Victoria University Essay: Women's Empowerment and Food Security

This essay examines the critical role of women's empowerment in addressing global hunger and food security. It highlights the strong correlation between gender inequality and hunger, emphasizing that women often face disproportionate challenges due to limited access to resources, education, and decision-making power. The essay discusses how empowering women, through equal access to opportunities, economic resources, and participation in decision-making, can significantly increase agricultural output, improve economic growth, and reduce the number of hungry people worldwide. It explores various strategies and policies to promote women's empowerment, including providing equal access to technology, preserving their rights, and promoting literacy. The essay also references the work of organizations like the FAO and World Bank, illustrating how gender equality is essential for sustainable development and the eradication of poverty and hunger. The essay emphasizes that empowering women is not only a matter of justice but also a crucial step towards creating a more food-secure and equitable world.

An Essay on Women’s Empowerment as Tool to End Hunger
Student Details
9/1/2019

Women’s Empowerment as Tool to End Hunger
There is plenty of food in the globe to feed all of us, but with excessive effects on
females and girls, the number of individuals impacted by starvation and poor nutrition is still
unacceptably high. Administrations and global organizations must prioritize reversing this
disturbing trend. Poverty needs to be treated as a matter of equality, rights and human rights
justice. Most significantly, the problem of gender equality is health and nutrition anxiety. Low
social status and absence of access to funds imply that the most deprived females and girls are
now the inequitable worldwide financial procedures governing food systems and worldwide
trends like climate change (FAO UN, 2011). Evidence indicates powerful correlations around
gender inequality as well as health and nutrition uncertainty, despite fast economic growth in
especially in developing countries, as a direct consequence of their reduced status relative to
males and children, thousands of females and girls even now lack health and nutrition safety.
These inequalities have been compounded by all the standardized burden of unpaid labor by the
frequently-limited access of females and children to economic resources, education, and
judgment-making (BRIDGE, 2014). Food safety at the person, family, domestic, national and
international level if all individuals also have access to enough, secure and healthy food to satisfy
their nutritional requirements and food choices.
The condition of hunger is really the problem that prevails throughout the globe and on a
big scale. In this scenario, each individual current on this earth has less or no accessibility of
appropriate food. It does have different parts that distinguish between different kinds of hunger.
Many individuals in Australia face the chronic hunger condition (Food Bank, 2019a). That
implies one in nine of the more than seven billion individuals on Earth are constantly suffering
from hunger. Practically all undernourished individuals around the world live in especially in
developing countries. Internationally, the primary cause of starvation is poverty. Millions of
individuals are merely too poor across the globe to be able to purchase food. The accessibility of
guaranteed food is also regarded to be based on sex differences. Australia's females also face
gender discrimination depending on food intake (IFAD, 2012). These, in turn, can hinder the
general accessibility of sound food as motivated females are deemed to be the instrument to
facilitate secure food for their society and the world. It's difficult to think that in a developed
nation like Australia, the hunger condition has also extended its branches.

The per capita Gross domestic product of the nation as of 2016 is $49,144, which is
considerably above any sensible limit for the recognition of developed countries. The nation
anticipated 60 million individuals to generate enough food (M. Ejaz Qureshi, John Dixon, &
Mellissa Wood, 2015). Food Bank is the biggest food aid organization in Australia, working on a
level that makes it essential to the job of front-line charities serving vulnerable Australians. With
a big food bank as well as other charities, the individuals of Australia are still facing the hunger
issue before them. In Australia's rural areas, the issue of women's discriminatory practices based
on equality in different fields is regarded one of Australia's primary factors for both poverty and
starvation (Marcum & Perry, (Summer 2015)).
Vulnerability in health and nutrition is a economic and political occurrence fuelled by
unfair worldwide and national procedures. This is an environmental problem as well.
Progressively unsustainable techniques of intensive farming, cattle farming as well as fishing
lead to air quality and water and food erosion that cause climate change and food shortages.
Simultaneously, females are literally' feeding the world.' Despite frequently limited access to
international or international markets, they make up the bulk of the world's food manufacturers
and generally handle the nutritional needs of their households. This is achieved despite engraved
gender inequalities and rising food price uncertainty. And even at the family level, where
prejudicial social and cultural standards prevail, their own sustainability and nutrition needs and
sometimes those of their sisters are overlooked (Miklosik, Evans, & Hasprova, 2018). There is
also another issue with both the notion of food safety which is now linked with the sex-aware
definition of food safety, arguing that temporary, apolitical and sexually-blind diagnoses of the
food security issue and inability to understand the right to health care for all individuals lead to
inadequate policy reactions. The 2009 World Conference on Food Security provides helpful
entry points for a more extensive assessment of the food insecurity issue and addressing present,
inadequate policy reactions (Talks, 2015).
The study evaluated examples of provincial, national, as well as local procedures,
policies, or even programs which use often easy yet revolutionary approaches to tackle food
safety in rights-focused, sex-aware, and often gender-transforming ways (ADB, 2013). The
approaches share a similar thread to address recognized food security as well as gender
inequality issues and to seek answers that are often collaborative, empowering, independently
owned and ecologically sustainable (Bigliardi, 2013). Equality occurs where males and females

have equal opportunities to possibilities and facilities, equal economic control and equal voice in
all levels of decision-making. Evidence shows that if equal rights were greater, with the
accessibility of safety food, there seems to be greater economic growth and better standard of
living for all. A latest World Bank study indicates that females now account for more than 40%
of the world's workforce, 43% of the world's farm labor force, and much more than half of the
country's college learners, so productivity will increase if their abilities are completely employed.
As per the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) study, increasing women's
empowerment can increase overall economic production by as much as 4% in developing
countries, decreasing the number of hungry individuals worldwide by 12 to 17%, as well as 100
million to 150 million (Food Bank, 2019). Though, gender inequalities remain to be extreme in
several parts of the developing globe, particularly in Australia, people in rural regions.
Many aspects of inequality restrain females, such as the absence of education, unequal
workloads and property rights, restricted resource control, as well as restricted involvement in
choices affecting their lives (International Fund for Agricultural Development , 2015). For
females, these circumstances are significantly de-motivating, which in turn contributes to low
productivity rates. It makes empowering females a needed task, that can in turn assist the
Australian cities to generate more food as well as deliver healthy food products. When
circumstances become equitable, females become more involved, productivity rises, and the
situation benefits the entire family as well as country (Galor, 2012). Empowering women is the
word referring to policies intended to improve the degree of independence and self-determination
in individuals and groups to allow them to represent their views in an accountable and self-
determined manner, acting of their own initiative. Women's equality is the method in which
women develop and recreate what it is that they can be, do, and achieve in a situation they have
been denied before. Empowerment can be described in many respects, but when speaking about
empowerment for females, empowerment means acknowledging and enabling individuals
(females) outside the policy-making process into it. "This places a powerful emphasis on
involvement in political structures and official decision-making as well as, in the financial
sphere, on the capacity to earn revenue that allows financial decision-making to take place
(Stuart Gillespie & Mara van den Bold, 2017).
Women's equality is a method for women which redefine gender norms that enables them
to gain the capacity to choose among recognized options otherwise limited from such capacity.

There are many principles that define women's empowerment, including having to come from a
situation of powerlessness for one to be empowered. In addition, one must obtain self-
empowerment rather than an external person giving it to them. Certain studies have discovered
that definitions of empowerment involve individuals with the ability to make significant choices
in their life while being capable of acting on them as well (UN, 2016). Finally, at a prior
moment, empowerment as well as disempowerment are related to others; thus, empowerment is a
method, not a product. Today, due to marketing, globalization, global warming, and fresh
techniques and patterns of migration, the field of cultivation is evolving quickly. The idea of
empowering females, together with males, makes it vital to acknowledge the important role that
females play in agriculture. To assist them adapt to these modifications and take advantage of
evolving possibilities, they need assistance and investment. Whole groups profit from social and
economic advantages when females have access to land, electricity, education, training,
expansion and economic services, as well as powerful organizations. From this, it is evident that
women's equality is essential in reducing poverty, hunger, and malnourishment. To succeed and
develop inclusively in disadvantaged rural societies, women's voices need to be heard and higher
gender equality is crucial (Food Bank, 2019).
Women's liberation can be accomplished in Australia using multiple methods. Many
methods, principles, ideas, etc. are created to encourage women's participation in the
development process and provide them with empowerment facilities. Specifically, Australia's
government requires to create provisions that make it possible for females to have equal access
to technology compared with men in that specific rural region (IFAD, 2012). This can boost the
output of food, which in addition can assist the community to reduce hunger. Some other
technique that the Australian government can apply is that rights of women, as well as
dignity, must be preserved in order to give them a feeling of accomplishment as well as
productivity, that in turn can teach the whole community to produce more food, thus minimizing
the condition of poverty and hunger. Literacy as well as the advancement of the community's
general economic empowerment is essential for providing fundamental understanding of
financial policies to males and females working in Australia's rural areas.
To boost Australia's female empowerment, the authorities must suggest some sex-based
discrimination avoiding consultants that must be published as hunger decrease from Australia's
communities in the women's empowerment scheme. An important project design requirement

must be provided for domestic and local initiatives to show the extent to which a proposal meets
women's expectations and the extent to which females are engaged in the hunger development
plan, which is design, execution, and assessment (Bigliardi, 2013). Not only is malnutrition a
result of poverty; it also creates poverty by transferring it from generation after generation-a
negative feedback loop. If moms are already malnourished, their children throughout pregnancy
cannot grow properly and are often born prematurely and underweight. Therefore, the program
must guarantee that at least 60% of the beneficiaries engaged in program projects are represented
by females. Women's interests were correctly represented in the various steering committees that
Australian government performed for women's general growth at set time periods.
In growth and economics, empowering women is becoming an important subject of
debate. Financial empowerment of females relates to women's capacity to appreciate their right
to monitor and benefit from funds, assets, earnings and their own time, as well as their capacity
to handle the danger and enhance their financial status and the well-being. Women's economic
growth is needed to regulate the hunger condition linked to Australia's rural sites as well as the
globe. Empowered females are seen efficiently in Australia as well as in other nations as the
instrument for managing the condition of poverty and hunger. This makes it necessary for both
the Australian government and every individual to create and enforce certain policies to bring
about women's empowerment circumstances in their nation in order to combat hunger and
poverty in an efficient and effective way.

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