MOVEMENTS

---

What Do Rural Women Want?

By David Bacon

<dbacon@igc.apc.org>

Date: 12-05-96

Rural women brought their own special perspective to the recent World Food Summit. Although their voices were largely excluded from the formal proceedings, the concerns they expressed revealed much about the plight of the world's food producers and the keys to guaranteeing their survival. PNS associate editor David Bacon is a freelance writer specializing in issues involving immigration and work.

ROME -- Sensitivity to issues of gender has become the rule in international agencies and conferences, and Rome's recent World Food Summit was no exception. Representatives of the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization, host of the conference, boasted that their final declaration mentioned women 35 separate times.

But this formal mention does not always speak to the concerns of women -- including needs felt so sharply by many rural women that they found ways to come to Rome. A few snapshots give some sense of their diversity and their crucial role in ensuring human survival in the countryside.

*****

Theresa Masinde from Kenya described the spread of AIDS in farming regions. "It's just finishing off whole communities," she recounted. "Many farms are run now by 14-and 15-year-olds, both of whose parents are dead." Yet she considers these children among the more fortunate ones. Others are taken away and put in homes, deprived of connection to their families and communities.

"We need a special kind of help for the victims of AIDS and their families," Masinde pleaded, "which allows relatives to take responsibility for the land and the children of people who have died."

******

An farmer activist from India, Juli Coriappa, told how women in the villages around her farm have historically taken care of the seeds used to plant each year's crops, a task that helps define their status in their families and their larger communities.

India, like many developing countries, has been flooded with new varieties of genetically-improved seeds for traditional crops. Coriappa explained how these have changed agriculture in a number of ways -- generally favoring large-scale monoculture and squeezing out small-scale farmers.

But one generally unnoticed effect is that plants grown from these seeds don't produce the required amount of seed for the following year's planting. Seeds now have to be bought from large companies, often those that sell the fertilizers and pesticides of the Green Revolution. Thus women no longer are the caretakers of seed, and their social status has suffered.

*****

A Dutch dairy farmer, Johanna Schuurman, talked of her country's agricultural policy which sees elimination of 40,000 of 100,000 farmers as necessary to keep the country competitive in Europe's new free market.

"When my husband and I were young, and took over our farm from his parents," she remembered, "we followed the prevailing policy of the time, which was that we should get bigger. We went from 50 cows to 100 cows, and increased our land use as well.

"Then those same policy makers brought Holland into the European Community, and all of a sudden we had a quota.

"Now they tell us that only bigger farms should survive. And the price of milk has gone down to 6.5 cents, which is less than it costs us to produce it."

Schuurman's son is married, with two young children. He still farms, but she doubts that he'll be able to survive.

"If every country is cutting costs for the same reason, we're all just being pitted against each other to see how far down we can go," she declared. "We're human beings, not surplus." She thinks change is possible. "I feel like a fly fighting with an elephant," she said. "But even an elephant will give up if it faces a swarm."

Photos copyright 1996 by David Bacon. Juli Coriappa, a farmer activist from India, joined a protest of the World Food summit by young anti-hunger activists and third-world farmers at Rome's Colisseum in mid-November. They protested the exclusion of rural people and non-governmental organizations from the summit's formal discussions, and objected to the increasing domination of free-market, pro-corporate policies over the world's food production and distribution.