Women in Agrifood Systems in Latin America and the Caribbean

FAO’s regional report updates its 2023 global study with evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean, while insisting that “women in agrifood systems” is not a single position. Rural, Indigenous, Afro-descendant and younger women encounter different relations to land, water, livestock, finance, technology and public institutions. The report’s regional lens is useful precisely because global averages can make those relations disappear.

Women make up 36 percent of the region’s agrifood-system workforce, and 71 percent of those women work in non-agricultural segments such as processing, marketing and sales. A 14-country sample finds women account for 55 percent of food-manufacturing workers and 52 percent of trade workers, but only 9 percent of transportation workers. These figures describe different parts of a value chain, not a universal profile of rural women. They also complicate the familiar image of agricultural work as only cultivation: processing and trade are central, while the more profitable or mobile segments remain unevenly accessible.

The report’s most important distinction is between participation and power. It notes that women’s share of agricultural activity has risen in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past two decades, yet this has not brought equal access to productive resources or representation in decisions. More women working can coexist with unpaid family labor, irregular hours, limited control over income and a heavier share of domestic and care work. The system counts labor differently from the way it distributes ownership, security and authority.

FAO reports a 9.1-percentage-point gender gap in moderate or severe food insecurity in 2022, after the gap widened to 11.5 points in 2021. Its review also finds an explicit gender-equality objective in 26 percent of the agricultural policies analyzed; fewer than 15 percent address discriminatory social norms, climate change or resilience. Those are findings about the report’s reviewed material, not every policy in every country. They point to a policy problem: naming women as beneficiaries is not the same as changing the rules and institutions that shape their work.

A feminist reading should welcome regional evidence without treating “empowerment” as a synonym for productivity. Secure tenure, collective organization, care infrastructure and a real voice in decisions matter even when their value cannot be reduced to output. Pair this report with FAO’s global overview of women in agrifood systems and FemRes’s analysis of Indigenous women’s rights in Latin America: together they help distinguish regional patterns from the specific histories and claims of communities. Read the FAO report and its official English summary.