Brainfood: Gender edition
- Informality in food environments: a systematic review of nutrition, livelihood, and sociopolitical outcomes and implications for food policy. A review of 327 studies across 64 countries shows women make up the majority of informal vendors, and their businesses are shaped by gendered constraints: eg access to public space, regulation, childcare and personal safety. Food policy needs to recognise informal food environments and address their social and political dimensions, not treat them as peripheral to the formal food system.
- Role of urban and peri-urban agriculture in nutritional diversity, cultural resilience and community-based food security in an Eastern Himalayan city. A study of 150 households in Imphal, Northeast India, finds that almost all urban households engage in some form of food production, with women managing most of it. Container, rooftop and terrace cultivation help maintain access to a diversity of fresh vegetables and herbs as traditional homestead gardens disappear under urbanisation, contributing significantly to nutritional security, cultural continuity and community resilience.
- Land tenure as a catalyst: Synergizing gender equality and agrobiodiversity conservation for sustainable development in Asian vulnerable areas. An analysis of 1,089 households across 12 sites in five Asian countries finds that women with secure land tenure manage greater crop species and variety diversity, because they can make independent decisions. The relationship varies considerably among countries and agroecologies, but it seems that strengthening women’s land rights can deliver benefits for both gender equality and agrobiodiversity conservation.
- The gender dynamics of crop varietal choices in rural Kenya: navigating risk, diversification, and decision-making. Drawing on interviews and focus groups across five Kenyan counties, this study examines how women and men negotiate crop varietal choices in the context of unequal access to resources and climate uncertainty. Both value production characteristics, but women place greater emphasis on processing and consumption qualities, while men tend to prioritise marketability and yield potential. Land ownership, household authority and cultural norms influence whose preferences prevail, with implications for conservation, breeding priorities and seed systems.
- Gender matters in seed system assessments: evidence from smallholder farms in Morocco, Senegal, and Madagascar. Surveys of 1,054 smallholder farms reveal substantial differences between women’s and men’s accounts of seed management and sourcing practices. Women are systematically underrepresented, partly because researchers commonly interview male household heads and overlook the constraints imposed by women’s care responsibilities. Gender-disaggregated data collection is thus essential for understanding how seed systems actually work, and seed assessments can reproduce the very inequalities they are supposed to measure.
- Sons or seeds: gender, care work, and agrobiodiversity in translocal households of rural China. Fieldwork in two mountainous Chinese villages explores the dilemma facing rural women who balance caring for family members with maintaining local seeds and agroecological practices. As men migrate for work, women take on more agricultural responsibilities, but are also expected to provide childcare and look after older relatives. Women’s knowledge and labour sustain agrobiodiversity while remaining undervalued and frequently uncompensated. Don’t romanticise women as natural guardians of seeds while overlooking the economic and personal sacrifices involved.
- Feminist Agroecology and Criollo Hens: Women’s Everyday Resistance in Colombia. The expansion of industrial poultry production in Colombia threatens traditional backyard hen keeping, undermining women’s autonomy and increasing dependence on commercial inputs. However, everyday practices of care, intergenerational knowledge sharing and community cooperation help sustain alternative poultry systems, a form of resistance to industrialisation and an important source of women’s socioeconomic autonomy and community resilience.
- Preserving Indigenous Peoples’ values and rights in food composition programmes: A call for agreed international guidelines. Food composition research can help broaden understanding of the nutritional value of Indigenous foods, but it also raises questions about who controls the knowledge and how it is used. Drawing on examples from First Nations in Canada, Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, Sámi in Sápmi and Indigenous Peoples in Northeast India, the authors call for participatory approaches grounded in free, prior and informed consent, data sovereignty and access and benefit-sharing. The idea is to ensure that Indigenous Peoples, especially women, are recognised as rights-holders and active knowledge holders, rather than simply sources of information for scientific research.
- To round things off, here’s a policy brief on Gender and Social Inclusion in Agrobiodiversity Conservation from the CBD Women’s Caucus and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, aimed at the just-concluded COP17 of the CBD>
Source: https://agro.biodiver.se/2026/11/brainfood-gender-edition/
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