Women bear brunt of food plight

BULAWAYO, Swaziland

Phetsile Ndwandwe - short, skinny and 23 years old - accepts an apple from a development worker and nibbles at it, stripping the peel with her teeth before handing the fruit to Siphokazi, her baby daughter.

Siphokazi manages a bite of the apple, the first fruit she has had in months, then thanks her mother with a kiss.

Mrs. Ndwandwe allows herself only the peel.

The mother’s sacrifice, health authorities say, is typical and creates a problem across the developing world. In hard times, these women tend to think of themselves last. This puts their families at risk, the specialists say, because malnourished mothers become malfunctioning mothers.

Mrs. Ndwandwe lost her sugar cane plot after falling behind in payments to a village cooperative. So she supports 15-month-old Siphokazi and her 4-year-old daughter, Setsebile, by working in a neighbor’s garden in this village in southern Swaziland, taking her payments in vegetables.

Ancient traditions and modern circumstances often combine to place the burden on women to feed their poor families. Researchers say women do as much as 80 percent of the farm work in poor countries. And - with food and fertilizer prices rising and AIDS and the global financial meltdown taking their toll - women such as Mrs. Ndwandwe are straining under growing responsibilities.

“We eat whatever we can get,” said Mrs. Ndwandwe, after describing a breakfast of cornmeal porridge. She said her husband had gotten sick and died but wouldn’t say what illness he had. When asked what the family would have for lunch, she said she had no idea.

She has seen the price of an apple rise 50 percent in recent months to the equivalent of about 15 cents. She used to take the bus to town to buy a bag of apples to sell to her neighbors, the small profits supplementing her garden work.

Now, she can’t afford the bus fare - and few of her neighbors can afford fruit.

The consequences of women having to scrape together food for their family, often on their own, can be far-reaching. They may not be there for their children at all - a poorly fed woman is more likely to die in childbirth. And their babies are also more likely to grow up physically and mentally stunted. It is a vicious circle that deepens misery in Africa and other lands of hunger.

The United Nations estimates that women and girls account for 60 percent of the world’s nearly 1 billion undernourished people.

Sometimes, it is sudden shocks that hurt. During Indonesia’s drought and financial crisis of the late 1990s, for example, children’s weight remained steady while their mothers wasted away. That indicates women were “sacrificing their own rice consumption” to feed their children, said Tufts University researcher Steven Block.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a humanitarian crisis or an economic crisis or a food price crisis, women are hardest hit. Women are always hardest hit,” said Catherine Bertini, a farming specialist with the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A woman “feeds her husband, and then she feeds her children, and then she feeds herself if there’s anything left.”

Travels across the tiny, landlocked kingdom of Swaziland show that the parched vegetable plots and kitchen gardens are often tended by women raising their families alone. In the past, women worked on subsistence farm plots while men hunted. These days, they have been widowed by AIDS or left on their own by men who spend most of the year in the cities of neighboring South Africa searching for work. They are grandmothers raising grandchildren, the parents beset by illness or poverty.

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