On 16th of June 2023, during World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, representatives of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) warned the international community that women and girls in low- and middle-income countries are suffering the greatest burden of drought, land degradation, and desertification. Climate change and intensive, unsustainable land use, combined with legal and socioeconomic inequalities, mean that women, especially in rural and agricultural settings, are the most exposed to food and water scarcity and to forced migration. Part of the solution to these growing socio-environmental catastrophes is to bolster women's rights and agency in land management, and the UNCCD called upon world leaders to prioritise equal land rights for women globally.

Food systems face enormous challenges in meeting global nutritional needs over the coming decades. Substantial increases in global food supply during the 20th century were made largely through intensive agricultural practices that rely on fossil-fuel-based synthetic fertilisers and large-scale irrigation; despite the tremendous growth in food supply, around 10% of the world population remains undernourished. Population growth, income growth, and climate and environmental change will put greater pressure on food systems and on fresh water and land resources, through increasing demand and potentially lower agricultural yields. Around a third of the world's soils are moderately to severely degraded, due to intensive farming practices and poor land management; which also reduce biodiversity, increase flood and wildfire risks, and damage ecology through nutrient and chemical waste pollution. Such intensive farming systems, and practices like monocultural crop growing, might also be less resilient than lower intensity and more diverse systems to shifting weather and disease patterns as the climate changes.

Smallholder farms are key to securing good household nutrition in low-income populations and to mitigating some of the impacts of climate change. Around 80% of the world's farmers are smallholders. According to the charity Oxfam, smallholder agriculture can be two to four times more effective at reducing poverty and hunger than any other sector. Smallholders often raise a greater variety of foods than larger commercial farming and might choose to use growing practices like crop rotation, agroforestry, or polyculture; all of which can increase resilience to extreme events and market price variability and improve household nutrition and income.
Almost half of the world's agricultural workers are women and women farmers produce up to 80% of the food grown in LMICs. Despite their large contribution to agricultural labour, fewer than 20% of landowners globally are women.

Gender discrimination around access to land, to loans, machinery, equal pay, and commitments to under-recognised domestic labour, limit women's agency and potential agricultural productivity, and create greater exposure to climate risks. However, when women smallholders have the decision-making power, they might choose less intensive and more diverse farming strategies that prioritise household or community nutrition, income and resource stability, and spreading the risk of harvest failures.

This idea is supported in a research article from Lilia Bliznashka and colleagues, who find that in rural households in Burkina Faso, India, Malawi, and Tanzania, when women have greater input into decision making, a greater amount and range of foods and more nutritious foods are grown. Similar associations are found with women's participation in community groups and their ownership of assets. These results reinforce the importance of women farmers’ autonomy in improving household nutrition and income and potentially the resilience of local-scale food systems.
Agricultural, economic, and nutritional interventions that focus on empowering women farmers and cooperative groups can contribute to the intersecting goals of promoting women's rights, improving nutrition, and safeguarding the natural environment. However, political and cultural barriers need also to be addressed at the national scale. The UN Gender Social Norms Index 2023 report found that the prevalence of biased beliefs against women's leadership and decision making has not improved globally over the last 10 years. A good place to start in shifting these gender biases would be to recognise and reinforce women's land rights and to witness the fruits of those labours for the health of people and the land.