Women play important roles as producers of food, managers of natural resources, income earners, and caretakers of household food and nutrition security. Giving women the same access to physical and human resources as men could increase agricultural productivity, just as increases in women’s education and improvements in women’s status over the past quarter century have contributed to more than half of the reduction in the rate of child malnutrition.

Trade liberalisation processes impact differently on men and women due to the fact that men and women have different roles in production. Despite the fact that women are actively involved in international trade, WTO agreements are gender blind and as such have adverse impacts on women. The General Agreement in Trade and Service (GATS), for instance, provides for a level playing field in service provision between big foreign owned companies and small locally owned companies.

The Commission for Gender Equality has put land restitution programme at the top of its agenda for the gender summit in August. Cites paper by Dr Funiwe Jaiyesimi-Njobe saying the big problem is that land is usually allocated to groups headed by males. Women and communities are too often viewed as homogeneous groups. Calls for encouragement of a critical mass of women entrepreneurs in rural areas. Also cites Samantha Hargreaves of the National Land Committee saying women are usually excluded from restitution programme and are unlikely to be represented on CBOs.

Covers introduction, farm workers in South Africa, tenure security for farm workers with a focus on ESTA – including the justice system, farmers’ responses and women farm workers; equity share schemes; rural housing and land redistribution; lessons to and from South Africa.

Closing statement from workshop on culture, practice and law: women’s access to land in Rwanda. Contains recommendations on the marriage problem, the inheritance law, land scarcity and population growth, the land policy and the bill, the environment, discrimination.

In what ways does political transformation mean a change in meanings and practice of citizenship - in the relationships between individuals and the state? This paper discusses the experiences of women, particularly black women, of citizenship in South Africa, where the new administration promised a new politics based on civil society and universal citizenship.

Peru's fifth submission to the United Nations Committee that monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) outlines the status of women in Peru. The government has faced difficulties changing attitudes that discriminate against women. However, mandatory changes in Peru's education system, including the introduction of the National Sex Education Programme, are highlighted as positive steps.

Critical shifts are affecting rural resource rights in Africa through widespread reform in land, forestry and other laws. The cutting edge of transformation affecting women is in emerging new provision for wives to hold family property as co-owners with their husbands, which could play a main role in revitalising smallholder agriculture. Recognition that equity in domestic land relations may ultimately be a prerequisite to the modernisation of subsistence agriculture in agrarian economies is the thesis underlying the analysis of legal texts in this paper.

Despite advances in the international rights regime, persistent discrimination evident in the customary laws which regulate women's status in most traditional societies was a constant factor across cultural, social and political divides. The case-histories and testimonies recorded by the Kigali Consultation provide an insight into changes in land and inheritance rights brought about by conflict and its attendant social disruptions.

Does poverty in Egypt have a woman's face? Is female poverty linked to their conditions in the labour market or levels of education? Are women particularly at risk in poor households? This report addresses the gender dimensions of poverty using the recent Household Expenditure, Income and Consumption Survey of 1999/2000 for Egypt. Poverty measures of males and females were found to be significantly different, in both urban and rural areas, where higher levels are observed among females than males.

This study explores the impact of changes in environmental conditions on intrahousehold labor allocation to the collection of environmental goods such as fuelwood and leaf fodder for a sample of rural Nepali households. Using household-level panel data collected in 1982 and 1997, the study finds that household collection time significantly increases with measures of environmental resource scarcity, and that the increase appears to come almost equally from men and women.

Para las sociedades agrarias, la tierra no es sólo un medio de producción , sino un elemento cargado de significados y valoraciones que define a los individuos, da sentido a su forma particular de existencia y los vincula con un entorno cultural determinado. La tierra es a la vez signo y referente de un conjunto de relaciones sociales que involucra pertenencia y lugar en una estructura social: su posesión puede implicar prestigio y poder sobre otros, y su carencia puede representar subordinación y vulnerabilidad.