Location: Monsanto Room

Time:1:00pm-2:20pm

Moderator: Dr. Juan Andrade, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Faculty Speaker:

“Subsidizing Drip Irrigation: the (re)feminization of agrarian labor in India”

Dr. Trevor Birkenholtz, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Doctoral Student/Visiting Scholar:

“Climate Change and Impacts on Nutrition, Food Security, and Gender: Evaluating Development Policy in Honduras”

Elizabeth Sloffer, Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The impact of climate change on food security is an urgent concern in developing countries. These countries bear the burden of food insecurity and increased vulnerability to climate change—a double burden which disproportionately affects women and children. Current development policy seeks to mitigate risks of climate change while also pursuing another timely goal—gender empowerment. The standard suite of evaluation indicators for such programs focuses heavily on economic outputs, such as assets held and income generated as proof of program effectiveness rather than gendered or health-focused indicators. When we over emphasize economic development to the detriment of other indicators of nutritional health, food security, and well-being, we a situation which favors men’s success over women’s. Over time, this leads to a situation where development policy is incongruent with local social norms in a way that prevents gender related goals from being realized. In this paper I focus on U.S. development policy for climate change resilience as it impacts nutrition, food security, and gender issues in Honduras. Through this case, I will examine issues of elite capture, mechanisms benefiting nutrition and food security as well as likelihood of reaching targeted populations.

“Integrating women’s traditional knowledge into the fabric of socio-economic development in Morocco”

Bernadette Montanari, Visiting Scholar, Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy (SDEP), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

For several decades now, Morocco has benefited from a series of funded development initiatives that seek to resolve women’s economic stagnation, especially for the rural areas of the country. While these policies have contributed to alleviate poverty in the urban zones, rural women remain isolated in terms of socio-economic development and opportunities in the rural world. With the second Pillar of the Green Moroccan Plan that preconizes social integration and socio-economic development through income generating activities (IGA), there stands a unique opportunity for women to use their traditional knowledge skills and practices toward these goals. In this presentation, I seek to demonstrate that the Moroccan government has undermined these practices that need to be recognised as a socio-economic tool in the country’s landscape of development initiatives.