In the developing world seven in every ten farmers are women. And they work harder than men, producing up to 80% of all crops. Apart from the physical labours of hoeing, planting, weeding and harvesting, these same women also carry out the majority of domestic work, such as feeding and caring for children. The toil of millions of women throughout the world is the only thing between countless communities and starvation. Despite this, women often don't even have the right to own their own land.

Study after study has shown that women, regardless of where they live in the world, carry out most of the work but are far more likely to be poor and excluded. However, according to the UN, while three-quarters of men's work is paid, only about one third of all women's work is rewarded with cash.

Because they are forced to function with less money, women are the first to be affected by rising food prices. Women and girls are also more likely to go hungry in times of need. Of the billion plus people in the world who are hungry, almost two-thirds of them are women.

Without land as collateral, women often can't get small loans to buy the seeds, tools or fertilisers they need to effectively grow crops and feed themselves and their families. Without money or access to land, and access to health care and education, women are more likely than men to be trapped in poverty for life.

Hunger and poverty can take an enormous physical and mental toll. Pilomena Aceng (56)?from Uganda struggled to survive during that country's 20-year civil war. Her husband was killed and four of her six children were taken by the militia to become child soldiers. She hasn't seen them since.

For five years, Aceng and her remaining two children struggled to survive in a camp where thousands of people fled for safety. For Aceng, more than the insecurity and fear, it is the hunger and despair the family faced in the camps that is etched in her memory forever.

Every time the family needed to eat, Aceng had to leave the camp. She risked being raped, tortured or killed by marauding militias and her children risked being abducted when she wasn't with them. When the war ended, Aceng moved home. But what she recalls most from that time is the sheer physical torture of hunger. Despite all that she went through, that's her most vivid – and feared – memory. "The hunger was the worst thing of all," she told me. "I will never forget it."

With Trocaire's help, Pilomena Aceng is now growing food on her small farm. Trocaire works primarily with rural communities in many parts of the developing world to help people increase the amount of food they grow and improve the farming methods they use. We provide credit schemes and help people get legal ownership of land. Through farming cooperatives and training schemes, we help people market and process their crops. We support communities as they adapt to climate change, through irrigation, reforestation and recovery of land damaged by erosion. And given that women produce most of the food in the developing world, we pay particular attention to the needs of women farmers.

The Irish government has pledged to play its part in eradicating global hunger. In 2008, its Hunger Task Force recommended that it concentrate its efforts in three areas, two of which directly involve women. Those were to increase the productivity of smallholder farmers ? mainly women ? in Africa and to implement programmes focused on the under-nutrition of mothers and their infants. That is to be welcomed.

But the third recommendation is perhaps the most important of all: to ensure real political commitment, at national and international level, to give hunger the absolute priority it deserves.

Hunger is a symptom of failed policies at the highest levels of government everywhere. It is caused and exacerbated by war, as in Aceng's case. HIV/Aids, natural disasters, climate change and unfair trade rules play their part. Lack of investment in agriculture is also a major contributor, and especially the kind of small-scale farming conducted primarily by women the world over.

Governments in developing countries have a role to play as well. African governments must deliver on the commitment they made in the Maputo Declaration to spending 10% of national income on agriculture and rural development.

When the world's governments agreed a set of Millennium Development Goals in 2000, they pledged to halve the number of people living in poverty and hunger by 2015. They will meet in six months time to assess progress. Unfortunately there won't be much to celebrate. Looking to the future we must ensure that women are a key focus in any proposed solution to hunger. This involves supporting women's access to land, finance and agricultural training and resources.

On International Women's Day we should celebrate the women of the world like Pilomena Aceng , who give all they have to help their families and communities. But our celebrations are tempered, because clearly women are still a long way from enjoying the same rights as men.

Ensuring women are helped with the most basic right of all, the right to feed themselves and their families, would be a very positive step in their journey towards equality.

Sorcha Fennell manages Trocaire's livelihoods programme

Prof Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, will deliver Trocaire's annual Lent Lecture 'Facing up to the scandal of world hunger - how can we ensure food for all?' on Tuesday at 7.30pm, St Patricks College Maynooth, Co Kildare

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