded.
This year’s desertification day observance events planned across the world will take forward the “Her Land. Her Rights: Advancing Gender Equality and Land Restoration Goals” campaign launched by UNCCD International Women’s Day in March 2023.

Inequality in land rights:

Women suffer the most because of the consequences of this human-made crisis such as scarcity of food and water as well as forced displacement, although only a fifth of the world’s landowners are women.
- This is because women have lower access to natural resources, financial services and technology, among other things, compared to men.
This inequality is despite the fact that women comprise “nearly half the world’s agricultural workforce and produce up to 80 per cent of food in developing countries.
- Inequality is also rampant — women in over 100 countries are stopped from inheriting their husband’s property.
The global soil health protection body also released an analysis of the benefits of land rights equality. It showed:
- If women had equal rights to land, agricultural production in the poorest regions would increase by up to 4 per cent and malnourishment would decline by 12-17 per cent, resulting in 150 million fewer hungry people globally.

Women’s role in land conservation:

The fact that women play an important role in soil conservation is not new to the global consciousness.
Past reports highlighted that when women decide how to manage land, both soil health and agriculture yield improved.

Efforts to reduce gender inequality in land degradation neutrality (LDN):

Despite this, as of 2019, only around 20 of more than 80 countries had included discussions on the role of gender and women in their LDN targets.
It was only during COP13 held in China in 2017 that UNCCD, which came into force in 1996, drew up a ‘Gender Action Plan’ mandating gender mainstreaming in efforts of countries to achieve their LDN targets.
In the two years till the following COP14, UNCCD observed that gender still had not found a prominent mention in the measures of most countries.
Some like Bosnia, Guyana, Senegal, Peru, Ethiopia, and Indonesia adopted the Gender Action Plan.