Forests are home to many peoples, including a substantial population of indigenous peoples. A 1992 European Union-funded study on the situation of indigenous peoples in the tropical rainforests estimated about 12 million of them or 3.5% of the total population of covered areas lived in the rainforest areas of the world. This was apart from those who lived in other types of forest areas.
Bulletin Issue 79 - February 2004
Women and forests
THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: WOMEN AND FORESTS
This edition of the WRM bulletin is entirely focused on the issue of women and forests, coinciding with the near celebration of International Women's Day on March 8, on which day 129 women died during a textile workers' struggle in the United States in 1909. The aim of this bulletin is to share information on both the differentiated impacts that women suffer in relation to forest loss and degradation and on the special role that women play regarding wise and equitable forest use. In this way we hope to contribute to raise awareness on the gender issue in relation to forests and to assist in its incorporation to both forest and women activists' agendas. We would like to express our most sincere thanks to the many people –both women and men- that contributed to this bulletin, while at the same time paying homage to all the uncountable and invisible women that are fighting throughout the tropics an unequal battle to protect the forests that are their homes and means of livelihood.WRM Bulletin
79
February 2004
OUR VIEWPOINT
CONSERVING THE FOREST
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12 February 2004It is not by chance that femininity is linked to nature, to the origins and to mystery. Women are those who make life, suckle the species, communicate oral tradition and are the jealous guardians of secrets. When the conquest of El Dorado started, the great boa woman meandered from the memory of time through the Amazon forest. She was the cosmic serpent, the great river with her long and enormous arms of water, with her quiet havens and warm and fertile lagoons.
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12 February 2004The role of indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge systems in the conservation of biodiversity is so well known as a general fact that it needs no further assertion. The particular role of women however is less acknowledged and even where such acknowledgement is offered, is not accompanied by the concomitant offer of space on related platforms of discussion and decision making particularly by mainstream processes. North -Eastern India is a region with rich forests and wetlands, inhabited by over 250 indigenous peoples. This region of India has historically been contiguous with the northern region of Burma and of Bangladesh.
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12 February 2004In Indonesia, the western part of Java -Halimun- is well known by its high biodiversity and cultural richness. In terms of community-based forest resource management systems, indigenous and local peoples of Halimun possess centuries of farming and knowledge about the tropical rainforests. They utilize the surrounding forest and land for various uses in models of swidden cultivation (huma), rice field (sawah), garden (kebon), mixed tree garden (talun) and various types of forests (such as Leuweung Titipan, Leuweung Tutupan and Leuweung Bukaan). These models are managed as one integrated system by men and women.
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12 February 2004The Center for International Forestry Research has implemented a program called Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forests (ACM) for more than five years. At its most extensive, we worked in 11 countries (Nepal, Indonesia, Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Madagascar, Bolivia and Brazil); and activities continue in eight. One of the striking elements of this work has been our success at involving women (and other marginalized groups) in our work with communities.
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12 February 2004In the framework of the South American Medicinal Plants Network, the Uruguayan Centre for the Study of Appropriate Technologies (CEUTA) is coordinating a collective activity for the recovery of traditional knowledge on the use of plants as medicine and as food. We want to tell you about the experience of a group of women, gathered together since November 2002, when we held the first meeting on Women’s Cycles and Natural Medicine. At this first meeting, we shared visions and knowledge of plants that help us to keep healthy, considering the various stages of our feminine cycles.
THE DESTRUCTIVE INDUSTRIAL APPROACH
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12 February 2004Women around the world suffer greatly. They suffer from all kinds of situations such as wars and sexual discriminations by men. Children suffer as a consequent of their sufferings. In many cultures, men look upon women as inferior and as such they are forced to do all the heavy and hard work. Ninety percent or 4.5 million Papua New Guineans depend on the forests for their livelihoods and have done so for hundreds and even thousands of years. The forests provide food, building materials, medicine and a source of culture and spirituality for the people.
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12 February 2004This article highlights the vulnerability of dam-affected peoples -especially women- being displaced from their homes and lands, and relocated elsewhere. Due to the need to clear forests and divert the river, dams can effectively deprive those in the way of dams of rights to their traditional resources. It highlights some dam-related issues which are apparently shared the world over. But first some examples of on-going and completed dam projects in Malaysia, to show the price tag for 'development': - The controversial Bakun hydro-electric power project across the Balui River in Sarawak, Borneo, cleared 70,000 hectares of tropical rainforest and forcibly resettled nearly 10,000 indigenous people to make way for the reservoir.
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12 February 2004The gypsy people say that when their women are standing on street-corners, offering themselves and when their old people die alone in old-peoples’ homes, the gypsy people will no longer be a people. The women in these oil zones have been cast to the street corners, punished with violence and are literally submerged in contamination. The Sarayacu community in Ecuador would have been subdued by the oil companies long ago, if it had not been for their women. Victims and protagonists of resistance to oil, that is what the women are.
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12 February 2004Inland aquaculture has been practiced in Asian countries, namely in Indonesia, China, India and Thailand for hundreds of years. Shrimps were traditionally cultivated in paddy fields or in ponds combined with fishes, without significantly altering the mangrove forest, which for centuries has been used communally by local people providing them a number of products such as commercial fish, shrimp, game, timber, honey, fuel, medicine. Women have played a key role in taking the advantage of mangrove resources. In Papua Island, indigenous knowledge regulates woman’s role in mangrove forest.
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12 February 2004More than 35 % of Indonesian upland territory has been licensed as mining concessions, of which 11.4 million hectares is located within protected areas. However, the mine sector’s contribution to the Indonesian government’ s net income is only 2% -4%. The amount is unequal to the impacts caused by the sector toward local people and the environment across the Indonesian archipelago. One of the islands most suffering from mining activities is Kalimantan (Borneo), and particularly eastern Kalimantan. The island of Borneo has a width of 10% of the total area of Indonesia and is inhabited by 2.5 million people who live in 1,276 villages. The male and female population is balanced. The main livelihood of the people is farming, artisan fishing and nursery shrimp breeding.
WHEN TREE PLANTING BECOMES A PROBLEM
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12 February 2004In 2002, the Malaysian organization Tenaganita, together with Pesticide Action Network-Asia Pacific launched a study that confirmed that women plantation workers were being poisoned by the use of highly toxic pesticides, especially paraquat. At the launching of the "Study of Pesticides Poisoning in the Plantations", Tenaganita Director, Dr. Irene Fernandez said that “If the Malaysian government had, through its enforcement agencies the Department of Occupational Safety and Health and the Pesticides Board, effectively implemented the laws the women would not have suffered."
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12 February 2004On October 16, 2003, Irene Fernandez, the Director of Tenaganita (a women’s non-governmental organization based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment by the Magistrates Court for the Memorandum on "Abuse , Torture and Dehumanized Treatment of Migrant Workers in Detention Centres". The memorandum had been finalized and sent to relevant authorities and the media in August 1995.
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12 February 2004The invisibility of women is perhaps nowhere greater than in timber plantations. Few women are ever seen working within the endless rows of eucalyptus or pine trees. But plantations are very visible to women, who are in fact greatly impacted by them in different ways.
THE APPROPRIATION OF NATURE
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12 February 2004The Twa are the indigenous people of the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, inhabiting Burundi, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Uganda. Their population is estimated at less than 100,000 in the region. Originally the Twa were forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers living in the mountainous areas around Lakes Tanganyika, Kivu and Albert, but over time the forests were encroached by incoming farming and herding peoples and taken over for commercial development projects and protected areas. Nowadays, few Twa are still able to lead a forest-based way of life.
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12 February 2004Pachamama is a Quechua term, which stands, basically, for Mother Earth. The Quechua, an Indigenous People living in a large part of the Andes, believe that the Earth is a mother which cares for people as if they were her children.