The need for conceptual clarity on the issue of women and the environment is critical in the face of the threatened disaster. Equally important is the need for authenticity in communicating the complexities of the debates and of ground realities, to our target audiences.
Only once during the eight month exercise described in the preceding pages was the authenticity of the voices questioned. This was when one government representative hinted that the peasant women had obviously been tutored by the urban, educated, middle class feminists. There were oblique references to peasant women being the repository of indigenous cultural values and the destructive nature of ideas (in this case feminist) of western origin. His criticism of the Indian group's recommendation of joint titles to land transferred by government - "A policy impossible to implement-the women will never be able to enjoy this right" - received a sharp retort from Julekha, a peasant woman from East Bengal who shouted across the table: "First you concede the huq (right). Then see if we can't wrest it from you through our struggles."
Then came Chandika (of Nepal's) response to one official's statement that rights to land were neither needed nor wanted by peasant women: "Persons who get food served to them three times a day without having to think from where and how it is coming, what right do they have to decide what we need and what we want?"
This should have convinced him that the women needed no tutoring from anyone!
These exchanges encouraged a young government representative from India to put up a spirited defence of the recommendation made by his team. "We realise the difficulties in implementing such a policy. But can you ignore the sheer empowering effect of a decision like that, once the women come to know of it? You can see it happening right here!" The positive impact of this exchange is evident in the very first recommendation of the final declaration.
The peasant women were taken seriously. Whether the political will required to follow up on the recommendations will be strong enough remains to be seen, but the women's plea to take back some concrete strategies to resolve their problems had not been made in vain.
Summing Up
The preparatory work and the organisational mode of the Summits as well as the recommendations that resulted, indicate the conceptual basis of the national and regional Summits. But before I sum up this exercise, a few words on the concept of ecofeminism may be in order. It is an offshoot of different strands of the Western feminist movement, relatively recent and still evolving. Some of its basic beliefs are:1
(a) There is a close connection between the subordination of women and the domination and exploitation of nature.
(b) Patriarchal thought identifies women as being closer to nature and men as being closer to culture; because nature is posited as inferior women become inferior to men.
(c) The two processes of domination - of women and nature-are historically contemporaneous, so women have an interest in ending the domination of nature.2
(d) Both the feminist and the environment movements uphold egalitarian, non-hierarchical systems, and can evolve a common perspective, theory and practice.3
This rather simplistic set of beliefs suffers from many inadequacies. It is a-historical and underplays diversity across space as well as time. It also emphasises ideological domination at the cost of the material basis for such ideologies. Third, it underplays opposing sets of ideas and beliefs that have persisted in many civilizations down the ages, without examining the reasons why some beliefs acquired greater currency at particular points of time. Fourth, in trying to project a common women's perspective on development and environmental issues4 it ignores the powerful influence of class, ecological, cultural and socio-political differences, and the inequalities in life experiences of different groups of women within and across nations.
The Miami Congress exhorted all women not to lose their womanly perspectives even if they acquired positions of power and influence, and put its faith in women's collective thinking to guarantee this. Anyone involved in the women's movement knows how difficult it is to achieve such collective agreements, let alone consciousness or perspectives on critical developmental issues, when interests - economic, political and ideological - are widely divergent.
Similar diversities characterise the environmental movement. Within India alone one analyst has identified three distinct ideological streams - Crusading Gandhian, Appropriate Technology, and Ecological Marxism.5 The first sees modern science as "responsible for industrial society's worse excesses"; the last sees "modern science and the scientific temper as indispensible for constructing a new social order". The appropriate technology groups adopt a more pragmatic approach and propagate a synthesis of traditional and modern technological traditions. Gandhian groups tend to gloss over socio-economic inequalities within rural society, Marxists clearly recognise class and caste inequalities. Appropriate technology groups recognise problems of socio-economic hierarchies but have no clear prescription for dealing with them. On the issue of gender, the position of all three is ambiguous. The Gandhians possibly come closest to the ecofeminists in proclaiming that all women are conservationist by nature.6
Even the Geneva Symposium's formulations, refreshing as they are, indicate some conceptual ambiguity. It is only fair to say that resource users should not be viewed as problems. But how should priority be allocated between different categories of users? With diminishing resources and increasing populations is it possible to equate the claims of large industry and the exploding demands of the urban population with the subsistence claims of poor, especially rural, communities? The claims of distant users will always clash with those of local ones, as those of the rich will with those of the poor, of the few over many, of the wealthy and powerful (or politically more vocal) over the powerless.
The basic question remains-is distributive justice possible within an unequal power balance? Large dams that displace millions of poor people are justified on the basis of irrigation needs, more food production and energy that will in turn generate more employment for an expanding population. The Narmada dam spells doom to the villagers of Madhya Pradesh who are going to be displaced, but promises the farmers of Gujarat relief from chronic water scarcity and drought. All these conflicting interests represent user groups. How then can anyone decide which user group will prove to be better managers and conservers of the environment? Which of them has a stake in conservation and regeneration? Which of them is likely to be more accountable and reasonably fair and humane in the allocation and distribution of scarce resources?
The Peasant Women's Summits were undertaken to identify a clearly defined, large group of users across South Asia with certain shared characteristics. They are victims of the environmental crisis; their functional specialisation gives them a set of clearly distinct attitudes to the natural environment which, for want of a better word, may be called conservationist; they have learnt to manage households on scarce resources. Waste in any form is a luxury that they cannot afford and their attitudes to natural resources come closest to what the ecofeminists believe is shared by all women. The Chipko women composed a song illustrating the difference between their own perspectives and that of foresters.
Foresters: |
What do the forests bear? |
Profits, resin and timber | |
Women: |
What do the forests bear? |
Soil, water and pure air | |
Soil, water and pure air | |
Sustain the earth and all she bears |
Chipko may be a household word in the environmental movement but none of the women present at the Summits had heard of Chipko. Yet they shared a commonality of attitude, one not always shared even by men in their own households. The five meetings highlighted that what makes peasant women view complex natural processes in interactive holistic terms is rooted in the women's material reality, "in their dependence on and actual use of natural resources for survival, the knowledge of nature they gain in that process and the broader cultural parameters which define people's activities and modes of thinking in these communities".7
The peasant women who gathered at these meetings did not dismiss science as their enemy, but they did ask that its skill in finding alternative solutions be brought to their knowledge. They advocated strategies that would promote and strengthen their own concern for the preservation and regeneration of the environment, and for a fair distribution of scarce natural resources. They were not thus trying to suggest that their attitudes were fixed and unchanging - after all they had seen many other women in their own villages who did not share their concerns or perspectives. Something of this realisation made the Indian group say that sustainable empowerment requires new ideas, support, knowledge, guidance and resources, and the need for NGO intermediaries to think of long term rather than short term strategies.
Two main factors are responsible for this predisposition:
S. Asian peasant women are dependent on the natural environment for subsistence; and are actively involved in agricultural work. The course of agricultural modernisation throughout the world has seen a concomitant reduction in women's participation. This could conceivably be one area for serious rethinking by agricultural policy makers, scientists and environmentalists on the basis of the peasant women's appeals. But as for subsistence living, it would be difficult for anyone in today's context to advocate that peasant women must continue in their present grinding poverty in order to retain their conservationist perspective. The Miami Congress referred to the "violence of poverty"; Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, had talked about "property as violence". Karl Marx (though considered to be a fallen prophet these days) had talked about "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". It is not possible in this paper to resolve these philosophical dilemmas, but the historical fact on which long-term strategies for the future of the environment could be built, while protecting the rights of all users, is that common property resources always ensured greater use rights to all, especially women.
Yet another lesson that was learnt through these meetings was that knowledge is a two-way process, and sustainable development in this field too requires learning from each other. Peasant women have held out their offer of a partnership-with governments, scientists and all others who are concerned about the future of the environment. It is obvious that such a relationship has no room for terms like "beneficiaries" or "victims". And if the population "explosion" is still believed to be the greatest threat to the environment, then surely it is high time for all those concerned about the future to pay heed to those demographers who have been arguing for years that the empowerment of women is the best contraceptive!
From the Lahore meeting it became clear that regional cooperation becomes a feasible reality among people who share problems and concerns. SAARC identified Women and Development as a priority issue for regional cooperation, but peasant women in the seven countries remain unaware of this fact. Nor has environment so far been included on the agenda of the Technical Committee set up to promote cooperation in this area. The women's offer of partnership should find a response from members of that Committee.
Finally, our differences with ecofeminists should not be interpreted as a denigration of the international women's movement, which is a living contemporary reality; it was that movement which first brought many women from rich countries to listen to the voices of poor women from poorer parts of the world, at Miami, providing mutual support, strength and courage. And it is the same movement which made these, five meetings possible. But the time has come to acknowledge that empowerment, too, is a two-way process. The participation and partnership of the poor and powerless peasant woman from South Asia and elsewhere is essential to the international women's movement in its struggles against the misuse of knowledge, power and the environment.
Notes
1 Bina Agarwal, 'The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India,' Feminist Studies 18, No. 1 (Spring 1992).
2 Ynestra King, "Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology" in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism ed. Judith Plant, Philadelphia: 1989.
3 Agarwal, op. cit.
4 Declaration of the Miami World Congress of Women for a Healthy Planet, 1991.
5 Ramachandra Guha.
6 Agarwal, op. cit.
7 Agarwal op. cit.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
UNCED/UNICEF/UNFPA
Excerpts from the Report of the Symposium on the Impact of Environmental Degradation and Poverty on Women and Children
Geneva, 27-30 May 1991
SPECIFIC RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CONSIDERATION BY UNCED
Land Resources
1. Basis for Action: For sustainable development, women should have access to and control over land and other natural and productive resources, such as trees and water. Participants in development activities should derive benefits, i.e. increased access to resources, from their participation.
2. To ensure women's access to and control over resources, special attention and action is required at the sectoral level.
3. To improve women's access to resources, efforts are needed in education and communication, to change traditional attitudes and stereotypes about women.
4. The legal framework for access to resources - specifically the rights of women to land-need to be addressed in the Earth Charter, and tied to the rights of women and children.
5. Agricultural policy and practices must be oriented to building upon local knowledge and initiative, and be geared to fulfilling national and regional needs in food self-sufficiency.
Natural Resource Management and Conservation
1. Basis for Action: Women historically have been the resource managers and have played this role efficiently on the basis of knowledge which is indigenous to them and their communities. This fact has received scant appreciation by development thinkers and planners.
2. Strengthen the research capacity of local researchers to document and interpret the reality of the contribution to sustainable development of grassroots women.
3. Build and strengthen the networks of women, NGOs and researchers deriving their livelihood directly from their ecosystem.
4. Facilitate movements of people within countries and across borders in promotion of people-to-people exchange (knowledge, technologies, experiences).
5. Women should be duly recognised as repositories of indigenous knowledge relevant to sustainable livelihoods and environmental preservation. Their capacities to transmit and to effectively utilise this knowledge should be encouraged, enhanced and strengthened.
6. Agricultural research should be aimed at sustainability, increasing production on rain-fed and flood-recession agricultural fields, in hand-water vegetable gardening, in pastoral livestock herding, and in floodplain and riverine fishing, as well as on irrigated perimeters. At present, agricultural research is focused almost exclusively on irrigation, and on commercial crops, the arena within which most women confront great discrimination.
7. Development programmes and projects need to move away from a sectoral approach towards a more integrated approach. Forestry and natural resource management need to be integrated not only with other land use management issues, such as agriculture and livestock, but also with human resource development, e.g. health education and employment, and improvement of human living conditions, e.g. safe drinking water, sanitation, and adequate housing.
8. The goal of promoting the participation of women and children in forestry development activities is not participation per se, but ensuring that these participants benefit through increased access to, and control over resources. Cost-benefit analyses need to be disaggregated by gender and age.
9. Women's current role in management of household water supplies, as well as their role as agricultural and fisheries workers is a key factor in the ecology of freshwater resources. Women must be given information concerning preservation of ecologically sensitive water resources and conservation, and they must be included in the decisions affecting their work.
10. In all aspects of control of water pollution, including protecting fisheries, development of an integrated pollution control policy, and in research and testing of appropriate techniques for pollution reduction and control, consideration is needed to the special needs of women and children and the potential of their involvement in programmes. Women as householders and mothers are typically strong supporters of positive actions taken to protect food supplies and the health of the environment and of children. They can help provide vital information concerning community needs, the right direction for policy formulation, and mobilise support for implementation of policies.
11. Development of communication between voluntary groups and other NGOs, government officers, aid agency representatives, the World Bank, village leaders and local women's networks (as applicable) should be facilitated to define energy problems, provide education about alternatives, and stimulate local awareness.
Legal Instruments and Institutions
1. All conventions and legal instruments including the Earth Charter must take into account the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Standards setting instruments must strengthen the human dimension inherent in achieving sustainable development by ensuring access and entitlement to land and other strategic resources for all peoples and promoting the development of human resources.
Education and Public Awareness
1. Technical education in environmental and natural resource fields must focus on community participation. Technical specialists should be trained to work with a wide variety of target groups, learning how to work with people of different genders, ages, and different types of resource users.
2. More such training must be offered to women. More women extension agents are needed to work with women resource users.
3. More grassroots, technical and professional women are needed to participate in policy and decision-making processes affecting women. Training and opportunities must be provided to enable women to participate in policy and decision-making processes.
4. Educational systems should be reoriented toward creative curricula which promote sustainable development and protection of the environment. Existing educational materials and curricula should be reviewed for gender bias and relevance to environmental education and health.
5. Strategies to combat deforestation must have a particular focus on conserving and promoting indigenous medicinal species.
Technology Transfer
1. Technology transfer should not only be environmentally sound, but also benign to women and children. Such technology should build on indigenous technology and knowledge, be appropriate, affordable and based on locally available material. Environmentally sound and equitable methods of production and species preservation should be promoted as part of such transfers, and local capacity to ensure sustainability be fostered.
2. Women must have access to and control over gender-specific and appropriate technologies to improve the quality of life for themselves and their children, and to enhance their ability to continue primary roles as resource managers, caretakers and producers.
3. Improving the overall status of women and their participation in socio-economic development together with availability of family planning services and information, and improved child survival rates, should be the basis of a sound and sustainable population policy.
4. If programmes to combat poverty and environmental degradation seek to broaden social participation, particularly of women and youth, these changes would also contribute to lessening of rapid population growth rates. In general, the best approach to tackling issues of rapid population growth where they exist seems to be support of female participation in socio-economic development including paid employment, education and management of natural resources.
5. Access to family planning services and information should be implemented and ensured as an important right for women, as crucial to the health and well- being of women and children. Every effort should be made to implement measures to include men's active participation in family planning activities.
Excerpts from the Declaration of the Tribunal of Miami World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet
Miami, Florida, 12 November 1991
SPECIFIC PROPOSALS
I. Global Equity
1. States should recognize the right of all people to an adequate and sustainable standard of living (including food, water, shelter and a healthy environment): implementing this right should be a primary goal of all international financial, economic, trade and aid policies.
2. Acting together, states should develop policies to reduce the over-consumption of scarce resources where that occurs and to enhance the access of those who are disadvantaged to basic resources.
3. The principles of human rights should be extended to protect all people from risks to life or to health arising from environmental damage, hazardous waste disposal, and air, water or land pollution, whether such risks arise from private acts or the acts of state governments.
4. States should be accountable to other states and to individuals for action which seriously reduces the prospects of sustainable life for all. Such action should be regarded as a violation of human rights (UDHR Art. 25, ESCR Art. 11, ICCPR, Act. 6).
5. States should draft a convention to apply the above principles and to confer jurisdiction on an international court/tribunal or commission to investigate violations of those principles and to determine disputes resolution; mechanisms should be included in such a convention.
6. Global standards should be adopted and implemented by all states to cover all environmentally sensitive activities.
These standards should cover the following matters:
(a) Limits on energy use and the adoption of less harmful sources of energy.
(b) Waste management and recycling should aim at neutral effects in terms of pollution of air, water and earth.
(c) Equitable management of water resources.
(d) International forestry policies should aim at sustainable development by linking exploitation to regeneration.
(e) Weapons testing (nuclear and other) should be abandoned.
7. Multinationals should be required to meet these common standards wherever they operate.
8. Developed states and financial agencies should act urgently to review the debts of developing countries and to relieve them from the burden of those debts which they have incurred as the result of fraud, misrepresentation and false expectation that debt would contribute to their prosperity.
9. Developing states should be given access to world markets on fair terms.
II. Resource Ethics
1. A free and democratic society is the necessary basis for action to protect people and environments.
2. States should assess and monitor their economic policies in terms of their social and environmental effect. National measurements of progress should include the well-being of the environment and the people and its effect on economic growth. The work of women in family care, food production and preservation of the environment should be included as part of a new value system.
3. All individuals, organisations and states shall adopt precautionary and preventive approaches and consider the value of the environment when planning actions which may affect the ability of the earth to sustain life.
4 States should give highest priority to the ability of people to be self-sufficient with production of food rather than to the expansion of trade.
5. The development of seeds for food producing plants by big-technology should not, of itself, give rise to proprietary rights.
6. Development and aid policies should give high priority to developing technologies suited to the particular needs of that community.
7. States should recognize the right of indigenous people to take part in decisions relating to the development and use of their traditional lands.
8. School curricula should include education on the environment, as well as sex education.
III. Empowerment of Women
1. States should recognize women's role as managers and conservers of natural resources and should involve women in the decision-making process as equal partners.
2. States should act positively to implement fully Articles 7 and 9 of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Political Participation, International Representation). They should act immediately to increase the number of women decision-makers at all levels and especially in relation to sustainable development.
3. States should act positively to implement fully Article 14 of the Convention (Rural Women) to ensure that women participate in and benefit from rural development on the basis of equality of men and women, and in particular, that they have access to agricultural credit and loans, marketing facilities, appropriate technology and equal treatment in land and agrarian reform as well as in land resettlement schemes. They must also be assured of access to land use and ownership, education and health services.
4. Development and aid funding should be allocated to women's projects. Women should participate in equal terms and at all levels in decisions relating to development.
5. Article 16.1.e of CEDAW (recognizing the equal right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of children and to have access to the information, education and means to exercise these rights) should be fully implemented.
6. Women in positions of power and influence should not lose a woman's perspective on development and environmental issues.
7. Women, by acting together, by organizing cooperatives and by managing credit and financial institutions can help change policy, protect the environment, improve their standards of living and challenge current economic analysis.
Further Action
It is our opinion that more should be done to ensure that women are involved in developing and implementing policies for environmental protection and development. To this end, the programmes for UNCED should include areas which are specifically devoted to enhancing women's initiatives and activities for sustainable development.
Guidelines for Discussions in the Working Groups at Lahore
Introduction
At the national summits and the presentations we learnt from the peasant women themselves what their problems and main issues are. They have committed themselves to contribute to an improvement of their situation.
We are also aware of the fact that all governments represented here have stated that they will include women's issues more appropriately in their policymaking and implementation.
Knowing what the problems are, we have to define as concretely as possible what is needed from governments, academics, NGOs and media before and after UNCED in a strategic way to make sure that women s voices are taken seriously regarding:
A. Land
a) to give peasant women actual land rights (not just on paper), and where they have rights how to improve these (including how land acquisition policies come in);
b) clearer definition and allocation of common property rights, especially of those used by women (e.g., common property rights for women's groups);
c) to stop soil erosion and degradation, including destructive mining;
d) to rehabilitate the quality of land on which women depend;
e) reverse the chemicalization and unsustainability of agriculture.
B. Water
a) to ensure water availability and rights;
b) to improve water quality, in terms of health, sanitation and sweetness;
c) to prevent water pollution;
d) to minimize damage by floods.
C. Forests
a) to stop deforestation of existing forests and inappropriate afforestation;
b) to increase the actual forest area;
c) to ensure that each of these forests has trees that provide the five Fs: food, fuel, fodder, fertilizer, fibre;
d) to ensure usufruct rights in the forests for the local women;
e) to encourage local forest-based (traditional) industries for women-based sustainable use of resources.
D. Health and Health Education
a) to promote peasant women's access to basic health facilities and health knowledge;
b) to document traditional forms of health practice and women's own knowledge in that area.
E. Education and Information
a) to increase women's literacy and formal and informal education, including the facilities needed for this;
b) to encourage and develop their artistic and other skills (including leadership skills);
c) to make curricula gender sensitive at all levels of education and training;
d) to educate men on gender, family planning, environmental issues and social evils, and to promote attitudinal changes;
e) to generate more data and statistics on women and environment and to disburse these at local levels, including information on chemicals.
F. Empowerment
a) to increase the acceptance of women's roles in development;
b) to promote women's organisation and networking;
c) to encourage women's legal and policy literacy;
d) to increase women's representation in social organisations;
e) and to promote their decision-making rights at all levels (starting with the family).
G. Other Issues
Are there any other issues which you think should be emphasised, e.g. credit facilities, etc.?
