“Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is calling on the international community to give rural women the same access to productive resources as men, noting the huge benefits that would ensue, from increased food production to a drop of 150 million in the number of the world’s hungry people,” the U.N. News Centre reports (10/14).

“The biggest obstacle women face is discrimination, experts and officials said. But women in Africa also receive little agricultural training and do not have rights to land,” Reuters writes. According to a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “if women had the same access to production resources as men, they could increase yields on farms by 20 to 30 percent,” Reuters reports (Stebbins, 10/16).