CSHL signed a 3-years research agreement with the Gender Center of the Graduate Institute of International Development Studies in Genevato implement the DEMETER project until January 2021. The DEMETER project examines changes in food security and agrarian transformation in the wake of land commercialization in Cambodia and Ghana from a right to food and gender equality perspective. The DEMETER project funds one full-time research position at CSHL. As one of the partners in this project, a CSHL Researcher and Director carried out in-depth research and co-wrote with researchers from Ghana and Switzerland. The CSHL Researcher and Director conducted research studies on Cambodian legal frameworks and policies on gender equality and gender mainstreaming at the national level as well as issues concerning social land concession and the right to food.
In July 2019 the annual meeting of the DEMETER project was held at the Chulalongkorn University hosted by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)in Bangkok, Thailand. Together with approximately 20 researchers from Switzerland and Ghana, the CSHL Researcher and Director participated in this yearly meeting to share their research findings and progress as well as to plan and coordinate its research activities, particularly fieldwork. The week-long meeting gave the CSHL team the opportunity to present their work in progress and drafted chapter sand receive constructive feedbacks from the DEMETER researcher team to further improve their papers. It was also a good chance for the CSHL team to listen to other presentations and engage in critical discussions on issues concerning gender equality, the right to food and land commercialization, especially from other research disciplines such as political science, social science, and agronomy. Alongside the research meeting, the CSHL team had the chance to participate in a policy dialogue on issues related to gender equality and the right to food within agricultural and land policies hosted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) regional office for Asia and the Pacific. Through this intensive one-week research meeting and workshop, CSHL and its research partners also had the opportunity to expand their academic and policy networks by engaging with regional and international partners such as the Chulalongkorn University, SEI, and FAO.
