Sunday, January 22, 2012

The status of rural women

Just now reading a spam blast from Episcopal Church world headquarters, I learned that this year's UN meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women, from the end of February into March in NYC, will have the primary theme of empowerment of rural women. There'll be lots about agriculture and food security on the agenda.

The papers of the pre-conference can be accessed here:
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/csw56/egm.htm

I have not had time to read them, so this is a note as much to myself as to my readers. About a third of the papers seem to be directly on agricultural topics and who knows how many indirectly. Several are on ecological topics.

Anglican women will be represented among the ngo's meeting at the same time as the UN conference in the center ring. One question I have, though, is why rural poverty in the US is seen by the Episcopal Church to be an issue primarily for indigenous peoples. True, there's no poverty like reservation poverty - but there's lots of rural poverty among other racial and cultural groups. But then, the Episcopal Church is not known for its rural consciousness - in fact, less and less so.

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