Gendered Resources: Food and Water Access in the Middle East and North Africa

Introduction
Around the world, men and women interact with their environment in different ways as the result of gender roles. As the result of these gender roles and power relationships, women in much of the developing world have less access to food and water resources than men. Even as they face lesser supply, women generally have a greater demand for environmental assets than men as the result of these same gender roles. Preparing food for the entire family and household chores such as cleaning and laundering requires a great deal of water and food. When women are not given access to these resources, their jobs become more difficult and their status worsened.
Food security is not simply the meeting of a human body’s biological caloric requirement, but the freedom people have in knowing that they will at all times “have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (UN FAO). Food security is contingent on three parameters – availability, accessibility and affordability (Krishnaraj). Too often, the problem is one of access, not of quantity (Smith). Thus women who work all day in agricultural labor, touching food every waking hour, still cannot afford to feed their children. The poor often do not have access to food and water, even when it is overabundant in their area (Smith).
Additionally, food and water security are inevitably bound together. Without meeting one, meeting the other becomes almost pointless. One must be water secure to be food secure; low levels of food security put a person at greater risk for waterborne disease. A critical piece of the puzzle is also land use, as pointed out by Mjoli.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, individuals have particularly stressful relationships with the Earth due to arid conditions, highly-regulated access to natural resources, and harsh politico-economic conditions. This paper will explore gendered access and needs to environmental resources in the MENA region. After a brief explanation of feminist political ecology, existing literature will be reviewed to present the problem, discuss how scholarship in this region often neglects gender issues, and demonstrate how development policies can help to enhance or diminish gender equality in environmental access.

Feminist Political Ecology
Political ecology seeks to understand people’s relationship with their environment, exploring how the environment is utilized, accessed, and valued by individuals, groups, and institutions. Political ecology looks at political, social and economic contexts locally, regionally, nationally, and globally that influence how actors are able and choose to interact with their environments. Feminist political ecology (FPE) deals with the complex context in which gender interacts with class, race, culture and national identity to shape our experience of and interests in ‘the environment’” (Rocheleau et al., pp. 5). FPE explores such issues as the gendered division of labor, access to decision-making and power over environmental regulations and quality, and land ownership and use rights. The “environment,” for feminist political ecologists, is not merely the dichotomized “natural world,” made distinct by Western minds from the cultured human world, but includes bodies, people, urban areas, and international movements. A person’s environment is the grand total of the world in which they live and act, and all of that environment has the potential to help or harm the individual, just as she can help or harm the environment.
Specific to issues of food and water security, feminist political ecology is concerned with how gender roles impact access to food and water resources. Feminist political ecologists would be interested in who is responsible for providing food, who uses water and how they obtain it, and who is recognized in society as having access to and responsibility for environmental resources. FPE would critique a society in which women are expected to cultivate a plot of land for family subsistence agriculture but not given land rights and a state in which migrant male workers are subjected to long hours of irrigating agricultural labor without access to clean water themselves. Both of these occur in the MENA region, as will be shown in the next section.

Literature Review
The first statement that must be made in a literature review discussing the intersections of feminist political ecology, food and water security, and the Middle East and North Africa is that there is a distressing lack of literature to review. Globally, attention to issues of food and water security is greatly focused on sub-Saharan Africa. There is a good amount of feminist political ecology happening in this region, as well as Asia (thanks mostly to Vandana Shiva) and Latin America. But very little attention is given to concerns of environmental justice, food and water security, and women’s relationship to the environment in MENA. Where literature does exist, it is predominately focused on irrigation technologies rather than discussing issues of distribution and access. Where women are mentioned, they are often barely a footnote. And too often, they do not even merit a footnote. In over two hundred pieces of literature reviewed that do address broad issues of food and water in the Middle East and North Africa, only fifty even contained the word “women,” and the authors are almost exclusively male.
Theoretically, there is a great deal of literature addressing gendered access to resources around the globe. It is no surprise, given the near-universal truth of women’s subordination and disempowerment. Why should access to environmental resources be any different? What makes women and the environment significant, though, is the idea that women are somehow “closer to nature” (discussed by Ortner). Thus women, while being denied equal rights in political, economic, and cultural institutions on the basis of their uncultured, natural instincts, are also denied greater – or even equal – access to the nature with which they are associated.
The relationship between gender roles and access to environmental resources is not a one-way street. Just as women are prevented from equal access on the basis that they are less competent than men, lesser access to these resources can result in lower cognitive functioning (Yount). The idea that women are weaker and less intelligent than men thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as “weak, dumb” females are given less food, water, and other resources from a very early age and are prevented from developing as well as their male counterparts.
The Role of Religion
Islamic societies, and the Middle East, are well-known in Western media and discourse for their oppression of women. While much of this discourse is problematic and homogenizing, general trends indicate that women in the MENA region lack equality with men (as they do in the United States). Women’s common lack of economic and political opportunities has been noted by several authors, including Moghadam, Nelson, Skalli, and Sørli et al. This is not to say that women’s oppression is caused by Islam, however. Bahramitash argues that international political economic forces seem to have a greater influence in women’s economic roles than Islam, at least in Iran.
Though we cannot blame religious institutions singularly for women’s oppression and unequal gender roles, this does not mean religion does not have a place in discussions about food and water security. Indeed, the religious implications and uses for food and water must be considered. Sered discusses the connection between “food and holiness,” presenting data about how important cooking can be for Jewish women, even seen as a “sacred act.” Food and water have central roles in many religious rituals in Islam, Judaism, and other religions of the Middle East and North African region.
Linking Gender, Equality, and the Environment
Academic discourses explore food and water insecurity and issues of equality, but this is often broadly focused rather than addressed specifically to the Middle East. Where notions of environmental inequalities are discussed in MENA, gender is generally not the focus. El-Ghonemy explores the relationship between food security, overall inequality, and rural development in North Africa. El-Ghonemy concludes that the lesser the land distribution inequality, the greater the chance that agricultural growth benefits will reach the poor and poverty will be quickly eliminated is; egalitarian agrarian structures are more likely to improve nutrition, health, and educational opportunities; and the more rural individuals can achieve earnings from non-land assets, remittances, and non-agricultural activities, the better they are able to overcome poverty. This means that eliminating the income gap between rural and urban communities requires governments to regard rural areas as more than simply agricultural. It also demonstrates that equality in environmental access can help strengthen equality in other sectors and improve quality of life for the community as a whole.
Ethelston’s article entitled “Water and Women: The Middle East in Demographic Transition” could serve as the poster child for the division of discourse about water resources and women’s empowerment. She asserts that “[i]n assessing demographic challenges facing the MENA region, two concerns stand out: the need for fresh water resources critical for long-term economic development, and the status of women,” and yet says literally nothing about the link between the two. Women are never associated with water; they are dealt with entirely separately. This, though water is characterized by Mjoli as a “woman’s issue.” Indeed, food and water security are more likely to be associated with military power than with women (Scanlan and Jenkins, Sørli et al.).
Ethelston is right to draw attention to water use as a demographic issue. Wallace et al. discuss the rapidly increasing use of freshwater resources as world population rises. They assert that humanity must be careful in its use and ensure equitable use with the environment. Concerns over gendered access to food and water resources must not focus solely on human use, but take into consideration the long-term ecological implications of that use. Women must not fight for the right to rape the Earth as violently as men do, but instead promote ways for all of humanity to live in a greater balance with the environment.
One indicator of gendered relationships with the Earth is the gender ratio of the agricultural labor force. In an gender-equal society, 50-50 ratios of men to women in all sectors of the economy would be expected. This, of course, is not seen in any sector today. The agricultural sector, though, is particularly problematic. As with all statistics, how and who measures can result in very different conclusion. Dixon shows that population censuses yield much lower proportion of females in agricultural labor forces than studies sponsored by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Statistical truths are also greatly impeded by the fact that women are incredibly likely to engage in informal subsistence agriculture; this is also acknowledged by Wenger and Stork.
Often, gendered differences in access to environmental resources and economic status result in very different understandings of the world between genders. A study by Briggs, et al. in upper Egypt indicates that environmental knowledges have become divergent between Bedouin men and women. The authors acknowledge that interactions with the environment, and thus knowledge and understandings of one’s role with it, are fluid and changes with circumstances.
In a particularly interesting article, DeRose, et al. argue that recognition of female disadvantage in calorie intake is problematic. Too often, this fact is interpreted by policymakers as requiring a focus on women’s food security. The authors argue that women’s reduced caloric intake is instead the result of women’s poverty. Pointing to access to food as the main cause of women’s poor health allows governmental officials to blame individual households rather than systemic injustices in the health care system and gendered institutions. It is important not to conflate women’s status and food security too greatly, or other issues of empowerment and disadvantage are excused from criticism and change. This article can serve to caution feminist political ecologists in being too reductionist; women’s access to environmental resources is one form of gendered oppression and power relations but cannot be seen as the only component, cause, or result.

Gender, Food, and Water in the Middle East and North Africa
In the 2003 FAO study, ~41% of the population in the Gaza Strip was food insecure (UN FAO, “Executive Report,” pp. 16). A huge proportion of this food insecurity is due to insufficient water security: More than 60% of water consumption in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is for agricultural purposes (UN FAO, “Main Report,” pp. 7). In times and places when a population is both food and water insecure and more than half their water goes to food, it often means people are deciding between giving a sick child a drink and having another meager meal. Though the geographic and political circumstances of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are intensifying food and water insecurity, numbers are all too similar for Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and other states in the region.
The FAO report further indicates the vast inequalities between women and men’s caloric intakes and environmental accesses. Men are more likely than women to be involved in paid or income-earning labor (and, ironically, this is often agricultural labor, even though the household is too poor to purchase the food just produced by their men’s labor). Women are often responsible for household chores requiring water (laundry, cleaning, cooking), but do not have equal access to water sources – let alone clean water sources.
The inequality between men and women in environmental access is not always the result of family dynamics and direct oppression; rather, it has become entrenched in the system and even the formal state. Nations that have shifted their economies to the agricultural sector ration limited freshwater supplies, giving good water to large, corporate food producers and denying it to women attempting to clothe and feed their children.
Nor is women’s oppression in food and water security homogeneous. Mothers-in-law do not access the environment in the same way as their daughters-in-law do; Bedouin women experience food security in a vastly different way than Jewish women.

Conclusions
There is a crisis going on. People are unnecessarily starving and dying from waterborne diseases in the Middle East and North Africa because no one with power is paying any attention. Though there are clear issues of food and water security across societies and groups in the Middle East and North Africa, the issue receives no significant attention in academic discourse, international aid work, or regional governmental policies. Part of this is the result of world power priorities: The Middle East is seen as a militarized region, to be used or subdued as required, rather than as a heterogeneous region with a multitude of problems, trying to develop on its own terms. As a result, international aid supports food security research and improvement in sub-Saharan Africa while ignoring it in MENA, instead funneling billions of military aid dollars to those states deemed as “friendly.”
This must be changed. Hunger feels the same in Morocco as it does in Ethiopia; unsafe water can kill a boy in Lebanon just as easily as a girl in Malawi. Attention to MENA food and water security must be demanded. Feminist political ecology is one area particularly well positioned to do so. Indeed, feminist political ecologists must apply their worldview and scrutiny on the MENA region or they buy into the further homogenization of women (Leach provides a good discussion of how this homogenization occurs). The little research that currently exists is incredibly limited, and groups “women” as a collective group. Without FPE’s sharp lens, women in the Middle East and North Africa will continue to be seen as a homogenous group, disempowered as the result of Islam, with little or no attention given to the various power relationships involved and how these roles affect society and development.
The Middle East and North Africa will not develop without improvement in the issues of both gender equality and food and water security. The two matters are inextricably linked. It is time that development discourse paid attention.

 
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