Food & Drink
Celebrating women
Two inspiring women from Yeo Valley Organic share advice for International Women’s Day.
8 March 2023
In 2026 – the UN Year of the Woman Farmer – Slow Food is giving a voice to women across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America to spotlight a fundamental truth: women are the backbone of agrifood systems worldwide, even though their work remains undervalued, underpaid and too often invisible.
Agrifood systems are among the largest sources of employment for women globally. According to FAO’s report, ‘The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems’, 36% of working women worldwide were employed in agrifood systems in 2019, compared with 38% of men.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 66% of women’s employment is in agrifood systems (compared with 60% of men). In Southern Asia, the gap is even more pronounced: 71% of women in the labour force work in agrifood systems, versus 47% of men.
Despite their central role, women’s work is more likely to be informal, irregular, labour-intensive and poorly paid. Much of it is not even formally recognised as work.
‘Women are not ‘helpers’ in agriculture. As we see in our Slow Food Farms around the world, they are farmers, processors, entrepreneurs, seed guardians, and community leaders.
‘Recognising their rights, especially secure access to land, is the most transformative action we can take for global food security. If women stopped farming tomorrow, the world would stop eating. It is time for institutions to move from symbolic celebration to structural change.’
DALÍ NOLASCO CRUZ
Slow Food Board member
Across continents, the answer is clear: secure land rights for women.
From Togo to Greece, Malawi to Iran, Cameroon to Burundi to Pakistan, women identify land ownership as the cornerstone of economic independence, climate resilience, productivity and dignity.
Limited access to land is compounded by restricted participation in specialised training, limited access to credit and technology and underrepresentation in decision-making bodies and cooperatives.
‘Women’s labour is essential, but land and financial decisions are often registered in men’s names. This limits women’s access to bank loans, equipment and specialised training. Many support programmes do not formally recognise small-scale women farmers. These structural barriers prevent women’s true capacity in food production from being fully acknowledged.’
FATIMA MALEKI
Farmer at Reza Slow Food Farm in Iran
Women-led cooperatives, social farms and short supply chains are emerging as important tools to strengthen both economic autonomy and social recognition, but structural barriers remain.
Across regions, the message is consistent: without secure land tenure and equal access to resources, women remain central to production but excluded from power.
‘Rural women constitute 58% of the agricultural workforce in Bangladesh. Yet strict patriarchal norms, mobility restrictions and limited inheritance rights restrict access to land, credit, inputs and technology. Without collateral and with male-centric extension services, women are confined to small-scale, lower-productivity activities, limiting their potential and the overall productivity of the sector.’
MAHFUZA KHATUN
Monoharpur Native Producer Farmers Slow Food Community, Bangladesh
Women are at the heart of household food security. They manage gardens, diversify diets, preserve seasonal harvests and educate children about nutrition.
‘Women are central to all four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilisation and stability. Without them, food security would collapse.’
LANGSI YELOMA RUTH
Environmentalist and coordinator for Slow Food Indigenous Peoples in Cameroon
Beyond the household, women are also guardians of biodiversity and agroecological knowledge.
They conserve local seed varieties, practise composting and sustainable beekeeping and transmit traditional processing and culinary skills that strengthen climate resilience.
‘Women are guardians of traditional seeds, indigenous recipes, and sustainable farming practices. They preserve local crop varieties and use environmentally friendly methods passed down through generations, which supports biodiversity and resilience.’
AFSHAN ALTAF
Potohar Slow Food Community in Pakistan
Across Nigeria, Iran and many other regions, women preserve crop diversity and food traditions increasingly threatened by climate change, land degradation and industrial food systems.
As Sahadatu Saana from the Akkuffokrom Slow Food Convivium in Ghana notes: ‘Producing food is only one part of a food system. Women plan balanced meals with limited resources, adapt during shortages, and prioritise children, the elderly and the sick. This determines whether food becomes healthy nutrition. Without this role, food availability does not automatically translate into food security.’
‘Women are custodians of traditional food knowledge’, adds Wendy Gómez, coordinator of the Slow Food Farm Casa Huerto Buena Vista in Peru. ‘Our understanding of local foods, medicinal plants and sustainable practices is too often dismissed, yet it is fundamental to building healthy, resilient and culturally rooted food systems for future generations.’
Yet the hours spent processing harvests, preparing meals, preserving food and passing down knowledge remain largely unpaid and unrecognised.
Across continents, women transform harvests into food and food into livelihoods.
In Togo, Ghana and across sub-Saharan Africa, women mill millet, sorghum and maize; they produce shea butter, preserve vegetables, fish and meat and manage agro-processing units that produce juices, flours and oils.
‘Women play a very important role in their homes, as they are responsible for transforming their family’s food into delicious dishes that help them maintain good health. This is a great responsibility for women today, given the crisis our country is currently experiencing, in addition to the severe drought’, comments Maricé Perez Caro from the Slow Food Farm Ilusión Guajira in Cuba.
In Greece, Lilian Kouidou of The Chilli Factor Organic Slow Food Farm highlights the cultural dimension of this labour: ‘In rural Greece, women are not just farmers. They cultivate, harvest, package, manage accounts, cook, organise logistics and sell. Generational renewal is not only about farms surviving, it is about food traditions surviving.’
Women are highly present in local markets, selling vegetables, grains, fruits, honey and prepared foods. In Burundi, they dominate municipal markets; in Nigeria, some even trade across borders.
Yet access to regional and international markets remains constrained by certification requirements, infrastructure gaps and limited financial autonomy.
Empowering women in agrifood systems is not only a matter of gender equality. It is essential to reducing hunger, increasing incomes and strengthening resilience in the face of climate and economic crises.
Slow Food is calling for concrete structural reforms, including secure land rights for women, equal access to credit, insurance, inputs and technology, recognition of unpaid care and post-harvest labour, support for women-led agroecology and biodiversity protection, and equal participation in cooperatives and decision-making bodies.
For International Women’s Day (08 March), Slow Food urges governments, financial institutions and international organisations to translate recognition into enforceable rights and to ensure that women farmers are no longer invisible pillars, but acknowledged leaders of the world’s food systems.
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