对于数亿妇女来说，提供食物来养活家人是每天的必要性。他们中的许多人仅取决于小地块和农场的微薄产量，当重要作物失败时，几乎没有或根本无法获得支持。同时，他们承担着家务的负担，例如取水，洗涤和烹饪。由于这些原因，水短缺和对粮食安全的其他威胁通常比男性更大，对社会文化，经济，生态和政治问题产生连锁反应。

Last month at the fifth UN High Level Political Forum (HLPF) in New York, where progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was reviewed, separate discussions on SDG 2 (zero hunger) and 5 (gender equality) may have fallen short in addressing the complexities of the food security-gender gap. The importance of the issue is underlined by statistics: women comprise, on average,43％的农业劳动力in developing countries, grow as much as 80 percent of all food consumed in Sub-Saharan Africa, and produce亚洲所有主食的50％。These numbers are, in fact, underestimated―if unpaid work was accounted for, the figures would be even higher.

This year, media reports from various regions elucidated the risks and challenges that women farmers face in times of water stress. In drought-stricken East Africa, women were forced to shoulder a ‘triple burden’ - 生存，照顾他们的家人，并在寻找水时走得更远时逃避性暴力。津巴布韦的交替干旱和洪水条件意味着女性农民丢失的a considerable proportion of their yield and were susceptible to domestic violence from male members of their household when harvests failed. In various South Asian countries, the climate-forced migration of male household members burdens women with additional farm labor; this stress is compounded by结构和社会障碍访问以男性为中心的推广服务，这些服务无法提供针对妇女农业角色的信息，投入或技术。

Women’s vulnerability to risks of changing weather patterns is even greater when they own no assets to hedge against these risks. Speaking on a panel on gender equality at the UN HLPF, Uganda’s Director of Gender and Community Development, Jane S. Mpagi, asserted that “access to, control over and ownership of productive resources such as land and credit” is a central issue in the feminization of poverty. In developing countries, only所有土地所有者的10-20％是女人。缺乏土地，财产和技术的女性所有权也转化为获得财务和家庭决策的限制，并防止她们朝着可持续农业的方向发展。

To understand where this double disadvantage is most pertinent for women, we compared global data on water stress usingWRI的渡槽水风险地图集数据打开粮农组织的妇女农业持有(Figure 1).

Figure 1: Female agricultural holders and overall water-stress (Data source: Gender and Land Rights Database, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, World Resources Institute) Graphic by Samantha Kuzma
Figure 1: Female agricultural holders and overall water-stress (Data source: Gender and Land Rights Database, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, World Resources Institute) Graphic by Samantha Kuzma

This figure highlights a few key challenges in the water-food-gender nexus:

  • 许多国家没有收集有关女性农业持有的数据。这一缺乏全国性收集的性别，性别分散的数据导致了对该问题性别性质的错误识别和低估，从而使其不在有关水和粮食安全的讨论之外。

  • 在大多数收集这些数据的国家中，只有不到20％的农业土地所有者被列为女性。许多北非和亚洲国家报告的人数不到10％。但是，这一低数字并不能表明妇女对农业的贡献，因为在女性在农业部门的整体参与方面，后者是世界上最高的。

  • 在北非和亚洲，绝大多数土地所有者是男性，也有很大的水压力。在这些地区，妇女可能处于双重劣势。凭借关于家庭劳动的强大性别问题，是妇女必须走得更远才能收集水，并面临较低的农业生产力的后果。

联合国讨论的参与者同意，随着各国朝着2030年议程（实现可持续发展目标的行动计划）的前进，必须改变各州对性别平等的孤独方法的转变。全球范围内以及本地的性别分散数据的收集将有助于向决策者告知水和粮食生产风险对妇女的独特影响。在实施新的解决方案以有效管理水资源或增加的收益率时，官员必须采取行动确保男人和女性都是受益人。

潜在的回报是巨大的。如果妇女可以获得诸如土地，水，农业投入，金融，推广服务，信息和技术等资源的机会，她们可以通过20-30％。赋予农业部门妇女权力可以使100-1.5亿人退出饥饿，从而朝着旨在消除饥饿和促进性别平等的可持续发展目标取得进展。