There can be no doubt that we are immersed in a long and sometimes resisted process of gender awareness regarding social relationships that in general terms have historically placed women in an unequal and subordinate position.
The women’s struggle –a freedom struggle stemming from their condition as excluded sector- is, in essence, a social demand for changes in relationships and social structures that, in most societies have restricted women’s role -through political, legal, cultural, religious and family systems- to the private and family context. In short, it is a demand for social justice.
Issue 152 – March 2010
Women on the march
THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: WOMEN ON THE MARCH
Doing honour once again to Woman’s Day, thousands of peasant, working and unemployed women are on the march in Brazil. They are marching to express their rejection of the criminalization of social movements, against violence falling on women, against agribusiness and monoculture eucalyptus and sugarcane plantations. They are also marching in defence of food and energy sovereignty and of public investment in peasant farming.
This is happening not only in Brazil. In the five continents the World March of Women invites people to march “in the struggle against privatization of natural resources and public services. We are going to march for food and energy sovereignty and against destruction and the control of our territories and against the false solutions to face climate change.”.
All over the world there are women who are becoming aware, getting organized, making demands and becoming empowered.
This bulletin is from them and for them.
WRM Bulletin
152
March 2010
OUR VIEWPOINT
LOOKING INTO THE GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT ISSUE
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30 March 2010Women often play a crucial role in environmental conflicts over oil extraction, mining and logging activities, shrimp farming and tree plantations. These courageous women do not hesitate to challenge political power, local tyrants and armed violence for protecting the surrounding natural resources they and their family depend on. Therefore they protect their culture, way of life, sacred places, livelihood means and so on. Although this phenomenon is widespread, it remains little studied and so is that of the empowerment that women can achieve through these struggles.
WOMEN: IMPACTED AND EMPOWERED
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30 March 2010This story has been cultivated with the thoughts, the experience, the dreams, the words and the hands of women shell-gatherers from the Province of Esmeraldas, in northern Ecuador. Living conditions there are hard. Access to the communities is usually difficult, there are schools in some locations, but very often the teachers lose heart and leave. The parents must make great efforts and send away their children to enable them to study. The water is no good for consumption and food is getting increasingly scarce.
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30 March 2010The communities constantly grapple with the consequences of oil spills, gas flares and other menaces arising from unregulated explorative activities of the international oil companies. Many women in these subsistence communities bear the burdensome task of caring for their families, protecting them from harsh pollution. The rate of cases of cancer, infertility, leukemia, bronchitis, asthma, still-births, deformed babies and other pollution-related ailments are unusually high in this region. From Ikarama to Akaraolu to Imiringi, women are bruised and dying.
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30 March 2010In late 2008, WRM and Friends of the Earth Papua New Guinea/CELCOR jointly organised a workshop with local women in Papua New Guinea. The workshop referred to oil palm plantations that are being mainly promoted to feed the European market with palm oil (used in products such as cosmetics, soap, vegetable oil and foodstuffs) as well as for the production of agrofuels. In a country where most of its 5 million population still lives in the rural area and rely on subsistence farming for their livelihoods, the oil palm export-driven production is increasing at the expense of traditional livelihoods.
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30 March 2010The building of hydroelectric dams in Brazil has been marked by a lack of respect for the environment and society and more so by a lack of respect for the affected communities that see how their lives are radically changed and how they are annulled in the name of “capitalist society development.” In Brazil, over 2,000 dams have been built, resulting in the eviction of over 1 million people from their lands. There are federal government projects foreseeing the construction of 1,443 more dams over the next 20 years.
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30 March 2010The lush green rice paddies, vegetable fields, forested mountains and quiet villages in the Wangsaphung district of the Loei province of North-Eastern Thailand could be an oasis of rural tranquility, with clean air to breathe, fresh vegetables and fruit to eat and spring water to drink. From the mountainous highlands to the lowlands along the banks of the Mekong River and its tributaries, the fertile lands provide seasonal harvests of macadamia nuts, bananas, lychees, longan, mangoes, passion fruit, tamarind, coffee beans, soybeans, maize, rice, sesame, and rubber. In the past, some small-scale gold panning was carried out along the riverbeds, as the area is rich in minerals, including gold, copper and iron.
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30 March 2010In a study published recently in Germany on Climate and Development, we find the following statements: “Poverty affects many, too many people – and it affects men and women differently and in different numbers. Most of the poor are women, as poverty research has shown, and this is bound up with the fact that in many countries women and girls continue to suffer legal and social discrimination: They have poorer access to education and health care than boys and men, and they do not have the same economic opportunities, be it because their ability to act is curbed by legal restraints, or because they are unable to move freely, or for other reasons.”
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30 March 2010Living should not have to be a struggle against deadly forces. The life of the indigenous Ayoreo women and men living in isolation (without contact with our civilization) did not used to be a struggle; it was a life lived in and with the land they inhabited, over the course of many centuries. Today, however, through no choice of their own, for these women and men, living has come to mean resisting, enduring – and having to struggle – since the arrival of another world bent on invading and replacing their own world…
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30 March 2010Sicilia Snal (25), is a Garo woman of the forest village Sataria in the Modhupur sal forest. It is merely a 62 thousand acres forest patch, yet the third largest forest of Bangladesh, a country having one of the lowest per capita forest coverage on earth. Sicilia has to routinely visit the nearby forest to collect firewood. This is a traditional right that she and other villagers have always enjoyed.
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30 March 2010What is happiness? We can find many answers and we may even consider that being happy is a strictly personal matter. However, at least two aspects of happiness are universal: we all want it and it would be hard to find someone who could declare him/herself happy when confronting hunger, homelessness or when lacking access to the knowledge constructed and accumulated by humanity. How are we in terms of the ‘happiness index? From the standpoint of being a woman, poor, very poor. From the standpoint of being peasants and working women, very poor. From the standpoint of being mothers, poor. Poor, why?