A/HRC/22/72
17.
The Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families
(CMW) provides entitlements for rural women to access education and vocation training as
well as protection against the use of misleading information related to migration,
trafficking, or unfavourable conditions of employment and remuneration.
18.
Not least, the protection framework applicable to rural women comprises a series of
equality provisions to be found in Conventions of the International Labour Organization
(ILO). Of these, the two fundamental ILO Conventions, those on Equal Remuneration (No.
110) and on Discrimination (No. 111) should be mentioned here.
19.
The integration of these identified human rights safeguards into comprehensive
legislative and policy instruments is necessary in order to achieve the full realization of the
right to food of rural women. States may find guidance in the updated version of the United
Nations Comprehensive Framework for Action to draw up food and nutrition security
policies.16 Certainly, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and in particular those
aiming at eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, promoting universal education, gender
equality and women empowerment, at reducing child mortality and improving maternal
health, may result in better livelihoods for rural women. States should nonetheless be
mindful that following such initiatives does not relieve them from the obligations
undertaken under human rights treaties. Voluntary schemes may be seen as temporary
benchmarks on the path towards the compulsory full realization of the right to food of every
human being, including rural women.
III. Patterns of discrimination against rural women
20.
A human rights approach requires the identification of vulnerable groups. The same
human rights approach, however, recognizes that vulnerability is not a given attribute
explainable by the sex of a person, but that vulnerability is a social construct.17 More often
than not, patterns of discrimination, de jure and de facto, stemming either from the action or
inaction of the State or the family, are responsible for this vulnerability. The established
fact that women across the world, and especially in Africa, Asia and South America, are
more likely to go hungry than men finds its roots in patterns of discrimination. 18
21.
A number of treaty bodies and United Nations initiatives have joined the pioneer
academics who have long advocated the need to take an intersectional approach to
discrimination.19 Kimberle Crenshow’s work has exposed the “single-axis framework” that
has been dominant in anti-discrimination law, which in her example, blinded the analysis,
since it excluded black women’s experiences not as women, or as black people, but as black
women.20 There is an increasing recognition today of the importance of addressing
16
17
18
19
20
High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, Updated Comprehensive Framework for
Action, September 2010.
M. B. Anderson, “Understanding the Disaster-development Continuum”, 2 Focus on Gender 1
(1994); A.R. Quisumbing, “Male-Female Differences in Agricultural Productivity: Methodological
Issues and Empirical Evidence”, 24 World Development 10 (1996).
FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2010–2011: Women in Agriculture. Closing the gender gap
for development, Rome, 2011; K. Hansen-Kuhn, Women and Food Crises: How US Food Aid
Policies Can Better Support their Struggles, Discussion Paper, ActionAid USA.
See CERD, general recommendation No. 25; A/55/18, annex V; CEDAW, General Recommendation
No. 18; Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 1995, http://www.un.org/womenwatch
/daw/beijing/pdf/BDPfA%20E.pdf and in the Outcome Document of the twenty-third special session
of the General Assembly “Women 2000: Gender, Equality, Development and Peace for the TwentyFirst Century”.
K. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of
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