As the world observes International Rural Women’s Day, the need to acknowledge the widespread food insecurity, affecting more than 300 million people, 88 million of whom are in the Asia-Pacific region, has become more apparent. A significant number of women and children are undernourished and suffer from various illnesses due to a lack of access to safe and nutritious food. The irony is stark – the rural women who grow the food, cultivate the land, fish the seas and protect the forests are among the hungriest and most neglected. This is the result of decades of neoliberal, patriarchal, and corporate control over our food systems, which benefit from women’s labour but deny them rights to food, land and livelihoods.
The food injustice faced by millions of women in the region is not only an issue of food availability and access, but reflects the unequal power relations that govern our food systems. Climate emergencies, economic crises and violent conflict deepen the breakdown of local food production, while the corporate and neoliberal land and water grabbing remains at the center of the crisis. Industrial food systems damage ecosystems, undermine food quality and security, and community well-being. As ecosystems collapse, rural and Indigenous communities lose livelihoods and access to safe, sustainable food sources. Rural women and Indigenous communities are displaced from their sources of food and livelihoods, forcing many to become agricultural or migrant workers.
The sustained extraction and plunder of vital production resources and traditional food systems is not accidental. It is a systematic programme under the neoliberal and neocolonial economic framework designed to erase collective, subsistence-based modes of production and replace them with an industrial, capitalist one that ensures total control of imperialist corporations.
Food has also been used as a weapon through starvation. In Palestine, famine has been declared in Gaza where more than half a million people are being deliberately starved under Israel’s ongoing genocide. Agricultural lands have been scorched, crops destroyed, access to water cut off, precisely to render the land uninhabitable and justify the violent occupation.
Across the Asia-Pacific region, our rural and Indigenous women and communities face similar injustices. Massive land grabbing projects are being enforced by militarisation of the area, subjecting the communities to displacement and other human rights violations. In Papua New Guinea and West Papua, large-scale land concession projects and food estates have handed millions of hectares to around 30 companies, displacing people and clearing forests for rice and palm oil. Mangroves and coastal and marine areas in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka are overrun by large commercial fishing companies, damaging vital marine resources while small-scale fisherfolk struggle to compete. Economic injustices such as unjust taxation among small-scale livestock and dairy farmers in Central Asia place disproportionate burden on already vulnerable producers.
Today’s food injustices are rooted in three decades of neoliberal restructuring through trade agreements shaped by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and various bilateral free trade agreements. These frameworks dismantled state protections, enabled investor–state dispute mechanisms, and embedded corporate privilege into law. The result is a fragile and unjust global food system where corporations exercise control over seeds, prices, and land, while rural women’s continued unpaid and underpaid labour subsidises this exploitation.
But rural women are not passive victims; they are leaders of resistance and resilience. Just as our role in agriculture and food production is central, so is our role in fighting back and reclaiming food sovereignty. Across the region, rural and Indigenous women are saving and exchanging traditional seeds, running community seed banks, building agroecology schools, communal farms, and urban gardens, and organising community kitchens during crises. We are reviving Indigenous land and water management practices and leading militant struggles against land grabs and corporate exploitation. Through these efforts, women reclaim decision-making, restore ecological systems, dismantle corporate monopoly power and strengthen solidarity networks across borders.
As a regional feminist movement, APWLD advances Feminist Food Sovereignty, which recognises women’s leadership in the struggle against the colonial and corporate capture of food systems. Feminist Food Sovereignty demands redistributive, economic and environmental justice that challenges patriarchal and neoliberal policies and institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, WTO and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) that enable the corporate capture of agriculture. It promotes and supports agroecology, traditional knowledge and intergenerational transmission of these practices as foundations for just and sustainable food systems. .
Today, rural women of Asia Pacific observe the International Rural Women’s Day by asserting our crucial role in food and agriculture, amplifying our voices and demanding our rights to food, land and justice. Grounded in our collective struggles and action, we join all rural women and communities, including Indigenous, Dalit, migrant, LBTQ+, women with disabilities, urban poor and women workers across the Global South in resolutely confronting and overcoming food injustice and upholding an agricultural system that prioritises people and planet over profit. ##
#FeministFoodSovereigntyNow #InternationalRuralWomensDay #FightforLandFoodJustice
