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Feminist perspectives on Ecological Sustainability and Equity

Raj Patel
October 8, 2002
Food First/ Institute for Food and Development Policy

Globalization has increased sexism and entrenched patriarchy the world over, but especially in Southern Africa. Rural women have borne the brunt of this assault. Structural adjustment policies have ratcheted back the progress made in sending both sexes to school. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the sexism around contraception issues, makes women face both increased risks of contracting HIV/AIDS and the burden of caring for people with HIV/AIDS and AIDS orphans. This impacts ecological sustainability directly. Poor farmers depend on their ability to work in the fields: increased burdens of care, and reduced levels of health and education, which fall disproportionately on women, militate against a sustainable future. Globalization's erosion of social services, together with the refusal by international agencies to deal with land issues for women, mean that the fragile gains made by feminists in Southern Africa are under attack. There are, however, examples of sustainable, equitable and pro-feminist farming. Our task is to globalize them.

First, I want to thank you all for letting me be here. I'm conscious that this is a space that has been hard fought for, and I'm honoured to be allowed to speak in it, and grateful that the organizers have done so much to move AWID to a position where gender is recognized as an issue that matters to everyone. I'm proud to be fighting with you for an end to the gender differences we know today, not only because I'm being patronizing or because I want to lay claim on women-only space, but because the rules that subjugate me and the regime that draws my blood on the streets of London, spits in my eye in New York and kills my comrades in Harare, the struggle against that regime is our fight, is my struggle. And I thank you once again for opening the possibility for solidarity.

I want to speak about the effects of globalization on the food systems of southern Africa. I should just say quickly that there's an error in the programme -- although I have done some work in Zimbabwe, I don't have the privilege of being a citizen of Zimbabwe. I am still, to my shame, a subject of her majesty the queen of England. But I have worked with groups in Zimbabwe, in particular the Padare Men's Forum on Gender, a group of pro-feminist men whose slogan is "a blow against patriarchy is a blow against capitalism".

What I want to do is explain why that's such a good slogan to have, particularly when one is dealing with issues of gender, land and food production.

I don't really want to give a history lesson, but I think history is important if we're concerned with ecological sustainability and equity. It's important to remember that for women's work on the land to be sustainable depends on a mixture of things. It has to do with the climate, yes, and soil, and plant breeding. But a feminist analysis also demands that we ask who really has control, control over resources, and over the macroeconomic and social environment in which this farming happens.

You can't tell the story of ecological sustainability without telling the story of colonialism.

Colonialism isn't only about the storming of a country and the planting of a flag, and singing a new song and saluting. It's about the procedures that colonists invented to siphon resources away from the colony, the complex measures used to subjugate the people, divide them, enslave them, and consolidate imperial power . Let me quote a passage from Mike Davis' powerful work, Late Victorian Holocausts (p297). He says "Although the British insisted that they had rescued India from 'timeless hunger', more than one official was jolted when Indian nationalists quoted from an 1878 study published in the prestigious Journal of the Statistical Society that contrasted thirty one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia."

This is exceptionally important, because the point I'm trying get across here is that yes it's important to be concerned about those things that we traditionally think matter about the environment. But floods come and go, locusts will eat your crops, the rains may disappear, but we can anticipate these things, plan for them. And by the same token we can make these environmental factors much more devastating. The insertion of the Indian food economy into the world economy magnified the risks associated with environmental factors as well as simultaneously taking away the social buffers against those factors.

Let's jump forward to right now, and let's zoom in on Southern Africa, where right now 14 million people are starving. This sits on top of an HIV/AIDS pandemic that is decimating the population of Southern Africa. We heard an exceptional presentation yesterday in the plenary session from Sisonke Msimang, and I won't repeat what she said.

The AIDS crisis hits the women who produce the food that feeds the region, very hard indeed. Why? Because it's not just the people with AIDS who suffer its consequences. It's true that HIV/AIDS hits young urban populations the hardest. In some clubs in Harare, for example, the incidence is above 80%.

But although the urban young are often people with aids, it's older women on the farmland in rural areas who are assumed to take care of people with AIDS and aids orphans. And within these new informal orphanages and hospitals, within these families, girls get hit hardest. Why? Well, it's a story we're all too familiar with. Structural adjustment policies have cut away support for education and healthcare. And we know that if there's a choice about sending any children to school, and money is in short supply, women lose out. Again, let me make the point that if we're concerned about ecological sustainability and equity, then we must be concerned about the social services available to the women who work the land.

And that means that we must pay attention to women's ownership of land. Some people might be thinking that, in Zimbabwe, where land redistribution has been taking place, the situation would be much better for women. But there are some things that haven't changed since independence; the blend of domestic and imported patriarchy remains firmly in place. Agriculture in Southern African society is largely women's work. For example, in Zimbabwe, women compose 52 percent of the Zimbabwean population, yet they provide 70 percent of the country's agricultural labor.. [yet] they've only been promised 5 percent of the land, and lower quality land at that.

Let me put it even more bluntly, because this isn't just happening in Zimbabwe. Worldwide, women produce 80% of the food on this planet, and own only 1% of the land. Women produce more than 60-80 percent of the basic foodstuffs for Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, perform over 70 percent of recorded women's labor in Asia and their home gardens represent some of the most complex agricultural systems in Southeast Asia and the Pacific and Latin America.

And so I ask you: How can you have ecological sustainability when there's not even any tenure?

And yet and yet. It's not all doom and gloom. This year's winner of the world food prize, Pedro Sanchez, won the prize because he showed that, despite all these unutterable circumstances, women and men can achieve ecological sustainability. These ecological practices were forced on people in the region, and this is very important to note. Often the poor are criminalized for destroying the environment, and the argument often advanced that the rich can save it. But this situation is precisely the opposite. In these cases in Eastern and Southern Africa, they cannot afford to use the inputs that the World Bank recommends in their farming, and they need any spare cash for things like medicine. So a very low-input, ecological farming system, based on pre-colonial farming practices was re-introduced.

Using a kind of agriculture that replenishes the soil, and works in harmony with the ecosystem, women have been able to grow vast amounts of maize, and other crops. The system uses intercropping of a tree that fixes nutrients in the soil and which greatly improves soil quality. By growing these plants along side the maize that is the main food crop in Southern Africa, it has been possible for yields to skyrocket, on only small 1 hectare farms. And by growing these trees, women have to venture out to look for firewood much less -- they grow their own.

But I can't follow the conventions of these sorts of talks. I'd like to end with a positive note, of feminist bravery in the face of extreme adversity. But I can't. We know that feminists and pro-feminists are fighting back. Right now, though, the odds are incredible. Nothing is going to make these sorts of ecologically sustainabile practices economically sustainable while the US and EU continue to subsidise its agriculture, to the tune of nearly half a trillion dollars over the next ten years while all the while telling the South to cut its subsidies. The US agricultural subsidies, say, for cotton, are three times what USAID has for the entire African region. Mali received $37m in aid in 2001, but lost $43 million in lower world prices for its food.

In conclusion, we have to fight this sort of exploitation which, and I say it again, works only because it relies on the largely unpaid labour of women. Yes, we must use agroecological techniques on the fields. But we have to take our struggle to the streets against governments, and to our cultural institutions, and to our homes. It's only by fighting in all these places, and it's going to be a long fight, that we can hope to see an end to the regime that subjugates us all.