by: Ann Tickamyer, Carolyn Sachs, and Paige Castellanos
While finishing up the edited book, Gender and Agriculture Handbook, the coronavirus landed full force in Europe and the U.S. and was starting to hit other regions of the world as well. With less than a week to go before the editor sent the book to the publishing department, we asked the contributors to the book if they would send a paragraph about how the coronavirus was impacting gender and agriculture in their region or the topic they wrote about for the book. Astonishingly, as anyone who has ever edited a book and tried to get timely contributions from authors, twenty people wrote back to us within a week with fascinating examples from their region or on their topic. The editors graciously agreed to use the resulting chapter as an epilogue for the book.
Now that we have begun this global exchange about gender, food, and coronavirus; we decided it would be valuable to have timely exchanges about what is happening around the world. We are starting a blog “Gender, Food, Agriculture, and the Coronavirus” to pursue this opportunity. We seek contributions that address any or all of the related topics through a gender lens and we are especially eager to have your personal perspectives on these issues and how they affect you. While we are all practicing varying forms of social distancing, its impacts and abilities to cope and manage vary greatly. Even under the best of circumstances, we experience extreme disruptions of daily life and great uncertainty for what the future will 
bring. We invite you to reflect on these scenarios. This is the chance to combine the personal with the analytical and the political, and we welcome any combination. We leave it to you to decide what specific topics or issues to address and in what combination.
The initiators of this blog are Paige Castellanos, Carolyn Sachs, and Ann Tickamyer – all gender and development scholars affiliated with GEARE at Penn State. As we write this, we are all stuck at home but our situations vary. Paige is working from home while also home schooling her daughter and actively providing assistance to her community. Carolyn and Ann are retired but continue their scholarship with only the occasional zoom meeting in contrast to the endless sessions required of their still employed colleagues. We feel fortunate to have comfortable shelter, expansive outdoor spaces to garden, hike, or exercise, and family, friends, and colleagues to share our concerns even if at a distance. And we chafe at the isolation, at the suspension of our plans and our research, and we worry about whether, when, and how we will resume these activities. We wonder what the new social order will be. Each of us will take a turn at contributing an individual blog; here we reflect collectively on the meaning of the pandemic and vision for the future.
The contributors to the Handbook underscored the ways that gender pervades every aspect of food and ag systems; how dependent the world is on women’s work, both formal and informal in ag and food production, consumption, and care; how underpaid and undervalued it remains; and from our perspective, how much research needs to be done both to fully understand its scope and to apply these lessons to creating a more equitable and just future. The epilogue shows what this means during a crisis created by the global pandemic that threatens the health and safety of virtuslly every creature and community in every corner of the globe. Accounts of the gendered vulnerabilities and sources of resilience experienced by migrant farm workers, minorities and marginalized populations, the newly unemployed and the long-term poor, communities previously ravaged by disaster, and many more demonstrate the pressing need for gender analysis. It also presages the difficulties to come as global warming and the many ensuing disasters exacerbate these inequities and injustices, bringing to the forefront how much change is necessary to do justice for those that grow and feed, provision and care and for those dependent on that care. We join with Margaret Alston in her contribution to the epilogue in hoping that the disruptions in business as usual will provide space for reimagining the future and creating one where women are empowered, gender justice prevails, and we can use the lessons from covid to address the coming crises of climate change or in the words of Patricia Allen “that we enter a new global order that recognizes and rewards women’s leadership and energizes us to rectify inequality on a world scale.”