Food security for sustainable agriculture development: a perception of women empowerment in Rajasthan, India

Abstract

Women play a vital role in advancing agricultural development, food security and nutritional outcomes. They participate in all aspects of rural life, including paid employment, trade and marketing, as well as raising crops and animals, collecting water and wood for fuel and caring for family members. But women face multiple constraints in many of the activities they pursue that limit their productivity. Relative to men, women tend to own less land, have limited ability to hire labour and have impeded access to credit, extension and other training services. They started to work in almost all fields like men and are equal to men. Inspite of the various measures taken up by the government after independence women haven't been fully empowered. The ground reality is deprivation and exploitation of women specially women from rural areas and those belonging to deprived sectors of the society. The study was conducted in Pali district. For this study, 160 rural women were selected and gathered information through structured interview schedule. The results of the study revealed that, majority of the women participated regularly in activities like sowing operations, weeding and intercultural operations, harvesting and post harvesting operations and animal husbandry activities. Major per cent of them participated in training demonstrations on vermiculture training and dairy training. Majority of the women perceived that losses at storage (due to storage pests attack), pests and diseases attack are the major causes for food grain losses. Empowerment of women in agriculture field is one of the major strategies for achieving food security. Hence, there is a need for empowerment of women in terms of social, cultural, economical and educational dimensions to play an important role in the overall development of the country. There is a need for empowerment of farm women to take care of food production and post harvest production losses for global food security through extension strategies.