80% Of The World Farmers Are Women

I was just putting some groceries away and was thinking about where our food comes from. It's Thanksgiving time and women in our country are busy making menus, shopping, and planning for a nice day.Our tables will be loaded with food.We just come home from the store and empty the car...carrying bags of groceries in the house and put them in our cupboards...seldom giving thought to the farmers who grew this food. I ran across this writing while doing some research on my computer. I never knew!

Consider the daily life of the world’s typical small farmer," said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "She lives in a rural village in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, or Latin America."
That's right: women grow more than half of the world's food and the lion's share (as much as 80 percent) of the food in developing countries.Despite their majority contribution, however, women only own 2 percent of the world's land. Around the world, women are deprived of legal rights to the land they toil over day after day.
Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International said that this is a bigger problem than simple unfairness. "We cannot address environmental issues, sustainable farming issues, industrial agriculture issues, food crisis, if we are going to ignore [the fact that women are over 80 percent of the world's farmers and they own about 2 percent of land in the world," she said. "How can you have a policy that ignores the people that are doing the work on a daily basis?"
That's why they are launching a new Global Center for Women's Land Rights, The center will research and advocate for policies that will help women gain legal access to their land.
“Women feed the world. Providing women with secure land and property rights is essential to addressing poverty, food security and violence against women," said Renée Giovarelli, founding director of the Center.
Hillary Clinton said that women would be at the heart of the international agricultural priorities of the Obama administration. At the G-8 Summit in July, Obama pledged a minimum of $3.5 billion over the next three year as a contribution to the $20 billion pledged by all the G-8 nations toward strengthening global agricultural systems.
"We have seen again and again . . . that women are entrepreneurial, accountable, and practical," said Clinton. "So women are a wise investment. And since the majority of the world’s farmers are women, it’s critical that our investments in agriculture leverage their ambition and perseverance."

I just thought it interesting...maybe the next time we go to the store to shop....we will think about this and thank our sisters in the fields all over the world... for all their hard work.

Balisha

The Painting....The Gleaners

When The Gleaners was first exhibited in 1857 it met with mixed reviews within the art world. Some commentators attacked its depiction of the rural poor, which on the one hand served as an unwelcome reminder of the marginalized poor (who were taken to be a threat to society), and on the other hand were consider the kind of grotesques who had no place within the artistic realm. Part of the shock value of Millet’s painting was undoubtedly due to the fact that in the past gleaning had usually been represented in art through the Old Testament tale of Ruth the gleaner, in which Ruth is characterised as a modest and virtuous example of the way to God, and not – as it was now – a statement on rural poverty.