Cost of gender inequalities in food and agriculture put at 1% global GDP

A new report finds the world pays an astonishing cost for providing women with fewer educational and other resources and higher unpaid care – they are almost a quarter less productive and earn less than men while working on farms of equal size.

Closing the gender gap in productivity and wages would “increase global gross domestic product by nearly $1 trillion and reduce the number of food-insecure people by 45 million,” the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a 264-page report on Thursday about the status of women in agrifood systems – those that produce food and non-food agricultural products.

More than a third of the world’s working women are employed in agrifood systems and related areas of food storage, transportation and processing-to-distribution. But on farms of equal size, women are 24% less productive than men due to unequal treatment, and women earn 20% less pay than men, according to the report.

“If we tackle the gender inequalities endemic in agrifood systems and empower women, the world will take a leap forward in addressing the goals of ending poverty and creating a world free from hunger," said the U.N. agency's director-general, Qu Dongyu.

Scaling up to markets, policies and the law

Women have fewer chances to own land, gain credit or use digital technology, and with less paid care their opportunities for education, training and jobs are reduced.

That translates into what the report calls marginalized work roles and conditions. But by creating a level playing field of farm productivity and agricultural wages, the world would add 1% to global GDP, or almost $1 trillion.

Doing so also would reduce global food insecurity by 2%, enough to help eliminate hunger for 45 million of the 345 million people that the World Food Program, another U.N. agency headquartered in Rome, estimates suffer today from a critical lack of food.

"Widespread change in gender attitudes is unlikely to occur unless lessons learned about ways to reduce gender-based discrimination are scaled up beyond households and communities to markets and policy and legal spheres," the report says.

FAO argues communities and households must be brought into a conversation about gender-biased local norms through gender-transformative approaches.

But it's also "imperative that governments, international organizations, civil society organizations and the private sector influence positive changes in gender norms," the report says, "and improve women’s access to resources through national policies, campaigns and large-scale integrated programs."