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From the outset, DAWN's analysis has included an understanding of sustainable livelihood concerns of women in the global South. More recently as the margins of ecological survival are shrinking particularly for impoverished communities, and in many places nature is already 'answering back,' we recognize the need to pay greater attention to the health of the planet alongside our human rights. However, ecological issues cannot be disassociated from women's rights, including the adverse effects on their sexual and reproductive health, or from political and economic concerns over the inequitable allocation of natural resources. Our intention therefore is to develop DAWN's political ecology analysis from a southern feminist perspective and experiences, conceptually linked to our continuing critique of global trends in the body politics, governance, and political economy arenas.
PEAS Analysis Coordinator: Anita Nayar, Noelene Nabulivou and Cai Yiping
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COP 10 People's Forum
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DAWN cooperated with the Gender Minority Working Group of the Japan Civil Network for the Convention on Biological Diversity (JCN-CBD) in sponsoring two out of three panels at the People's Forum in Nagoya in October 2010. The cooperation was initiated by Prof. Kinhide Mushakoji and Dr. Seiko Hanochi of the JCN-CBD Gender Minority Working Group. The JCN-CBD was formed in January 2009 as a platform for Japanese civil society when these served as host of the NGO Network of th CBD COP 10.
 The presentations carried a strong critique of neo-liberal globalization policies and practices that promote market-based solutions and technological fixes to issues related to loss of biodiversity, climate change and sustainable development. DAWN speakers engaged with Japanese commentators and CSOs in examining how pespectives building on feminist principles and rights-based and sustainable development proposals could provide alternatives to the current path of over-exploitation of natural resources, loss of cultural diversity and commodification of life in general. DAWN's inter-linkages analyses that provided the lens through which the inter-connection of ecological issues with unsustainable production and consumption, patriarchy, militarization, and unequal power relations between developed and developing countries, were discussed in the context of multilateral responses.
Click the titles to listen to the podcasts:
On the Road to Economic Recovery: Financing Challenges to Biodiversity by Marina Durano
Gender, Development and Agriculture Reforms in Africa by Zo Randriamaro
Some Questions on the Relationship Between Gender, Militarization, Armed Conflict and Their Effects on Biodiversity by Kumudini Samuel
Sustainability, Human Development and Growth: A Gendered Look by Gita Sen
Beyond Market Mechanisms and Technological Fixes: Building Feminist Principles and Alternatives with Justice Movements by Anita Nayar
NOTE: Excerpts of DAWN presentations at the CBD-COP10 People's Forum are featured in DAWN Informs December 2010 Issue
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Women's Rights in a Changing Environment by Anita Nayar
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There are five areas where major change is occuring which clearly affects women's rights and therefore human rights. But must we accept these changes as inevitable? Will the religious right inevitably be in control of our countries? Are neo-liberal policies the inevitable design of our economic policies? Is climate change inevitable? Can we not and must we not as feminists challenge the inevitability of these models? After all the only constant in life is change so why look at the future as somehow predetermined? We all have a choice of what the future can be.
Environment
With regard to the environment, science has made an important contribution in terms of our understanding of ecological concerns. Today very few scientists and people regardless of corporate power would dare say we are not facing a major crisis with climate change. In the last year from the Tsunami to hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Stanley and Wilma to the recent earthquake in Pakistan and India, the crisis is in our face. While corporations have been actively involved in the environment whether derailing rivers, drying and reclaiming marshes, deforestation or removing natural barriers making us vulnerable to hurricanes, where have we been engaged? Indigenous and community-based women's groups in particular have taken up the call for action on these crucial environmental issues yet the collective of women’s movements must take these issues on board at the global level.
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A Feminist Agenda for Transforming Structural and Technological Convergence: A Contribution to a Global CSO Seminar on the Threats from BANG
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With today’s urgency around climate change and global warming and its devastating health and livelihood effects borne most severely by the poor in all parts of the world, and with talk now of another ‘green revolution’ and the shortages of clean water and food worldwide, it is critical that feminists start to take seriously alarms raised about many environmental crises and the kinds of crisis-oriented ‘sustainable solutions’ that are being put forward by governments and corporations alike. Feminist analyses need take into account how life science companies are appropriating and manipulating genes for seeds, food and medical purposes without public debate, oversight or consensus. The new biotech research has profound implications for farmers (and fisher people and pastoralists) and for food sovereignty worldwide impacting millions of poor women’s livelihoods. Major agribusiness firms, such as Syngenta, BASF, Bayer and Monsanto are reformulating their pesticides at the nano-scale to make them more biologically active and to win new monopoly patents. It is estimated that over the next two decades, the impacts of nano-scale technology convergence on farmers and food will exceed that of farm mechanisation or of the Green Revolution. The recent spate of local protests and mobilizations swelling into a global movement for food justice is but one very visible and rising manisfestation of social, ecological and economic disjunctures at ground level, created by unfettered and unexamined technological and economic convergences among corporate and state actors at global level...
A newly theorised feminist political ecology framework would pay attention to: the power dynamics between different groups of men and women at different times and places; the political processes by which power is differently articulated in different ‘places’ from the corporeal body to the globe; and the ways that non-human communities and landscapes co-exist with humanity in complex processes of interdependence. Such a framework will also pay attention to the different knowledges and participatory processes that must be recognized and developed to frame and guide the scientific, political and civil society agenda. This feminist critique will take into account the re-emergence of a presumed link between race and genetics, the issue of informed consent in government research protocols, the critique of genetic reductionism, the concern about the rise of a new eugenics, and the misgivings related to racial/genetic stigmatization and discrimination. Such a framework will identify the many existing, viable alternatives to neoliberalism’s technologies and sciences, and it will advocate for technoscientific research and development in support of genuinely sustainable and just solutions to social and environmental problems worldwide. It would help make visible the environmentalisms of everyday life that can be seen in many community-based struggles and movements occurring around the world. We aim for nothing less than to build alternative ecologies and economies that protect the rights of people and the health of our planet.
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Food Crisis and Sovereignty in Sub-Saharan Africa by Zo Randriamaro
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The interconnections between the food crisis and financial crisis are multifaceted: the food price hikes began in the futures markets first. Some traders who were looking for profitable markets following the US subprime crisis and the crash at Wall Street found it interesting to buy and sell the so-called derivatives or futures in commodity markets, including food products. This speculation on agricultural products and oil has boosted demand and consequently increased food prices. Between June 2005 and June 2007, the face value of commodity derivatives has increased by 160 per cent, although real production has not increased. The increase was thus related to something that did not really exist but which was still driving the prices.
Oil is a strategic product, as its price is included in the prices of other agricultural products for which it is needed (e.g. transportation, fertilizers, etc.). Experts estimate that approximately 25 per cent of the oil price is determined by speculation. The increases brought about by this financial speculation plus the increases in the price of oil, which is also subject to speculation, have contributed to the food price hikes. On top of this, because most of international trade is billed in US dollars, the depreciation of the US dollar has led producing countries to increase food prices in order to compensate the exchange rate losses that they have incurred. Click DOWNLOAD to read more
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Environmental Education and Gender Justice: Presentation to the Commission on Environment, Ecology and Sustainable Development (ICAE 7th World Assembly) by Yvonne Underhill-Sem
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Place matters because without a recognition of and attachment to places, we cannot defend the environment, we cannot feel a struggle, we cannot fight for anything. [This is not unlike saying that without a recognition and attachment to women as a group, we cannot defend women’s rights.]
However, we need to recognise the different ways and the different places that we are attached to. They are not all ‘natural’. They are what we make them and in this way, we can make them whatever we want. We can protect and conserve places, enhance and modify places, abuse and overlook places.
But as the margins of ecological survival are shrinking and, in many places, nature is already ‘answering back’, the lives and livelihoods of many people, especially women in the global south, are under constant threat of not only total ruin (through sea levels rising), but also total transformation (through deforestation and monoculture plantations).
While many environmental problems may not appear to differentiate between men and women, there is no doubt that the social and political responses to these problems are profoundly gendered. For instance, while a tsunami strikes everyone rarely do relief packages include sanitary napkins for women.
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