Check out this post from our partner organization Women Thrive, another entry in our Food Security in Focus series. This post focuses on the issue of women and food security. Stay tuned to the blog for more entries over the coming days.

-Kara Arsenault

There are about 1.4 billion people worldwide, most of whom are women and children, living in extreme poverty (defined as living on approximately $1 per day or less). As president and co-founder of Women Thrive Worldwide, I spend my days advocating on behalf of these women. This fall, I lived in Tactic, Guatemala for four days, a mountainous, rural region that contains some of the most desperate poverty in Central America. I spent time with three Mayan women—Margarita, Dorotea, and Eluvia—and attempted to experience what they must do everyday: live on less than $1, or 8.3 Quetzales (Guatemala’s currency), per day.

The following is an excerpt from my diary:
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Back at Margarita’s home we talk to her about her life. Because of a poor economy, there are no formal jobs in Tactic, so, like most women, Margarita supports her family selling vegetables that she grows with her husband. However, they can barely produce enough food to feed their family, let alone enough to sell. Hence, their income is extremely low – combined they earn about 50 Quetzales a day ($6.02), which they must split among 13 people.

With limited income and limited crops, come limited diets. In the morning, children in Bempec will usually have a cup of coffee with sugar and two tortillas. At school, they will receive a cup of Atol de Elote (ah-TOLL day eh-LOW-tay), a thin corn-based porridge, followed by herbs cooked in water after school. Mothers often have to send their kids to bed as early as 4pm just to keep them from feeling hungry for dinner.

I look around at the lush landscape and think about how much food Margarita could grow if we could get U.S. development assistance programs to reach women like her. You wouldn’t know it in the States, but much of the developing world, including Guatemala, is experiencing an extreme food crisis.

Yet women, who produce the majority of the world’s food supply, receive a scant amount of the credit that goes to small farmers. It strikes me that growing food in the fertile Western region and selling it to the Eastern region, where there is a famine, could be a path out of poverty for these farmers. But that can’t happen until development programs get serious about helping agricultural communities like Bempec – and women like Margarita. Read more about women & food security here.



Read my full diary, view my photo album, and watch videos from the trip here.

-Ritu Sharma, president and co-founder, Women Thrive Worldwide

Photos by Mckenzie Lock, Women Thrive Worldwide