Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that its policies and funding support equal pay for female and male farmers.

DFID’s 2017 Economic Development Strategy commits to tackling gender discrimination and to delivering safer, more secure and higher-return work for women, building on the 2015 UK commitment made through our G7 membership to include gender objectives in at least 50% of agriculture and food security programmes. A 2018 review of DFID’s commercial agriculture programmes found that 31 of DFID’s 65 commercial agriculture programmes aimed to increase the returns received by women working in agriculture.

The Department also assists the development of standards that help smallholder farmers reach a decent standard of living: for example, by providing £3.7 million in assistance to the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance (ISEAL Alliance) which supports systems such as Fairtrade. DFID is also a founding member of the Living Income Community of Practice.

DFID’s 2019 review of commercial agriculture programmes finds that since 2007, 22 million smallholders have benefitted from DFIDs current commercial agriculture programming (3.4 million of them women) with 4.7 million of these (1.1 million women) having benefited financially.