There is a paradox that has haunted global agriculture for decades, a disproportion so stark that its continued existence borders on institutional embarrassment: the women who feed the world are among the world’s most systematically dispossessed. They constitute the majority of the agricultural labour force in the Global South — contributing an estimated 60 to 70 percent of agricultural labour globally — and yet own a fraction of the land they till, receive a sliver of available credit, and remain largely absent from the councils where decisions about their own work are made. It was to confront this paradox, and to move beyond the conference-table regret that has long accompanied its recitation, that New Delhi opened its doors in March 2026 to one of the most consequential agricultural gender dialogues of recent years.
The Global Conference on Women in Agri-Food Systems — GCWAS-2026 — was inaugurated on 12 March by President Droupadi Murmu, in the presence of Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, at the Bharat Ratna C. Subramaniam Hall within the ICAR Convention Centre at the NASC Complex, Pusa Campus. The valedictory session, on the third day, was presided over by the Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Annapurna Devi. That this conference was flanked, at opening and close, by the constitutional head of state and a Cabinet minister responsible for women’s welfare was itself a statement of institutional seriousness — the sort of symbolic architecture that signals to the world where a host nation places its priorities.
A Year of Reckoning, a City of Purpose
The conference was jointly organized by ICAR, the Trust for Advancement of Agricultural Sciences (TAAS), CGIAR, and the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Authority (PPV&FRA), with over 15 national and international bodies participating as co-organizers and knowledge partners. Its timing was far from accidental. The programme coincided with the UN-declared International Year for Women Farmers in 2026 — a designation that gave the proceedings the weight not merely of institutional convention but of global moral consensus. The conference theme, “Driving Progress, Attaining New Heights,” was chosen, one senses, precisely because it resists the passive grammar of aspiration; it insists on movement, on altitude, on the kinetics of actual change.
CGIAR engaged through its Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator, bringing to bear cutting-edge research on inclusive and sustainable development outcomes. Among the international luminaries present were figures whose careers have been defined by the very questions GCWAS-2026 sought to address: Dr. Bram Govaerts, Director General of CIMMYT; Agnes Kalibata, Founder and Chair of Connect4Impact Advisory Group; Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, World Food Prize Laureate from WorldFish; Julie Borlaug, President of the Borlaug Foundation; and Nitya Rao, Professor of Gender and Development at the University of East Anglia, among others. A total of 18 countries participated in the conference, reflecting its stature as a genuinely global platform.
The Architecture of the Event
The conference was constructed around nine thematic technical sessions and three plenaries — a structure dense enough to accommodate the full complexity of its subject without dissolving into abstraction. The sessions ranged from an “Interface with Global Women Trailblazers” and a focus on mainstreaming gender equality, to dedicated discussions on emerging and disruptive technologies for gender-transformative change, economic inclusion, and gender dynamics in policy and market access.
Two forums gave the conference its most distinctive character. A Women Farmers’ Forum was designed specifically to address grassroots realities and bridge farm-level experience with policy frameworks, while a Youth Forum engaged the next generation of agri-food leaders, recognizing that the transformation sought cannot be delivered by the present generation alone — it must be inherited, internalized, and carried forward by those who will farm the fields of the mid-twenty-first century. An accompanying exhibition showcased women-oriented technologies, women-led entrepreneurial ventures, and start-up innovations — theory and practice in productive proximity.
The Delhi Declaration: From Resolution to Architecture
If one outcome defines GCWAS-2026 above all others, it is the adoption of the Delhi Declaration. Presented by Dr. Renu Swarup, Former Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology, the Declaration announced the establishment of a Global Alliance on Women in Agri-Food Systems, committing stakeholders to champion gender-responsive policies and institutional reforms across agri-food value chains, strengthen enabling environments ensuring women’s access to land, finance, technology, and digital innovation, ensure gender-responsive budgeting, and establish robust accountability mechanisms including periodic gender audits.
This last commitment — the periodic gender audit — deserves particular attention. It transforms intent into accountability, aspiration into verification. Too many declarations of this kind have foundered on the absence of precisely such mechanisms; GCWAS-2026, in building audit architecture into the Declaration itself, appears to have learned from that institutional history.
Technology as Transformer, Not Token
One of the conference’s most analytically significant emphases was its insistence on technology as a substantive instrument of gender equity, not merely a decorative addition to a social justice agenda. The call for “Technology for Transformation” — the conference’s flagship strategic framework — argued for innovations that specifically address the disproportionate physical labour burdens borne by women farmers in subsistence and smallholder contexts. Climate-smart tools designed for women’s ergonomic realities, digital platforms delivering direct access to market pricing and credit facilities, AI and IoT applications calibrated to the needs of resource-poor women producers — these are not abstract futurisms but practical interventions with documented precedents.
The conference additionally recognized women’s largely unacknowledged role as custodians of plant genetic resources and biodiversity, calling for institutional and financial support to empower these grassroots custodians — and for regulatory simplification in seed value chains to support women’s transition from custodians to agri-entrepreneurs. This is a subtle but profound reframing: the woman farmer not as beneficiary of policy charity but as knowledge-holder, innovator, and economic agent whose potential the system has systematically underutilized.
The Arithmetic of Inequity
The numbers, as always, are both indispensable and insufficient. Women farmers produce approximately half the world’s food yet own only 13 percent of agricultural land and receive less than 2 percent of available agricultural credit. The conference emphasized the need to expand women’s access to knowledge, credit, markets, and training — the four pillars whose absence defines the architecture of agricultural gender inequity. These statistics are not new; they have circulated in development discourse for decades. What GCWAS-2026 attempted — with some success, judging by the Delhi Declaration — was to move their moral weight from the realm of lament into the grammar of action.
There are conferences that generate documents and conferences that generate momentum. GCWAS-2026 — by virtue of its timing within the International Year for Women Farmers, its high-level political imprimatur, its genuinely international participant base spanning 18 nations, its multi-stakeholder architecture drawing together scientists, policymakers, farmers, youth, and industry, and above all its adoption of a declaration with accountability mechanisms built in — aspires to be the second kind. Whether the Delhi Declaration translates into changed ground realities for women tilling fields in Telangana or Tigray, Bihar or Burkina Faso, will depend on what happens after the microphones are switched off and the convention hall empties. But as a statement of collective intent, and as a structural framework for the sustained work ahead, GCWAS-2026 has set a standard that subsequent gatherings of its kind will be measured against.
The future of agriculture is gendered. And increasingly, so is its science.
– Amarendra Dasari
