To Help Feed the World, Help Women Avoid Unwanted Pregnancies

There's a lot of fretting going on about how we're going to feed all the people on the planet, especially as the population continues to boom and climate change raises the specter of crop failures and water shortages. The New York Times reports that experts believe we will need to increase food production by 50 percent over the next 20 years. Some see genetically modified organisms or other techno-fixes as the best way to do that.

As Nicholas Kristof and others remind us, however, there's a much simpler way of addressing this problem. Empowering girls and women in developing countries will reduce birthrates, which means fewer mouths to feed. Additionally, because women make up the lion's share of the farm workers in developing countries, giving them access to training and lessening their family burdens via family planning can only be good for food production.

Not only does empowerment lower birthrates, but improving women's rights and education is good for societal health as a whole, bringing people out of poverty and thereby increasing food security. Kristof points to Bangladesh as an example, saying that the country's policy of educating and supporting women has led to "a virtuous spiral of development, jobs, lower birth rates, education and stability."

Yet women's empowerment is not an international priority, as evidenced most lately by the exclusion of their concerns from the climate change debates. They are also "largely ignored by development aid around the world," officials at the Clinton Global Initiative said recently. And according to Worldwatch Institute, the percentage of global development aid dedicated to population and reproductive health dropped as a share of global health aid to 13 percent this year, down from 30 percent in 1994.

If we wanted to get busy solving the impending food crisis, aid to women's priorities, including family planning, would be jumping off the charts right now. Instead what's getting all the attention is science-based techno-fixes for agriculture.

As Tom Laskawy writes in Grist "if this were really about preventing the catastrophe of 9 billion mouths to feed in 2050 (as GMO proponents incessantly remind us), the obvious answer isn’t a magic seed, it’s to do all we can to ensure there aren’t 9 billion mouths to feed in 2050."

If it's so obvious, why are so few people talking about it? Let's start the conversation!

Photo: UN Photo/Tim McKulka