On 22nd April 2021, ARROW delivered an oral statement at the 54th session of the Commission on Population and Development (CPD54). Watch the live intervention here.
The Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW) welcomes the theme of the 54th session of the Commission on Population and Development focused on population, food security, nutrition and sustainable development.
The Asia-Pacific region is home to 4.1 billion diverse people and includes countries that are situated further down the list in the Global Food Security Index.
The right to adequate food and nutrition cannot be separated from women’s self-determination, autonomy, bodily rights and the right to health.
We call upon Member States to:
Advance women, girls and adolescents’ greater control and decision making, and propel them out of poverty in all its dimensions including food insecurity, under nutrition and anaemia throughout the life course.
Apply rights-based approaches in ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, which has strong interlinkages with quality nutritious food, elimination of child, early and forced marriages and other harmful practices, elimination of sexual abuse and intimate partner violence.
The reorganising of food trade should ensure availability of affordable food for domestic consumption with equity as a key tenet.
Women play a crucial role in sustainable agricultural production, food security, food safety and nutrition and their rights should be fulfilled.
Advance genuine redistributive agrarian and land reforms that ensure land to the landless, especially women’s access, ownership and control of land and productive resources.
Focus must be on advancing the economic, social and sexual and reproductive health and rights of marginalised groups and urgently address widespread violations of their rights, including those relating to access and control over natural resources as well as those related to the rights of agricultural workers mostly women in rural areas.
Member States must increase measures to mitigate the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and address the exacerbated existing vulnerabilities which are having disproportionate impact on the lives of women and girls.
Data disaggregation is crucial to include with focus on women and girls in all their diversity including in rural areas
Finally, we welcome the active inclusion of CSO in the consultations and CPD sessions.
