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• Provides a comprehensive overview of the key challenges encountered by women smallholder farmers, such as restricted access to markets and technical training programmes
• Addresses the critical role of women smallholder farmers to the success of global agricultural production
• Includes a selection of case studies which highlight the development of programmes to aid women smallholder farmers in crop and livestock production

Women play a central role in agricultural value chains by doing work and investing resources across value chains from production to consumption of the products. However, as agricultural value chains commercialize or upgrade, women risk being marginalized and eliminated from commercial activities of value chains. This chapter draws on Ugandan research and development programs supported by the International Livestock Research Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through the Uganda Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services to identify the gendered structure of pig value chains that women smallholders participate in. Findings reveal that inequalities exist in the structure for division of labour, and the benefits that women and men derive from pig value chains. The chapter suggests that supporting women smallholders involved in pig farming requires further understanding of women’s role, the risks they're exposed to, and generating de-risking solutions to promote their work and investments along pig value chains.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are internationally agreed aspirations to guide political action and development efforts until 2030. The guiding questions for this chapter were two-directional: What is the relevance of the SDGs for smallholder women? And, what do smallholder women contribute to the achievement of the SDGs? The chapter explores these questions through a narrative review on the evidence available and by systematically reviewing the indicators and targets of all 17 goals for visibility of smallholder women farmer. The co-authors analyze and interpret of what is captured and what is overlooked vis a vis smallholder women farmers in the SDGs considering their positioning both as potential agents and as potential beneficiaries of the goals. The chapter articulates critiques and limitations of the SDGs vis a vis this demographic and proposes priorities for the final six years of these SDGs and beyond.

Women smallholder farmers globally are confronting social, economic and environmental challenges related to water resource management with impacts on access to energy, drinking water and food. Furthermore, it is common for women in rural regions to be subjected to physical, economic and slow violence. In this chapter the authors utilize a water-energy-food (WEF) nexus framework with a gender lens to analyze the experience of women smallholders in the fields and in the home in three rural communities in the Magdalena River Watershed in North Colombia. The WEF nexus framework helps reveal integral connections between these elements to show both the magnitude of the challenges women face as well as how they gain access to these resources to produce food and reproduce lives.

Coffee and tea are two of the most ubiquitous beverage crops that are grown globally, and together they represent a significant share of the beverage industry overall. Even with the rise of packaged sodas, tea remains the second most popular beverage in the world, just below water. Coffee, though less sipped than tea by volume, is second only to crude oil in terms of its value (International Coffee Organization, 2015). Due to the value of these beverage crops, the production of coffee and tea represents an important point of focus for addressing global inequalities in agriculture for women in smallholder farming. This chapter will explore the recent historical evolution of these industries and efforts by women coffee and tea farmers to address inequalities in their agricultural spheres on the farm, in cooperatives, and through coordinated efforts at multiple levels of the coffee and tea supply chains.

Gender-sensitive analysis is critical to understanding women's roles in agrifood systems. However, studies typically portray agrifood systems as mechanistic entities controlled by macro level structuring forces. In this chapter, we apply a new materialist perspective to examine how farmers from the Association of Renewed Intibucan Women affect or are affected by horticultural crops. We analyze the relations that integrate the assemblage of women and horticulture, the affects that draw these relations together, the capacities produced or constrained, and the emerging micropolitics and long-lasting dis/advantages. We find that, by relying on available resources, horticulture crops enhanced AMIR member’s capabilities to fulfill their roles, while strengthening their position in their households and defending their right to occupy feminist spaces, in a way that other economic activities might not have made possible. This examination emphasizes the significance of contextual knowledge to guide the design of development interventions to support women and mitigate inequality.

Women smallholder farmers in this region have generally had to seek land in the interstices of large male-owned land holdings. Such smallholdings have been ignored in official statistics and the gender of their ownership rarely considered. European colonialism has strongly influenced farming and Covid 19 and climate change have worsened rural poverty. Recent positive changes for women smallholder farmers have largely come about through new ideas on sustainable development and gender introduced by international agencies. The chapter considers the background and current status of women smallholder farmers in Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Special emphasis is given to Barbados which has long had a high proportion of women smallholder farmers. Much of the information provided is based on field research.

There are numerous studies on the interlinkage between gender and agricultural productivity and gender and agricultural technology adoption. However, most of these studies use the sex of the household head as a gender indicator, which ends up dismissing the contributions of males in female-headed households and females in male-headed households. This chapter provides a detailed overview of these studies, focussing on the factors that influence the adoption of agricultural technology by women smallholder farmers, as well as how differences in agricultural productivity between male and female farm households can be measured.

Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) is a major banana disease affecting small-holder farms in East and Central Africa. While BXW management practices have been introduced across extensive regions, achieving high levels of disease control and/or eradication has proven difficult. Resurgence of BXW in managed sites and the transmission to new regions are ongoing problems. In this chapter we present an overview of the disease epidemiology followed by the state-of-the-art of BXW control and prevention measures. We address management practices that have shown variable adoption successes, and present innovations recently introduced (including Single Diseased Stem Removal and improved tool sterilization options) or underway (including the development of resistant cultivars, and risk mitigation through early warning systems). Next, we discuss lessons learned from problems that have arisen during phases of implementation of management, the constraints that local farmers face and the shift towards sustainable management through integrated participatory extension services.

Rice provides 20% of the world’s food energy, and increased rice production owing to growing demand needs to be derived mainly from existing agricultural land. This requires reducing the ‘yield gap’, which is defined as the difference between potential yield and average on-farm yield obtained by farmers.
In this chapter, we provide case studies of yield gap analyses using different benchmarks (potential yield, experimental yield and best farmers’ yield) for estimating yield gaps. We start with studies focusing on the quantification of yield gaps and then describe studies with a focus on identification of the causes of yield gaps. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges to achieving better quantification of yield gaps and their causes, and the implications of yield gap studies for sustainable agricultural development to meet future rice demand.