Funding for the $1 million project, titled Women in Agriculture Network Cambodia: Gender and Ecologically Sensitive Agriculture, was awarded by the Feed the Future Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab, which is based at Kansas State University. The program is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development as part of Feed the Future, the U.S. government's global hunger and food security initiative.
Smallholder farmers produce nearly half of the world's food, but they often have notoriously low yields, strong gendered divisions of labor and limited financial resources, according to lead investigator Rick Bates, professor of horticulture at Penn State.
"Small-scale farming systems such as these -- prevalent in many developing countries -- have been called 'very resilient poverty traps' that are characterized by chronic food and nutrition insecurity," said Bates, whose expertise includes horticulture enterprise development and sustainable food production systems. "Such is the situation in Cambodia, where some regions have 45 percent poverty rates and high concentrations of stunting and malnutrition."
To overcome these challenges, the researchers aim to improve the socio-economic and nutritional status of women and their families by promoting existing and potential sustainable intensification technologies, practices and policies that foster production of nutritious and marketable food while protecting agro-ecological resources.