BULAWAYO, Swaziland — Phetsile Ndwandwe, short, skinny and 23 years old, accepts an apple from a development worker and nibbles at it, stripping the peel with her teeth before handing the fruit to Siphokazi, her baby daughter.
Siphokazi manages a bite of the apple, the first fruit she has had in months, then thanks her mother with a kiss. Ndwandwe allows herself only the peel.
The mother’s sacrifice, say health authorities, is typical and creates a problem across the developing world. In hard times, these women tend to think of themselves last. This puts their families at risk, the experts say, because malnourished mothers become malfunctioning mothers.
Ancient traditions and modern circumstances often combine to place the burden on women to feed poor families. Researchers say women do as much as 80 percent of the farm work in poor countries. And with food and fertilizer prices rising, and AIDS and the global financial meltdown taking their toll, women like Ndwandwe are straining under growing responsibilities.
“We eat whatever we can get,” said Ndwandwe, describing a breakfast of corn meal porridge. She said her husband had gotten sick and died but wouldn’t say what illness he had. When asked what the family would have for lunch, she had no idea.
The consequences of women having to scrape together food for their family, often on their own, can be far-reaching. They might not be there for their children at all, as a poorly fed woman is more likely to die in childbirth. And their babies are also more likely to grow up physically and mentally stunted. It’s a vicious circle that deepens misery in lands of hunger.
The U.N. estimates women and girls account for 60 percent of the world’s nearly 1 billion undernourished people.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a humanitarian crisis or an economic crisis or a food price crisis, women are hardest-hit,” said Catherine Bertini, a farming specialist with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A woman “feeds her husband, and then she feeds her children, and then she feeds herself if there’s anything left.”
About 100 miles over winding roads north of Bulawayo, in the village of Motjane, Fikile Dlamini shakes her head at a stand of stunted corn. She couldn’t afford fertilizer or high-yield hybrid seeds.
“Maybe this year (the harvest) will be OK. The rain has been quite OK,” she said.
Dlamini, raising corn and garden vegetables in Swaziland, and her husband, working the mines of neighboring South Africa, put five children through high school. Then he came home, too sick to work.
Now, Dlamini isn’t sure she can keep her youngest child in school, with the government too poor to provide free education.
Agriculture scientist Julia Sibiya worries about frail, elderly women farmers taking on more family burdens. She finds women farmers eager for advice on using fertilizers, insecticides and hybrid seeds but often baffled by technical instructions; many fall back on traditional ways that don’t always meet modern challenges.
But in the face of adversity, there is also resilience. A development group recently offered Ndwandwe a small plot of land, and she plans to grow vegetables that she hopes to sell to a hotel being built for visitors at a nearby game reserve.
“The vegetables will bring money,” said Ndwandwe, who learned simple farming techniques during her elementary school education. “I am a good farmer.”
