Addressing the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and 
Forest Degradation Initiative^*

Women and Forests

Women are not more important than men in social and sustainable development, but they deserve special attention as their specific role and needs are often overlooked. Women are the main victims of deforestation and forest degradation but they also form part of the solution for addressing the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation.

Many economic strategies, for example in the timber sector, only take into account employment opportunities and income for men. This is not only true for developing countries. In a country like Canada, economic strategies focussing on the timber sector tend to overlook the fact that this sector hardly provides any employment for rural Canadian women, while employment is a crucial element of strategies to raise the status of women. Economic strategies also tend to overlook the monetary and, in particular, the non-monetary labor and income of women, for example in gathering non-timber forest products and fuel wood. The products this labor provides often play a crucial role in the livelihood of rural families, as it provides them with goods like medicinal plants and nutritional diversity.

It should be realized that gender cannot be accounted for in monetary terms. Neither can social problems like the social disintegration caused by short-term employment contracts in the timber industry or the migration of landless farmers to forest areas be translated into purely monetary terms. Full cost accounting and other economic strategies neither provide the answer to the complicated question how to protect sacred and other traditional knowledge and the rights of indigenous peoples. The recent commercialization of the economic value of genetic resources in the forest and the traditional knowledge of forest communities has completely by-passed the rights of the original owners, including in particular women. The problem is not that large companies do not place a value on genetic resources and related knowledge but that many companies refuse to share that value with the original holders of the knowledge.

Women also hold the key to forest conservation. In Nepal, for example, women used to be neglected in the forestry sector. In reality, though, they formed the main actors in forest management. A few years ago the Nepalese government handed over a large part of their forest management to local communities. And it turned out that in most cases the women were the ones which took up the main responsibility for forest management, as the men were involved in other forms of employment. Their management turned out to be very sustainable, as they fostered an approach which was both efficient and caring.

There also is a strong gender aspect in land tenure inequities and land concentration causing deforestation. In many developing countries, communities used to have communal land rights, which were equitably shared between men and women. Often, when these communal lands were privatized, land titles were only given to the heads of a household. In most cases this implied that the men received the land titles and the women were deprived from their responsibility to manage the forest. In Melanesia, for example, it has often occurred during the transition period that land titles were given to associations of men which were unrepresentative of the community. As these men were not responsible for gathering fuel wood and non-timber forest products they did not have an interest in preserving the forest. Thus, they often sold the land titles to timber companies.

A number of international agencies, such as the FAO, have gender programmes and many governments also have a formal program on gender. Often, however, these programs have relatively low status within the government and the gender-sensitive policies which are proposed are seldom implemented. During the drafting of the IPF Proposals for Action it was felt that the gender perspective should be reflected in all proposals for action. If you do not spell out the role and needs of women, however, they will be neglected in reality. It should also be ensured that women are not only involved in the implementation of projects, but that they can fully participate in the development of projects.

^* Presentation made by Simone Lovera. New York, February, 1998