This book is about the effects of AIDS on women and food security in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. AIDS is more than a health problem. Rural households and women in particular have to cope with the lack of labour in agriculture which threatens their food security. For the matrilineal Agni women land ownership appears to be an unexpected burden, rather than a safeguard from poverty. Culture matters, but not in similar ways everywhere. Matrilineal or patrilineal kinship organisation, gender inequality, and norms about sexual relationships very much influence the differences in Agni and migrant women's vulnerability to AIDS. African women are often seen as victims of AIDS. This study shows that women may also use their creativity and social networks to battle and to be resilient against the effects of the illness in their everyday household activities. Using a combination of quantitative statistical data and qualitative methods, this research questions the effectiveness of mainstream AIDS policy and interventions in Côte d'Ivoire. Victimising the poor does not help. Instead, multi-sector policy intervention can mitigate the social effects of AIDS by improving household food security and by changing cultural practices through local leaders who have historical legitimacy and power.

This book introduces the human right to adequate food and nutrition as evolving concept and identifies two structural "disconnects" fueling food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers: the separation of women’s rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health. Three conditions arising from these disconnects are discussed: structural violence and discrimination frustrating the realization of women’s human rights, as well as their private and public contributions to food and nutrition security for all; many women’s experience of their and their children’s simultaneously independent and intertwined subjectivities during pregnancy and breastfeeding being poorly understood in human rights law and abused by poorly-regulated food and nutrition industry marketing practices; and the neoliberal economic system’s interference both with the autonomy and self-determination of women and their communities and with the strengthening of sustainable diets based on democratically governed local food systems. The book calls for a social movement-led reconceptualization of the right to adequate food toward incorporating gender, women’s rights, and nutrition, based on the food sovereignty framework.

This volume discusses the significance of human rights approaches to food and the way it relates to gender considerations, addressing links between hunger and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, agricultural productivity and the environment.

This second publication in the AWLAE series on HIV/AIDS and agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa discusses the gender dimension of HIV/AIDS impact at household and community level. It does so in using the threefold typology of gender specific constraints, gender intensified disadvantages and gender imposed constraints. Special foci of attention include the implications of gender constraints for food security in rural settings, where women are the main producers of food crops as well as the main caregivers; and how cultural norms determine the different options open to women in contrast to men in mitigating the effects of the epidemic. This last point provides the link to the last publication in the series, which discusses agricultural mitigation strategies in the context of HIV/AIDS as a challenge to human development. The text is followed by an annotated bibliography.This second publication in the AWLAE series on HIV/AIDS and agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa discusses the gender dimension of HIV/AIDS impact at household and community level. It does so in using the threefold typology of gender specific constraints, gender intensified disadvantages and gender imposed constraints. Special foci of attention include the implications of gender constraints for food security in rural settings, where women are the main producers of food crops as well as the main caregivers; and how cultural norms determine the different options open to women in contrast to men in mitigating the effects of the epidemic. This last point provides the link to the last publication in the series, which discusses agricultural mitigation strategies in the context of HIV/AIDS as a challenge to human development. The text is followed by an annotated bibliography.