The symposium aimed to give visibility and a voice to a series of experiences from around the world in which women are the central hub of the agricultural world. It highlighted the empowerment of women based on agricultural activity, their task in transmitting knowledge, the management and economic independence it offers them, the family health they get from it, the environmental respect with which they work, etc.

Isabelle Anatole-Gabriel, Chief of the Europe and North America Unit at the World Heritage Centre, UNESCO, talked about the new values that little by little are influencing the valuation of cultural and agricultural landscapes: sustainability on the one hand and, gender equality on the other hand. Several studies show that women from the agricultural world are part of the collective of poorest people in the world: 66% are poor and almost 20% are found in extreme poverty. It was also shown that women invest the profits they make from their work in health and education for the family.

Sara Pérez also highlighted the gender perspective, by stating that this integral vision of agroecology must consider the role of women. Bearing in mind that, traditionally, in the rural world, the patrimony and the land were for male heirs, the “emergence of women can also represent new ways of doing things, without bonds, from the absolute freedom of stakeholders from whom nothing is expected.”

From Cuba, Nídia Cabrera Huerta, the administrator of the Valle de Viñales Cultural Landscape, reminded participants that in this territory, work is carried out to incorporate gender equality in co-operatives (where the male dominance of positions is maintained) through training. At the same time, she reminded us that women in the rural area still have a double responsibility: family and their work. She also highlighted another increasingly common aspect in the rural world (particularly in Europe): the ageing process of the rural woman and the difficulty of agricultural activities being taken over, which started happening as women with qualifications tend to give up on farm work.

From Morocco, Amal el Hantati, the president of the Argan Oil women's co-operative defended the importance of organising and making women's work visible. In her case, this was possible thanks to the co-operative work. Along with the visibility of this work, she added that there are increasingly more women who can earn a living from it and who, above all, do so by capitalising on traditional knowledge. Many of the women who work on the project have qualifications but were unable to find work. The co-operative was the formula that gave them the possibility of having a job and improving the socio-economic status of their families and their rural environment.

Altogether, she pointed out that empowering rural women could enable the quality of life of their families and of the entire community to be improved, as well as the social recognition of women and the obtaining of basic rights which now, in many countries, are not guaranteed to them as they are women. They are local action projects that seek a different way of doing things, from the values of sustainability, respect for the environment, social commitment, solidarity and so on.

To this end, in 2005, 25 Moroccan women created the Argan Oil women's co-operative, which is in a village 17 km from Essaouira, the best-known city in the area. It was not easy for them, as the men opposed the fact that women were working outside the home, but they persevered, promoting social, cultural and ecological values and based on good governance and equal distribution of the profits. Today, there are 70 women that make up the co-operative, that enables a socioeconomic improvement of the co-operative members, who take on a new social role as well as being empowered. It also prevents women from giving up on the rural world. There is no rural exodus in this area, the speakers told us.

The Vía Campesina Association (Via Pagesa in Catalonia) is an international movement that coordinates organisations of farm labourers, small and medium producers, rural women, indigenous communities and so on. Wendy Cruz, from Vía Campesina in Honduras, defended the role of women as guarantees to feed their families and cultivate the land, as well as carrying out domestic tasks. However, the work of these rural women is not visible, despite the fact that women in Honduras represent 70% of field labour; 90% of the supply of foodstuffs to the home; between 70% and 80% of women are responsible for the family production and sale: 80% of women participate in the storing and transporting of agricultural products and 90% do work to prepare the land. Despite these data, they are not taken into account.

The Bi-Songo co-operatives in Burkina Faso are co-operatives of women which have the aim of conserving and preserving the land, the transmission of biocultural knowledge, respect for the environment, schooling children, health and training young people in agricultural work. They cultivate shea butter and other products. There are 1,500 women linked to the project. Their products have the Organic stamp and they work using agroecology values. They work 37 ha of woodland, hectares which are currently threatened by aggressive, unsustainable practices (dispossession of land, single crops, intensive chemical treatments, etc.).

“L’Arada, Creativitat Social”, with its headquarters and centre of operations in the Catalan region of Solsonès, is a work co-operative of a social initiative that specialises in the local and community promotion of rural areas and underprivileged districts, from an integral point of view or from specific areas (cultural, social, economic, ecological). Based on the need for intervention and from participative methodologies, projects are developed that are constructed from social diversity and through the creation of local collaboration networks. Some examples are to promote the employment of women in the offer of services to people, the collective tourist-cultural promotion of a territory, or the recovery of the popular memory as a tool for social intervention and cultural and economic promotion. This means that projects are always developed adapted to the territory, its identity, reality and the wishes of its people.