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<p class="MsoNormal"><b>2022 - The State of Food Security & Nutrition in the world – 260 Pages:
</b><a href="https://www.fao.org/3/cc0639en/cc0639en.pdf"><span style="color:blue">The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 (fao.org)</span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/01/25/the-gender-hunger-gap-is-real-and-getting-worse/#:~:text=CARE%20International%2C%20a%20global%20humanitarian,just%2017.9%20million%20in%202018">https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/01/25/the-gender-hunger-gap-is-real-and-getting-worse/#:~:text=CARE%20International%2C%20a%20global%20humanitarian,just%2017.9%20million%20in%202018</a>.
<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:#111111;letter-spacing:-.4pt">The Gender Hunger Gap Is Real & Getting Worse<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:4.8pt;mso-line-height-alt:13.8pt"><b><span style="font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:#111111;letter-spacing:-.4pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><img border="0" width="667" height="444" style="width:6.95in;height:4.625in" id="Picture_x0020_4" src="cid:image001.png@01D93329.61B507F0"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:15.0pt"><span style="font-family:Solido">An Indigenous woman stands in her spare kitchen in Jhargram, West Bengal, India, on Sept. 29, 2022.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:15.0pt"><span style="font-family:Solido">Climate change has dramatically reduced agricultural output in the region, and its impact has been felt particularly strongly by the area's Indigenous women. </span><span style="font-size:8.5pt;font-family:Solido;text-transform:uppercase">RITWIKA
MITRA/THE <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:16.2pt"><span style="font-family:Solido;color:black;text-transform:uppercase">JANUARY 25, 2023,-
</span><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">JHARGRAM, India—The U.N. World Food Programme describes it as “eating last and least.” Alaka Mahato calls it “eating light.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">The small rice and vegetable field behind her home that supplies much of her family’s food yielded only 40 percent of its normal
half-ton harvest after unusually heavy rains last November, well after the monsoon ended in September. The result is that the 52-year-old’s budget for groceries is suffocatingly tight, and her pantry is bare: no onions, potatoes, or any of the other staples
found in most Indian kitchens.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">On days when there isn’t enough food for her household of three, Mahato will make do with what’s left after her husband and
youngest daughter finish eating—a handful of rice and some water. Sometimes she asks her adult daughter, who lives in a separate household, for financial help, though this creates conflict at home.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">“My husband says we will not take money from our daughter. But then we will have to die,” Mahato says.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Around the world, <a href="https://www.wfpusa.org/women-are-hungrier-infographic/"><span style="color:#111111">women eat less
than men</span></a> under tough conditions such as conflict, famine, or disasters. The World Food Programme predicts that climate change will produce economic and environmental shocks that will exacerbate this inequality, and it says this impact can already
be seen in places like Mahato’s hometown. Jhargram, a district not far from the Bay of Bengal and the Sundarbans rainforest, is one of West Bengal’s many climate hot spots—areas that are especially affected by global warming. Over the past decade, agriculture
here has been disrupted by intense flooding, cyclones, and sea level rise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">The hunger gap between the genders had been shrinking in recent decades, but it rose dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CARE International, a global humanitarian organization, estimates that <a href="https://www.care-international.org/news/150-million-more-women-men-were-hungry-2021-care-analysis-finds"><span style="color:#111111">150 million more women than men</span></a> went
hungry in 2021, compared with a difference of just 17.9 million in 2018.r<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Its analysis drew from several global data sets, including the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s latest <a href="https://www.fao.org/3/cc0639en/online/cc0639en.html"><span style="color:#111111">report
on the state of food security</span></a>, which found that the hunger gap grew in 2020 and 2021, fueled by widening disparities in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. The U.N. attributed this to the disproportionate impact that the pandemic-triggered economic
crisis has had on women, saying they were more affected by job and income losses and bore a larger caregiving burden, looking after sick family members and children out of school.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Researchers at CARE say this should serve as a warning about the likely impacts of climate shocks on hunger levels among men
and women. One shortcoming is that sex-disaggregated food indicators in major global data sets focus mainly on women’s reproductive role, such as statistics about anemia among women of childbearing age. This means policymakers can fail to detect a nutritional
crisis in which men are relatively well-fed compared with women, unless it shows up in anemia statistics. It also means food crises disproportionately affecting older women don’t register at all.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">“Yes, it’s true that women eat last and least, but what we’re trying to unpack is the root cause,” says Gregory Spira, the
head of the gender, food, and climate justice programs at CARE. Not only do patriarchal norms in many vulnerable countries result in policy responses designed primarily with men’s needs in mind, he says, but they also create social pressure on women to put
men’s needs ahead of their own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">“When there’s a shock or misallocation of resources, we really see women not having the power to take action. Women don’t have
the power to make decisions about what they eat, when they eat. Without that decision-making power, women cannot control basic questions. As climate change advances, there is increased competition when it comes to food and everything else, and women lose out
because they’re disadvantaged compared to men.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">The CARE report highlighted the problem in India, where many women and girls suffer from hunger in spite of strong economic
growth that has led the International Monetary Fund to project the country will become the <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD"><span style="color:#111111">world’s third-largest economy</span></a> by 2027.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">India slipped from 94th place in 2020 to <a href="https://www.globalhungerindex.org/ranking.html"><span style="color:#111111">107th
out of 121 countries</span></a> in this year’s Global Hunger Index, a report compiled by Irish and German aid agencies. The country is home to a <a href="https://www.wfpusa.org/countries/india/#:~:text=As%20the%20second%20most%20populous,social%20exclusion%20are%20very%20high."><span style="color:#111111">quarter
of the world’s undernourished people</span></a>, according to the World Food Programme.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">The Fuller Project and <i>Foreign Policy</i> interviewed several women in Jhargram, including Mahato, who said they regularly
eat less than their husbands and children. The impact can be glimpsed in the prevalence of anemia cases in West Bengal among females ages 15 to 49, which rose from 62.5 percent in 2015-2016 to 71.4 percent in 2019-2020, according to the latest available data
from the Indian government’s National Family Health Survey. Officials in the region point to climate change as the primary factor behind the increase, with the data covering a period before the pandemic had a significant impact in India.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">The late rains last year came after Jhargram, like much of the southern part of the state of West Bengal, had already been
hit by several cyclones and floods in recent years. The region is home to over 30 million people.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">“If there is drought, there is extreme drought. When there is rainfall, there is extreme rainfall,” says Joy Chakraborty, an
assistant director with the local government’s department of agriculture in Jhargram. “The maximum temperatures are shooting up, and the soil is so hot that you will find it difficult to breathe.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Most of the population here belongs to groups officially designated as marginalized tribes or castes, a population the World
Food Programme says will “<a href="https://www.wfp.org/news/climate-crisis-threatens-food-security-women-and-girls"><span style="color:#111111">face the brunt</span></a>” of a climate-driven rise in hunger. Chakraborty says almost everyone here relies on a
system of government rations—food supplied by the government to those who live below the poverty line.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Under strain from the impacts of climate change and the pandemic, the system is falling short. Indigenous women have <a href="https://www.newsclick.in/NREGA-Workers-Protest-Against-Delayed-Low-Wages-Union-Government-Blames-Corruption-States"><span style="color:#111111">staged
protests</span></a> over claims that they haven’t been paid for work they’ve performed under West Bengal’s guaranteed rural employment scheme, as the state budget struggles to cope with the demands placed on it. The Right to Food & Work Campaign, a network
of advocacy organizations in the state, said at a news conference that the nonpayment of wages significantly affected hunger among single women and widows.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Women are increasingly becoming primary breadwinners for their homes as climate change pushes men to migrate away to find work
outside their towns and villages. As agricultural production in the area suffers due to climate change, males are prioritized in terms of getting fed, leaving women and their girls so hungry they say they struggle to function and focus at work and school.
Predatory behavior has also increased as local economies collapse and people become more desperate. Over the past decade, there has been a steady rise in <a href="https://fullerproject.org/story/sundarban-climate-change-child-sex-trafficking/"><span style="color:#111111">trafficking</span></a> in
the Sundarbans, with young girls getting kidnapped by neighbors or sold by family members to traffickers or into early marriage.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Bedani Shabar, a woman belonging to an Indigenous group who also frequently eats less than the rest of her family, says the
food distribution system broke down during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. “There was a lot of distress then,” she recalls. “It was a situation where there was no food. And there were no rations. We had to survive on rice with salt.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Then there’s the lack of protein. Families receive only rice, wheat, and whole-wheat flour from the government.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">“No eggs, no milk, no lentils,” says Shabar’s 10-year-old daughter, Padmarani, when talking about her diet. Mahato’s 14-year-old
daughter, Urmila, says she can’t focus at school and gets frequent headaches. She says her periods are irregular, missing one every other month—a <a href="https://time.com/4351088/things-that-mess-with-your-period/"><span style="color:#111111">common problem</span></a> for
girls who lack adequate nutrition.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">Three out of five pregnant women in West Bengal are anemic, and their protein-poor diet will have generational impacts, warns
Abhay Bang, a doctor and community health researcher, adding that the effect will be particularly pronounced in the area’s Indigenous communities.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="font-family:"Georgia",serif;color:black">“When an Indigenous girl transitions into adulthood, she has smaller body size, less height, and low weight—when she gives
birth, the baby born to her will also be small in size,” he says. “The next generation will be affected, and this cycle will continue.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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