The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of the Canadian government approved a grant to Grow Asia Partnership Ltd. and its country offices: Cambodia Partnership for Sustainable Agriculture (CPSA), the Philippines Partnership for Sustainable Agriculture (PPSA), and the Partnership for Sustainable Agriculture in Viet Nam (PSAV) respectively. These three countries have launched a multi-country project entitled “ASEAN Green Recovery through Equity and Empowerment (AGREE)”. The project demonstrates that empowering women farmers, women landowners, and women entrepreneurs in ASEAN is an essential component for economic growth and competitiveness and a pathway for decarbonization and climate resilience. The project will generate value chain analyses of rice, maize, and vegetable value chains, private sector case studies, and pilot testing to inform policy development.
How can women in agriculture contribute to low-carbon economies in ASEAN? ASEAN’s agriculture sector holds great potential in reducing rural poverty, tackling gender inequities, and meeting the climate challenge. Smallholders are the backbone of ASEAN agriculture, with ~55 million households among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Women comprise ~32% of agricultural labor in ASEAN’s agricultural-exporting countries. Women are often engaged only as laborers, seldom own land for collateral, have fewer opportunities to pursue education, and provide care for out-of-school children or sick household members. Given the extent of their roles on and off-farm, women are often most vulnerable to extreme weather and other climate shocks.
At the same time, 23% of GHG emissions come from agriculture, forestry, and land use, yet land also acts as a great carbon sink. With 200 million+ hectares of forest cover, ASEAN is home to nearly 15% of the world’s tropical forests. Still, it is also a major deforestation hotspot, mostly due to the conversion of intact forests into plantations. These priorities have been acknowledged by ASEAN Heads of State, which adopted the ASEAN Comprehensive Recovery Framework and its Implementation Plan as a consolidated exit strategy from the COVID-19 crisis while laying the foundations of a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable future.
The AGREE project responds to these dual challenges by mapping and testing climate-resilient approaches to agriculture which also generate greater opportunities for women to contribute to a low-carbon economy.
The Philippines Partnership for Sustainable Agriculture (PPSA) and the ASEAN Green Recovery through Equity and Empowerment (AGREE) research team conducted focus group discussions among farmers in two municipalities in Mindanao in October 2022.
The project aims to achieve the following objectives:
1. Deepen private sector understanding of the “business case” and buy-in for their value chains to become more inclusive, gender-responsive, and climate-positive.
2. Support policymakers to understand how to support and work with the private sector, research, and civil society to better develop gender-inclusive and climate-positive policies/incentives, access NDC priority financing, or align investments.
3. Identify, design, and test high-impact women’s economic empowerment interventions for scaling in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Viet Nam.
4. Scale interventions so that women in agriculture understand how to adopt climate-positive practices and recognize them as a critical component of their own economic recovery and sustained prosperity.
All content, learnings, and best practices the partnership generates will be shared across the region through Grow Asia’s network and hosted on the Grow Asia Exchange.
For more information - including how you can get involved - please contact Grow Asia’s Sustainable Investment & Inclusion Lead, Erin Sweeney, at erin@growasia.org.