Women's Participation: Food Gathering, Food Insecurity and Hunger Periods: Some Policy Implications for Village Krishna Rakshit Chak in West Bengal, India

Two visits to the villages in West Bengal were made. The report illustrates the importance of information gathering with rural women, to highlight variations in seasonal food consumption and womens responses to this insecurity. PRA was used to analyse the links between food insecurity, health and ecological degredation, for example using food calanders to illustrate food consumption. A high level of detail was obtained for both primary and secondary foods. There were a number of lessons learnt from this, and immediate impacts apparant - such as which roles the women could play and which were dependant on outside inputs. Seasonal food calanders are considered to form a strong basis for understanding for interventions in food security, agroforestry, environmental care and the development of womens groups. [copy held at IDS is the summary of the original document, on which the abstract above is based].