Women’s Economic Empowerment: A Sustainable Path to Food Security

There is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, but the number of people affected by hunger and malnutrition is still ‘unacceptably high’ (FAO 2014), with disproportionate impacts on women and girls. Due to unequal and subordinate gender roles, women face lack of access to and control over critical livelihood and productive resources. This asymmetric power relation severely constrained the capacity to participate and “capability” to build their “assets” and rise out of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, exploitation, dependency, discrimination, marginalization and deprivation. The paper is based on the contention that women’s economic empowerment is a key to unlock the way to ‘Smart economics’. Based on the premise of the gender dimensions of food security, the paper contextualizes the ‘structural constraints’ of rural women in India, makes an attempt to provide a way for transforming the gender-specific constraints into opportunities, and put forth a gender-inclusive policy paradigm for the post-2015 development