Project rationale:

Rural women, particularly women farmers, indigenous women and agricultural workers, continue to be disadvantaged and discriminated against and have limited options for developing new and adequate sources of livelihood. In addition to gender discrimination, rural women experience social and economic exclusion due to their ethnicity, age, (dis)ability, nationality, caste, religion, or sexual orientation. Nearly 58% of economically active women in Asia work in the agriculture sector but less than 20% hold secure tenure of the lands they farm and face impediments such as the lack of access to credit, infrastructure, irrigation and machinery.

This discrimination begins at home and permeates at all levels, including community and national levels where discriminatory laws and practices keep rural women from fully participating in political and economic life.

Rural women face multiple burdens. In many countries in Asia, the out-migration of men and young people often leave women in rural areas providing the main labour for their own farms or as waged workers. As agricultural workers, they receive very low wages, face insecure conditions of work and lack access to social services.

Rural women are also exposed to pesticides. There are about 385 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning annually, and an overwhelming number of fatalities. Some 99% of fatalities occurred in developing countries where health, safety and environmental regulations are weaker. Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.

As women workers in plantations and in the agri-food sector, women experience specific challenges. Women workers, especially in the plantation sector, are exploited. This contributes to a higher risk factor for women workers exposed to hazardous agrochemicals. Worse, even when they suffer from ill effects of pesticides, they are not provided with free medical treatment and indemnification. Occupational health and safety of these workers are ignored and many of them are often casual workers without contracts. There is a complete lack of labour rights and they rarely have any form of social protection.

Moreover, because rural women are severely impacted by climate change, our focus also allows for the development of social protection policies that would strengthen climate resilience grounded on structural development and disaster prevention and mitigation.

Climate-induced disasters such as drought and flooding further put climate-sensitive sectors such as rural women in extreme risk. Majority of rural populations in Asia are concentrated in agricultural communities and along coastlines. Already reeling from anthropogenic-induced devastations such as pollution and over- exploitation of these resources, rural women and their communities stand to further decline in productivity and sustainable livelihoods, and will further slide way below poverty thresholds. Climate-sensitive sectors such as rural women are identified as climate-vulnerable sectors, yet this is not matched by clear plans of action and funding allocation for social protection and labour rights by nation states.

Lastly, the recent COVID 19 pandemic has intensified the decades of inequality and marginalisation of small farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous peoples, further pushing them into landlessness, unemployment, poverty and vulnerability. Marginalised communities are increasingly suffering loss of income and livelihoods, health-related issues, food insecurity and malnutrition. They lack access to social protection mechanisms, including social health protection, crop insurance and/or unemployment benefits, and are unable to withstand such onslaught. In contrast, even in the midst of the pandemic, big agribusinesses and pesticide corporations are still reaping huge profits.

Nations should be built on a social contract between duty-bearers and stakeholders allowing citizens to exercise their rights and to hold governments accountable. Social protection is a policy that underpins this principle if governments grant all citizens the right to claim adequate protection while contributing to its national budget/funding.

PANAP recognizes the critical role of social protection in strengthening its work in food sovereignty, agroecology, nutrition, agriculture, poverty eradication and rural development, as well as in its efforts to enhance the resilience of rural livelihoods to shocks and stresses. The project identifies women working in the food production, including the agri-food sector, particularly farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous peoples who face multiple livelihood risks, as those who are in dire need of improved social protection and labour rights.

The project will address the abovementioned areas of focus in relation to improved social protection and labour rights, categorized into the following main concerns and areas for discussion: 1) rural women’s empowerment and rights focusing on social protection; 2) impacts of climate change and Covid-19 as vulnerabilities of women farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous peoples; and, 3) impacts of pesticide use and digitisation of agriculture on the lives and livelihoods of rural communities.

The FAO Social Protection Framework Promoting Rural Development for All has some positive recommendations for us to consider and others that may not be applicable for us as CSOs or movements. This framework views social protection to play protective, preventive and promotive roles. It can play a promotive role in providing means (i.e. crop insurance, unemployment benefits) to access food and mitigate the impact of shocks. It can also play a promotive role by directly supporting investments in human resources (i.e. health insurance, education, nutrition and skills development). It can have a preventive function in averting deeper deprivation by strengthening resilience against shocks and stresses and preventing loss of incomes and livelihoods. Social protection can also have a transformative function in the lives of rural women and communities through re-orienting their focus beyond day-to-day survival by shifting power relations within households (to empower rural women) and by strengthening the capabilities and capacities of those living in poverty to empower themselves (i.e. through agroecology, collective and organic farming, among others).

The project seeks to engage with governments and duty-bearers via social dialogue, campaigning, multi- stakeholder initiatives, mechanisms and negotiation, to be reinforced by national and regional campaigns and advocacy work. It will maximise existing accountability mechanisms for a rights-based approach, including but not limited to relevant ILO conventions and recommendations, relevant ASEAN declarations, CEDAW, FAO, UNEP, among others.

The target outcome integrates a specific focus on rural women’s empowerment and resilience, both from a decent work and gender-based perspective of economic, social and political empowerment in the workplace, in society and at the household level. Without gender justice, labour rights and social protection cannot be achieved.

The project is grounded on the Joint Strategic Framework of Decent Work and contributes to the Three Pillars of Decent Work: 1) promotion of labour rights (wages, occupational health hazards [to include impacts of the use of hazardous pesticides], and gender-based violence); 2) expansion of social protection (shock-responsive and gender-transformative); and 3) social dialogue (tripartite, meetings, collective bargaining and other dialogue mechanisms, such as multi stakeholder approaches). Indirectly, it also seeks to contribute to the creation of more decent jobs through regularisation and formalisation of highly informal sectors. Farmers’ cooperatives and organisations will serve as role models in this respect.

By including small farmers and agricultural workers in the target groups and beneficiaries, the definition of workers is expanded, thus providing a particular added value to the Decent Work Agenda. Indeed, farmers and agricultural workers are own-account (informal/irregular) workers contributing to the economy, the national budgets and food production/security. They deserve to have equal access to government support and protection that complement market-based national and regional strategies.

Taking cue from this context and rationale, this new project has four major strategies for implementation within a five-year period (2022-2025), with corresponding activities and target outputs:

The first major strategy of the project will focus on the documentation of the vulnerabilities of women farmers and agricultural workers and their suggestions in terms of:

• The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the livelihoods, incomes and health of their communities; and the resilience strategies of/for women. This would also include any recommendations from women about what would be important for them to protect their health, livelihoods and support more This will be characterized by individual interviews or focused groups discussions with rural women.
• The situation of pesticide distribution and use in the different countries, with the aim to update the stakeholder analysis and gender dimensions of the issues. This would be something ongoing for Laos and Vietnam using CPAM. For others, we will do a training on how to use the web app and it will require interviews with women who are using
• The potential impact of digitisation of agriculture, particularly since it is being spearheaded by the UN to solve the problems of food production as part of the economic recovery for rural areas after the Right now, this would be secondary research with some discussions with partners to verify if the information is correct.

The second major strategy will focus on policy advocacy and campaigns to bring attention on the need for shock responsive social protection and labour rights in the ASEAN and its member states, FAO, and UNEP and its member countries. This will be characterized by the publication and dissemination of the results of the research documentation to focus communities and the general public; the release and development of policy briefs on specific topics/issues for distribution and sharing at ASEAN meetings, in UNEA and regional meetings, FAO meetings, side events, etc; the release and popularization of campaign materials and policy advocacy campaigns; and the distribution of relevant information to various stakeholders and network partners.

The third major strategy is the building of resilience of women farmers and workers and their communities to improve their livelihoods and reduce poverty. This will entail the following activities:

• Documentation of successful strategies and good practices of resilience (food production) and agroecology and marketing strategies. This would be documentation that partners would do with women;
• Knowledge-exchange and sharing through broad social media outreach;
• Research on the economic, environmental and social impacts of strategies of resilience and agroecology to develop policy briefs for ASEAN and its member countries;
• Online research through interviews with women and experts through learning exchanges;
• Sharing of women’s stories of struggles, resilience and agroecology practices through videos, websites and face-to-face exchanges and workshops.

The fourth major strategy will focus on the strengthening of the network of rural women farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous peoples and youth in Mekong countries and at the regional level. Activities will include:

• Skills trainings of partners through webinars and face-to-face meetings, workshops on organizing, mobilizing and skills on policy advocacy and campaigning and the use of media;
• Support for and strengthening of local women’s movements;
• Collaboration and cooperation with a broad sector of partners, regional groups, people’s movements, rural women groups, including the Asian Rural Women’s Coalition, to support campaigns on the rights of women farmers and workers to decent work and shock- and gender-responsive social

Objectives

Overall, the project aims for 5,000 women farmers, agricultural workers and indigenous women to be strengthened in support of their right to social protection, as well as their rights to gender equality, resilience and agroecology.

Specifically, the project aims:

1. To contribute evidence-based knowledge and documentation with regard the risks and vulnerabilities that women farmers and agricultural workers face, including insights into vulnerabilities caused by climate change, which will provide basis for advocacy work; and,
2. To support cross-sectoral alliance building between rural women farmers/agricultural workers and labour rights movements, in the process introducing labour rights and social protection issues in the work of PANAP network members.