The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched the FAOSTAT Gender in Agrifood Systems Domain, its most comprehensive platform dedicated to sex-disaggregated data. It serves as a tool for accountability, arming policymakers with harmonized indicators (spanning 2000 to 2024) to track inequalities and design targeted investments.
Why the Dataset is Needed
While women make up 42% of the global agrifood workforce, they face severe systematic disparities and structural barriers:
- Wage Gaps: Globally, female employees in agriculture earn 18% less than men, equating to women making 78 to 82 cents for every dollar men earn.
- Resource Disparities: Female farmers typically work on smaller plots of land. Even when managing the same farm size, they experience a 24% gap in land productivity compared to men.
- Climate Vulnerability: Extreme temperatures and a 1°C increase in average temperatures have a disproportionately higher impact on women’s crop values and household incomes compared to male counterparts.
Objectives and Impact
The platform’s launch ties into the International Year of the Woman Farmer 2026 and the broader Commit to Grow Equality initiative. The FAO emphasizes that closing these gender disparities could be transformative:
- Enhanced Food Security: Eliminating employment and income disparities could address 52% of the global food insecurity gap.
- Economic Boost: Empowering rural women and securing equal access to resources could raise incomes for 58 million people and boost the global GDP by $1 trillion.
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