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Indigenous women are 'seed guardians' in Latin America hunger fight, says UN

by Sophie Hares | @SophieHares | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Monday, 15 January 2018 18:06 GMT

An indigenous Warao woman from the Orinoco Delta in eastern Venezuela, washes clothes at a shelter in Boa Vista, Roraima state, Brazil November 18, 2017. Picture taken November 18, 2017. REUTERS/Nacho Doce

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In Latin America and the Caribbean, indigenous people comprise 15 percent of those affected by hunger and extreme poverty

By Sophie Hares

TEPIC, Mexico, Jan 15 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Indigenous women in Latin America must be at the centre of efforts to adapt agriculture to deal with the threat of climate change and help tackle hunger and poverty, said a top U.N. food official.

Jose Graziano da Silva, head of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said women were too often left out of development schemes, despite expert knowledge of the environment passed down through generations.

"They have fundamental roles in the spiritual, social and family arenas and are seed guardians - critical carriers of specialised knowledge," Graziano da Silva told a Mexico City forum.

"Their social and economic empowerment is ... a necessary condition to eradicate hunger and malnutrition in their communities," he said, according to a statement.

Lack of healthcare, malnutrition and illiteracy are other issues faced by indigenous women who generally have little access to the political arena, he said.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, indigenous people comprise 15 percent of those affected by hunger and extreme poverty, despite making up just 8 percent of the population in the region where 45 million identify as indigenous.

Women suffer the most. Wage levels for indigenous women in the region are often four times less than those for men, said the United Nations' food agency.

Indigenous women can play a key role in adapting agriculture and diet to cope with climate change, said the FAO, with traditional indigenous land comprising 22 percent the world's territory and 80 percent of its biodiversity.

The organisation said it would ramp up projects to boost indigenous women's leadership in countries including Bolivia, Paraguay, India and the Philippines this year.

In Mexico, traditional healer and Nahua speaker Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez is a candidate in July's election, the first indigenous woman to run for the country's presidency.

(Reporting by Sophie Hares; editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women's rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/)

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