The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released its 2011 State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report this week, just in time for International Women's Day on March 8. The report illustrates how better investments in female farmers would prevent malnourishment in 100-150 million people, because of the ways women are likely to allocate resources in a food-shortage-threatened world.

"The report shows the hard economic numbers behind a message we've known for a long time, which is that women are crucial for agricultural security," says Terri Raney, SOFA editor.

And, as climate change-induced floods and distorted weather patterns put farmers and food security at increasingly greater risk, including causing a wave of 50-million climate change refugees, the message from the report is likely to hit home across the developing world.

"The takeaway message is that gender equality is not just a problem for women or for NGOs to deal with. It's a problem for entire countries--their rural economic development and agricultural security, ministers of finance, the entire state apparatus, and the private sector," says Raney.

To read the entire article, link here.

For additional reading, link to this BEEF magazine piece entitled Scientists Counter Climate Alarmists.