In her updated essay, Marilee Karl reviews the promises of the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) as well as the Millennium Development Goals as she once more makes a case for a sharper gender lens in assessing the current food crisis. She asserts that we are still far from achieving a hunger-free world. The 1996 WFS aimed to decrease the number of malnourished people by 2015 to 400 million yet 2008 saw this number soared to 923 million. In addition, some 75 million more people experienced hunger in 2007.

Karl demonstrates the failure of highly-technological models in ensuring healthy supplies of food and much less, their even distribution and instead argues for community-based initiatives where women's roles as valued. She writes, “Overall, women are responsible for about 50 per cent of the world's food production and in some countries of sub-Saharan Africa, women provide between 60 to 80 per cent of the food for household consumption, mainly as unpaid labourers on family plots.”

Aside from being a critique of the current neoliberal model in trade, the essay also interrogates some analytical tools that attempted to highlight the gender dimension of food security. Karl explains the inadequacy of gender analyses and gender mainstreaming in assessing women's share in food production.

“Gender analysis has sometimes had the unintended effect of marginalising women in development programmes...Projects were devised to direct resources and assistance to women. Unfortunately, in most cases, these resources were miniscule and women ended up being isolated in small income generating project, tacked onto larger development programmes,” she shares. Gender mainstreaming has similar tendencies which result to women's “integrat[ion] and mainstream[ing] into patriarchal systems.”

Karl then proposes the concept of intersectionality where women's situation is analysed not only in terms of gender but other social categories as well. “Gender roles cannot be seen in isolation. Gender intersects and is intertwined with other factors such as race, class and ethnicity that affect or even determine the condition of men and women, their opportunities and choices.”

“Inseparable: The Crucial Role of Women in Food Security Revisited” is one of the articles featured in Women in Action magazine issue, “Harvest Reaped but Hard to Reach .” 

Next issue, we feature a narrative on hunger in an other super-abundant context with Denise O' Brien's essay, “Hunger in the United States.”