Gender and Food Security in Rural Households:

Concepts of economic approaches in farming and rural development in developing countries often focus on the decision-making in farms assuming a single decision-making body. Reality has shown that decision-making processes are more complex in three ways. First, in family farms the farm is often related to household, processing and off-farm activities. This requires to not only look into the farm as a technical unit but also the other sectors of the family living sphere. The interrelationship between farm, household, processing and off-farm activities brings the economic and social problem of allocating the family resources between these family sectors in the center of a family based system concept. This publication gives special interest to the involvement of women in the decision-making process. Second, these activities are not only carried out by different persons of the family but also the decision-making is involving many people. This requires including the family as the decision-making body. Special role is given to the husband and the wife in the family as well; sometimes the older persons of the family as well as younger generation may have an important impact in the decision-making. This publication gives special interest to the food security aspect of the household and women's activities in the complex system of farm/household/off-farm and off-household activities and decision-making. Third, decision-making in rural areas has a third dimension which is in a vertical line from individual family to the society, such as to the village society, the clan and the institutions in rural areas and decision-making bodies for the rural infrastructure. This part is not explicitly dealt with in this publication, but is of equal importance to understand and influence the multi-faced process of decisionmaking in rural areas.