Index - Viewpoint - Conserving the forest - The destructive industrial approach - When tree planting becomes a problem - The appropriation of nature - The changing cllimate

THE APPROPRIATION OF NATURE

• The Impact of Protected Areas on Twa Women
• Pachamama: The Impact of the Commodification of Nature on Women

THE CHANGING CLIMATE

- The Impact of Protected Areas on Twa Women

The 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. During the 20th century Twa communities were expelled from national parks and conservation areas throughout the region, including the Volcanos National Park and Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda, the Mgahinga and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and the Echuya Forest in Uganda, the Kibira forest in Burundi and the Virunga National Park and Kahuzi-Biega National Park in DRC.

"The ancestors told us we were the first. The people who know how to write have invaded our lands [the Kahuzi-Biega National Park]. According to our ancestors, all those lands belonged to us, but we do not have any rights there now. The park was our area since the time of our ancestors. When a man left with his spear from his home to go into the forest, the family knew they would eat. If the man did not get out his spear, the woman knew she had to get her basket and axe to collect wood. She took the wood to non-Pygmies, and bartered it for bananas, so the family had food. Now, we, the women of the forest, don’t have access to the forest. […] We cry because we have a miserable life. Then, we could live, we had enough to eat, all our needs were satisfied. Now there is nothing." (Twa woman from Buyungula/Kabare, DRC at Women’s Rights Conference organized by the Congolese Twa organization PIDP in 2000)

The removal of the Twa from these forests has caused enormous hardship. No lands were provided as compensation at the time of eviction, with the result that the former inhabitants of these forests are now largely landless and suffering extreme poverty. A few communities have since obtained small amounts of land through government distribution or NGO land purchase schemes. In these cases the distribution has either been to individual families or to Twa communities, who have then divided it up between the families. In these circumstances, the Twa have adopted the customary laws of neighbouring farming communities as concerns land rights – the family plot is considered to be owned by the husband, land is inherited by sons from their fathers and women only have use rights. According to these customs, a wife can be denied access to the family land if her husband takes another wife, or if he dies, his family can remove the widow from the land. Although these customs seem to be applied more flexibly in Twa communities than in neighbouring ethnic groups and Twa women not infrequently can inherit and retain control of family land if their marriage ends, the rights of Twa women are weaker than those of men. They are also probably weaker than when Twa lived as hunter-gatherers, when it is likely that collective rights to large areas of forest enabled women to exercise autonomy in how they used the land, and their rights to gather or hunt were not dependent on their husbands.

The loss of access to forest resources has also had a severe impact on Twa women, who are mainly responsible for providing daily food for the family. Forest yams that are a favourite food of Twa are no longer accessible, along with many other forest products including leaves, fruit, mushrooms and small animals, as well as medicinal herbs. When they had access to the forest, women could also sell forest products such as charcoal and vines, and make handicrafts such as mats.

"We go to look for yams and milunda bitter leaves in the marshes on the edge of the lake and in the eucalyptus plantations of the Zaïrois [DRC Twa term for non-Twa people], as that’s where the yams like to grow. We can’t go to the park since they closed it off, and even if we bend the rules a bit, if we are caught we are threatened with death. Yet, it’s in the forest that there’s a large amount of food, but how to get access to it? Now we don’t even know if we can go to the eucalyptus plantations, as the Zaïrois have started to threaten us and drive us away, saying that we are damaging their trees by cutting their roots when we dig up the yams." (Twa woman, Chombo/Kabare, DRC)

Without land and without access to wild food resources, Twa women’s main source of livelihood is now from labouring on other peoples’ fields, carrying loads or opportunistic searching for food, including begging. Some communities, particularly in Rwanda and Burundi are specialists in pottery, but this is no longer profitable due to the advent of metal and plastic goods. A Twa woman’s typical earnings from a day’s agricultural labour is 15-50 US cents, or the equivalent in food i.e. 1-2 kilos of beans or cassava flour. With these earnings she is scarcely able to meet the daily food needs of her family, let alone have spare resources for essentials such as clothes, soap, medical care or paying for her children’s schooling. The extra food that would have been supplied by her husband, in the form of game from the forest, is also no longer available, unless her husband hunts clandestinely.

As the Twa have lost their forests, so has their culture been undermined.

"Before, when we had access to the forest, the boy had to present his future mother-in-law with a bride price of 5 fuko [small rodents] caught in the forest. In our grandparents’ time, we gave an antelope and buffalo as bride price. Now we are all in the same situation, without means to pay a bride price, so we just live together without ceremony." (Twa woman, Chombo/Kabare, DRC)

Very few of the national parks employ Twa, and then only as game guides and park guards. No Twa women are employed even though they also have valuable forest knowledge like their men folk. The ongoing violent civil conflicts in the area have severely reduced the number of visitors to the national parks. However, women in one or two Twa communities on the edge of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda have been able to benefit from tourism by selling handicrafts to them, and also being members of dance troupes that put on performances for tourists.

By: Dorothy Jackson, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: djackson@gn.apc.org . For more information about the situation of Twa women see Jackson, D (2003) "Twa women, Twa Rights in the Great Lakes Region of Africa." Minority Rights Group international.

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- Pachamama: The Impact of the Commodification of Nature on Women

Pachamama 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.

The concept of ecological services is a very strange one, in this perspective. According to the concept of ecological services, the different functions healthy ecosystems provide to local people, like the provision of food, medicines, fuelwood, water and construction materials, and local climate mitigation, can be translated into monetary economics, turning local people who use these “services” into clients. Clients that will, one way or another, have to pay for these functions. It is like one enters a family and suddenly forces the children to pay for the care their mother provides.

Women have always played a fundamental role in the non-monetary “economy” of people. Much of their day-to-day employment is targeted towards caring for their loved ones, their children, husbands, parents. Like the functions of Mother Earth, these activities are very hard to translate into monetary terms. Yet, they are indispensable for human well-being.

However, neo-liberal biodiversity policy-makers are actively trying to impose the concept of ecological services upon people living within "Mother Earth’s care. These local people suddenly see themselves in a position where they have become the “clients” of ecoservices.

Water that used to be available to them - and used to be fresh - has suddenly become a commodity that has to be paid for, and paid for dearly. Due to water privatization, some families in Mali are now paying up to 60% of their income for freshwater alone!

Fuelwood used to be freely accessible to them, but with the privatization of forests, and the rapidly progressing conversion of forests into monoculture tree plantations, every branch has to be paid for nowadays.

Medicinal plants used to be and still are a fundamental source of health care for many rural families, but with biodiversity destruction reaching epidemic speed worldwide, many families have lost their access to medicinal plants, which means they have to rely on expensive commercial health services.

Bushmeat has become overexploited by commercial hunting, and coastal fish grounds are becoming rapidly degraded, with the only fishstocks left being sold to large commercial fishing fleets.

Even seeds, which are the result of generations of joint innovations of farmers, most of them women, are becoming rapidly privatized and monopolized. Large biotechnology companies are even introducing special terminator technologies, which ensure that farmers are unable to reproduce their own seeds. Meanwhile, it is the reproduction of seeds which has formed the engine behind the development of the world’s amazing agrobiodiversity.

As women are, in average targeting a large part of their daily work to non-monetary activities like family care and unpaid care for people in their direct neighbourhood in general, they have a very disadvantaged position in the monetary economy. In many countries, women are still unable to participate fully in the monetary economy: they are unable to own real estate, they cannot get a mortgage, and they often cannot take a loan without permission of their husbands.

Worldwide, women are paid 30 to 40% less than men for comparable work. Meanwhile, women in developing countries work 60 to 90 hours a week, they provide 40 to 60 % of the household income, 75% of healthcare services, and over 75% of the food consumed throughout Africa. Even in the UK, the average full-time weekly earnings of women are 72% of men’s.

Meanwhile, women are far more dependent on nature in their economic activities than men. In most countries, women are responsible for providing basic needs like freshwater, fuelwood and health care to the family. In most rural families they are also responsible for maintaining the family vegetable garden, and caring for small livestock like chicken, which form an important source of nutrition in the family. Men often work in paid labour or cash-crop production, and they are more likely to benefit economically from monocultures like export-oriented cash crops and even from logging.

The replacement of biodiverse systems by monocultures is a major cause of impoverishment of rural women. As most of their work is unpaid, it deprives them of their main source of income and makes them more dependent upon men. This diminishes their overall status in society and increases their vulnerability, including their sexual vulnerability.

The introduction of ecological services schemes adds even more to this problem. As women receive relatively little monetary income, they are unable to pay for basic needs like fuelwood and water. Due to their low status in many societies they are also less capable to negotiate on an equal level about access to so-called ecological services, thus leading to an even more disadvantaged position in the so-called ecological services market. The concept of ecological services has thus become a major cause in the further impoverishment of rural women.

Instead of trying to sell life and associated knowledge, we should address the direct and underlying causes of deforestation and other forms of biodiversity destruction. Only by challenging market-oriented approaches to biodiversity, and supporting the efforts of millions of women and men around the world to nurture nature and share the benefits of it, we can make any progress towards eradicating poverty amongst women and preventing ecological disaster.

By: Simone Lovera, Friends of the Earth International, e-mail: lovera@foei.org

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THE CHANGING CLIMATE

- Linkages Between Climate Change and Women

Climate change analysis has so far been science–driven, presented in terms of greenhouse gases and emissions. While the scientific analyses remain crucial, social imperatives must be taken into account. Although there are no obvious direct linkages between climate change and women, its potential impacts in terms of socio-economic vulnerability and adaptation place women in a key position.

The notion of gendered impacts of climate change may be perceived by cynics as yet another attempt at academic babble; a systematic attempt at gender mainstreaming in key development policies. After all, climate change is a phenomenon of our times that may alter the lives of humankind in general. Just as hurricanes, storms and floods strike indiscriminately, so too will the consequences of climate change. So, what gender differences could be expected?

The release of greenhouse gases through human activities is creating a thick blanket in the atmosphere, bringing about global warming and hence climate change. Carbon dioxide is one of the most important of these gases and its release is mainly caused by the use of fossil fuels and by deforestation.

As we consider along this bulletin, women who live in or depend on the forest are already being affected by processes which destroy or degrade it: logging, mining, oil, dams, expansion of agriculture, plantations, shrimp farming. These processes in turn contribute to climate change (through the release of carbon dioxide and methane), while changes in the climate will further degrade forests, thereby accelerating the release of carbon dioxide. This means that women already impacted by deforestation would suffer the additional impacts of climate change.

Physical impacts such as rising sea levels, increasing salt-water intrusion, and intruding into human settlements will dramatically alter the natural balance of local and global ecosystems. The problem of rising sea levels is crucial, especially in terms of small islands and low-lying areas. These areas are inhabited by a significant percentage of the human population whose main sustenance comes from their natural habitat. Water contamination of ground water by seawater would also occur in low-lying deltas. Women involved directly or indirectly (as fish traders) will see their income fall significantly. Climate change impacts could give rise to job losses and an increase in the price of fish leading to social upheaval.

In their quest for remunerative activities, women may be unable to adapt to the vagaries of the weather and their remunerative activities could be severely disrupted. Also, many women are responsible for the cultivation and production of agricultural crops. Climate change may worsen agricultural production and, consequently, exacerbate food insecurity. Women who are centre stage in the food chain, in production and in distribution already have to contend with environmental stress such as cultivating arid land, and climate change will exacerbate the situation.

Climate change may also heighten the problem of human migration. Natural catastrophes such as floods and storms could result in severe infrastructural damage on the coast and lead to population displacement. Worldwide, 150 million people will become homeless due to coastal flooding, agricultural disruption and shoreline erosion. Because women are key actors in maintaining the social cohesion of the family, this possible impact of environmental degradation could be very destabilising. Migration and environmental change could also trigger economic and social instability.

Climate change is predicted to cause serious health problems related to cardiovascular, respiratory and other diseases. Also women and children may be exposed to greater water-related health risks since they are responsible for drawing water and have to contend with unhygienic and unsanitary conditions.

Women constitute the majority of low-income earners. Perpetually imprisoned in cycles of dependency and co-dependent roles, women have to strive to maintain the household and its nutritional needs. Defining poverty is not easy, yet indicators such as per capita income, access to credit, ownership of assets, differential access to land rights, life expectancy, education, all put women in an unfavourable position in comparison to their male counterparts. In addition, because poor people and poor women specifically tend to have isolated lives, they find themselves marginalized and do not figure in poverty indicator analyses. Climate change is predicated to accentuate the gaps between the world’s rich and poor, and women are among the poorest and most disadvantaged. They often develop adaptive strategies, yet the nature and scale of environmental stress is such that it may overwhelm women’s ability to contribute effectively to socio-economic development. Climate change related hazards could mean a loss of revenue for women in agriculture, industry, fisheries and also in the informal sector.

Climate change is simply a much graver example of the complexity of environmental stress and how it could affect women, who have a multi-dimensional role as mothers, providers, carers and often natural resource managers.

Excerpted and adapted from “Gendered Impacts of Climate Change”, by Fatma Denton at ENDA – Energy Programme, e-mail: energy2@enda.sn published in ENERGIA News, vol. 3 nº 3, http://www.google.co.uk/search?q= cache:
YKhgHEkBDR8J:www.sms.utwente.nl/energia/pdf/issue3_v3/enews33_13-24.pdf
+Gendered+Impacts+of+Climate&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

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