MUMBAI, 10 March 2026: As the world enters the International Year of the Woman Farmer, a landmark World Agriculture Forum dialogue exposes the gap between women’s immense contributions to global food systems and the structural barriers that continue to deny them land, finance, and power.
The Paradox
She wakes before dawn. She plants, harvests, processes, and carries food to market. In Sub-Saharan Africa, she generates nearly 80 percent of household income from the land she tends. In Jordan, Libya, Syria, and Palestine, she makes up more than 60 percent of agricultural labour. Globally, she accounts for 43 percent of the world’s farming workforce — rising to 60–70 percent across much of the developing world.
Yet she owns less than 15 percent of the world’s agricultural land. She is largely excluded from formal finance, technology, and markets. She earns roughly 20 percent less than men doing the same work. And in many countries, she cannot legally inherit the field she has farmed for decades. This is the defining paradox of global food systems in 2026: the people who do the most to feed the world are the least empowered to control how that work is recognized, rewarded, or sustained.
“The necessity is no longer to make the case for women’s inclusion, but to redesign agri-food systems so that women can lead, decide, and thrive.” — World Agriculture Forum Report, December 2025
More than a Labour Force
Women in agriculture are not a monolith. They are farmers and pastoralists, seed custodians and researchers, processors and cooperative leaders, market traders and climate innovators. Yet decades of policy have treated them as a single, undifferentiated category — offering one-size-fits-all training programmes, small-scale input packages, and schedules adjusted around childcare, while leaving the underlying power structures entirely intact.
That approach, experts say, is why progress has stalled. Access to seeds, credit, or extension services is valuable — but it is not the same as agency. A woman can technically have access to a water pump, credit line, or seed bank, and still lack the authority to decide what she plants, control the income she earns, or transfer the land she farms to her own children.
"It’s not an access problem. It’s a power problem."
Dr. Nicoline de Haan, Platform Director of the CGIAR Gender Impact Platform, made this distinction central to the dialogue convened by the World Agriculture Forum in December 2025. Gender inequality in agriculture, she argued, is rooted in power relations: who makes decisions, whose knowledge is considered valid, and whose aspirations are treated as legitimate.
Her framework distinguishes between two dimensions that most interventions fail to address: agency — a woman’s ability to articulate her goals and act on them — and social norms, the informal rules that define what women are expected to do, want, and become. Together, these forces explain why women remain excluded from livestock ownership, crop selection decisions, and leadership roles, even in communities where formal policy has notionally opened the door.
“Transformation requires changing norms, strengthening agency, and aligning technology with social and institutional realities.” — Dr. Nicoline de Haan, CGIAR Gender Impact Platform
Land: The Root of everything
If a single thread runs through every dimension of women’s exclusion from agriculture, it is land. Without secure land tenure, women cannot access credit (which requires collateral), cannot make long-term investments in soil health or irrigation, cannot diversify into climate-resilient crops, and cannot participate in formal markets. Land insecurity locks women into informal, unpaid labour — and traps their households in food insecurity, even when those households are the ones producing food.
Across the MENA region, women own less than 5 percent of agricultural land despite comprising half the agricultural workforce in many countries. In Egypt, women dominate animal husbandry but own almost no land. In Morocco, women form the backbone of agricultural employment but are largely confined to informal work with no social protection. In Tunisia, women constitute the majority of agricultural workers and earn significantly less than men.
These are not anomalies. They are the predictable outcomes of inheritance laws, land registration systems, and customary practices built over more than a century on the assumption that the farmer is male.
When climate change hits hardest
Climate change is compounding every structural disadvantage women already face. Droughts destroy crops that women grew but could not legally own. Water scarcity forces longer journeys that women make while men attend coordination meetings. Land degradation erodes the productivity of plots women farm without the title to invest in improving them.
Nour El Jundi of the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture has documented this dynamic across Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. Women farmers, she found, are actively seeking to shift toward more climate-resilient and nutritious crops — millets, drought-tolerant varieties, neglected indigenous species. But in many settings, they are excluded from the very decisions about what gets planted on the land they work.
“Climate change is not gender-neutral, especially when women do not have access to land or decision-making power.” — Nour El Jundi, International Center for Biosaline Agriculture
The Women Alliance for Climate Action in Agriculture (WACAA), launched at COP28, is one response: a platform that documents women’s own assessments of their constraints and priorities across regions, rather than designing climate solutions from the top down. Women surveyed consistently identify the same priorities: training in climate-smart practices, land tenure reform, access to microfinance and inputs, and local markets close enough to reach.
The system was not designed for women
Nikolet Zwart, a specialist in international agribusiness law, locates the problem at the level of architecture. The legal, market, and technological infrastructure of global agriculture was built over more than a century from a predominantly male perspective. Individual components can be repaired, she argued — but the underlying design keeps producing the same exclusions, which is why incremental reforms so rarely deliver systemic change.
The three domains are mutually reinforcing. Legal frameworks restrict inheritance and asset ownership. Market structures create entry barriers that limit women’s access to higher-value roles. And technological systems — from digital finance platforms to AI-driven advisory services — are frequently designed using male-dominated data, male-coded assumptions, and male-centred governance.
Emerging technologies offer a rare opportunity to rethink this architecture rather than retrofit it. But only if women are in the room when those systems are being designed — not added as an afterthought once the infrastructure has already been built.
What the evidence demands
The WAF dialogue produced seven concrete recommendations for policymakers, development institutions, private sector actors, and technology developers. Together, they reflect a shift in framing: from asking how to include women in existing systems, to asking how to rebuild systems around women’s realities.
- Secure land and tenure rights: Legal reform, inheritance rights, and enforceable mechanisms that enable women to access, control, and benefit from land.
- Gender-transformative approaches: Move beyond gender-neutral programmes to interventions that explicitly address power, norms, and agency.
- Design technology with women, not for them: Co-creation of digital platforms and AI systems using low-barrier formats grounded in women’s actual needs.
- Invest in cooperatives and local institutions: Empower community-level bodies as anchors for policy implementation and sustainable inclusion.
- Build open, shared knowledge platforms: Reduce duplication and accelerate learning by unifying gender and agriculture data across geographies and value chains.
- Link climate action to women’s leadership: Integrate women’s agency, market access, and decision-making into every climate adaptation and resilience strategy.
- Invest in gender-disaggregated data: Expand data systems to hold governments and institutions accountable for outcomes, not just inputs.
The economic is settled
For those who remain unconvinced by the equity argument, the economic evidence is equally compelling. Closing gender gaps in agriculture could increase global GDP by approximately 1 percent and reduce food insecurity for an estimated 45 million people worldwide. Haifa Al Kaylani OBE, President of the Arab International Women’s Forum, has argued for years that women’s economic empowerment is not a social programme — it is one of the highest-return investments available in the development toolkit.
Agriculture already accounts for roughly one-third of global GDP and sustains the livelihoods of the majority of the world’s rural poor. Women are central to that system. Their labour is essential. What remains missing is the institutional recognition, legal protection, and economic agency to convert that labour into ownership, income, and influence.
“Sustainable agriculture cannot be achieved without women’s leadership, economic participation, and institutional representation.” — Haifa Al Kaylani OBE, Arab International Women’s Forum
The moment is now
The International Year of the Woman Farmer is not simply a commemorative moment. It is a window: a convergence of political momentum, digital transformation, climate urgency, and growing accountability for gender-disaggregated outcomes that creates genuinely unprecedented conditions for systemic reform.
Across regions, practical proof points already exist. Climate-smart value chains anchored in women’s cooperatives. Seed multiplication programmes embedded in national research institutions. Quinoa development projects in Morocco co-designed with women’s groups to ensure cultural relevance and market viability. Leadership pipelines for women researchers in MENA. SMS-based advisory platforms designed around low literacy and restricted mobility.
These initiatives demonstrate something important: transformation is possible when solutions are designed with women, grounded in local realities, and supported by institutions built to last beyond a single project cycle.
The question facing policymakers, development institutions, private sector actors, and technology developers in 2026 is not whether to act. The evidence has long since settled that argument. The question is whether the systems they build will finally be designed to serve the people who have always fed the world.
Image credit: wotr.org