Distinguished Professor of Latin American Studies and Food & Resource Economics, University of Florida, USA.

Carmen Diana Deere is Professor of Food and Resources Economics and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida.  Her research focuses on gender and development – specifically, the gender distribution of assets and wealth–, agricultural development and land policy, rural social movements, and agrarian history. She is the co-author of Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America (2001) and co-guest editor of the special issue on Women and Wealth of the journal Feminist Economics (2006). Professor Deere is a co-PI of the Gender Asset Gap Project, an international research program focused on improving statistics on gender and assets and analyses of women’s intra-household bargaining power, currently funded by UNWomen.

Professor Deere’s presentation focused on the relation between women’s ownership of land and their role in agricultural decision-making at the Gender Summit 3 North America 2013 (GS3NA). Survey data for Ecuador, Ghana and India demonstrate that women landowners are actively engaged in the decisions regarding their own plots.   Their role in decision-making is overlooked in most surveys and agricultural censuses that focus on household headship rather than who in the household owns the land, to the peril of food security.