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All you ever wanted to know about ecofeminism

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Here are some ways in which gender and environmentalism are related

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Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation

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October 30, 2014 | Dr. Vandana Shiva discusses how the future of the planet is intimately linked to the future of food, both because everyone must eat and because industrial agriculture has the largest impact on ecosystems and our health. Trained in physics and philosophy, Dr. Vandana Shiva is renowned for her activism against GMOs, globalization, and patents on seeds and traditional foods. She co-founded Navdanya, which promotes seed saving and organic farming and has more than 70,000 farmer-members. She is the recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award) and has authored several bestselling books.

Boone: My name is Chris Boone. I'm the dean of the School of Sustainability, which is part of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. And I'm very proud to say that we are one of the sponsors of tonight's special presentation by Dr. Shiva. The Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability provides support to bring in the world's leading thinkers and practitioners in sustainability. And of course, Dr. Shiva's certainly one among those ranks. This is the second of the Wrigley series of this year.

One of the things that we do in the Institute is to not only think about human environmental issues, but also to think about solutions. And the Julie Ann Wrigley series, I think, exemplifies that spirit and exemplifies those principles. So as I mentioned, this is a cosponsored event. In addition to the Wrigley Institute, we also have the Institute of Humanities Research and the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies as cosponsors.

It's my honor now to introduce to you Dr. Sally Kitch, who is a regents professor, one of the highest honors awarded at ASU to faculty. She's also the founding director of the Institute of Humanities Research and I'm particularly proud to say that she's a distinguished sustainability scientist. Sally.

[APPLAUSE]

Kitch: Thank you, Chris. I'm here to tell you a little bit about the Institute of Humanities Research and also to tell you about the project that is actually responsible for thinking about bringing Vandana Shiva here to ASU. We are part of an international project that is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation through the Consortium for Humanity Centers and Institutes to look at a global perspective on humanities for the environment.

And sometimes people think, what do the humanities have to do with the environment? But as I think you'll hear a little bit tonight, it has everything to do with the environment. And that, in fact, environmental issues are not in the first instance technological problems, but they're issues that involve human cultures and capacities. And we're here in our project to study and represent these possibilities. So also thanks not only to the Wrigley Institute but also to President Crow's Presidential Initiative Funds and Shippers, we are able to bring Dr. Shiva tonight so she can speak to us about some of these crucial and deep issues involving the environment.

I would now like to introduce the person who's going to introduce Dr. Shiva. Because you never just get one person up here. And that is Doctor Joni Adamson, who is a professor of English and Environmental Humanities here at ASU, and also a senior sustainability scholar in the Wrigley Institute. Joni.

[APPLAUSE]

Adamson: I would like to warmly welcome you to this lecture. Today we meet on the lands of the Akimel O'odham and Pima nations. And I tell you this because the focus of my own work is on global indigenous and oral and written literatures. I first came to know the work of Dr. Vandana Shiva when I had to answer the question of why so many indigenous novelists and writers around the world were writing about food sovereignty, seed saving, and soil health.

This brought me to Dr. Shiva's books and her prodigious writings answered my questions about why a prominent Laguna Pueblo writer such as Leslie Marmon Silko would write a novel that has as its main character a small O'odham girl who collects seeds and who freely shares them around the world. This novel titled Gardens in the Dunes focuses on all the topics that we will be discussing tonight, including seeds, seed saving, and famine foods. And the novel illustrates one of the ways in which the humanities and the arts are contributing significantly to conversations around the future of foods.

Dr. Shiva is a world renowned environmental thinker, a seed and food sovereignty activist, a physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, a writer, and a science policy advocate. In the 1970s, during that historic Chipko or Hug The Tree movement in the central Himalayan region, she dramatically shifted her career direction after learning that the women protecting forests against logging-- excuse me, after learning that the women protecting forests against logging were trying to convey the idea that to the world, forests for timber, revenue, and profits, but the real products of the forests were soil, water, and pure air.

She went on to focus her work on protecting access to clean water and preserving the diversity and integrity of native organisms. In 1993, she was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as the alternative Nobel Prize. She's also the co-founder of Navdanya, an organization that works with local communities and groups in India. She is the writer of many books, including Staying Alive, Biopiracy, Monocultures of the Mind, and Water Wars, and one that is very important to this seminar, Soil Not Oil, as well as over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals.

Her recent work in Soil Not Oil, she has argued that we need to quote, "Change our mind before we can change our world. This cultural transition is at the heart of making energy transitions to an age beyond oil." Unquote. Energy transitions is a research and cultural issue that we here at ASU are deeply involved in working on and it is an area of concern that is bringing humanists together with their colleagues across the disciplines.

Dr. Shiva's visit to ASU is part of a humanities workshop titled Forms of Collaborative Knowledge and Collective Action, The Future of Food, in which we will dive into issues and discussions about how we can build interactional competencies to work together. There is no one more qualified to help us think about these topics.

She has inspired change and empowered others through her optimism, her strength, and her unwavering determination to demonstrate the ways in which scientific knowledge, ecological knowledge, and collective action can lead to positive changes in the world. It is my great honor and my deep pleasure to welcome Dr. Vandana Shiva to the podium. Her lecture is titled, "The Future of Food, Dictatorship or Democracy."

[APPLAUSE]

Shiva: Thank you so much to the collaboration between the Institute of Sustainability, the Institute for Humanities Research, the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. And isn't that an amazing collaboration? I think it's the first time such a diversity of institutes and disciplines have invited me. And it already shows that ASU is truly looking at the challenges of sustainability and non-sustainability in a very fresh way.

I never thought I'd spend so much of my life looking at food. I was among those crazy scientists who thought food is a luxury. You eat it when you have to eat it. And I realize increasingly that food is the web of life. Because the web of life is interactions between different organisms, where one is the food of the other. And the soil food web it's such an amazing correction to that extremely false idea that life is a pyramid with man on top. The organisms in the soil are one step beyond us. We are their food. That should bring us a little humility.

[LAUGHTER]

And how we produce and consume food is probably the most significant impact, both on the planet and society. In recent years, there was an indifference to these issues. I woke up to it in 1984, when violence erupted in the state of Punjab, which is the land of five rivers, prosperous, hardworking farmers. The Green Revolution was first implemented in Punjab. It was even given a Nobel Peace Prize with the thesis that changing the seeds and adapting them to chemicals is going to create so much prosperity that there will be peace.

And the color green did not come from the philosophy green. There was no philosophy green in '60s. The Green Movement grew much later as a sustainability movement. Green was just a color different from red. And red is what you didn't want/ and the idea was, you engineer the seeds, you engineer society, and there'll be peace ever after. But there wasn't peace in Punjab.

That same year, in the city of Bhopal, a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide leaked. And I rushed in with bucket fulls of Neem saplings, beautiful tree whose scientific name is azadirachta indica, which has been used for centuries in India for pest control. And I drew a poster. No more Bhopal, let's plant a Neem. But by the end of that year, I was asking myself, why is the model of agriculture that is dominant causing so much violence?

And I was working, at that point, on a major program for the United Nations University on conflicts over natural resources. And either I think the conflicts that are deeper than the ones that are being reported on. And will you let me investigate? They did. I wrote a book called The Violence of the Green Revolution as a result. And while doing the research for the book, half the time the field trips had to be canceled because the train had been blown up or the bus had been blown up with a bomb. But I persisted and finally did the research.

And I remember in particular a declaration of the Sarbat Khalsa, which is the big body of the Sikhs, saying when can't choose what you grow, when you can't decide the methods of production, when you don't determine the price of what you produced, when your own river's water can't be released through your decision. Because the Bhakra dam was controlled by Delhi. Then we are living under slavery.

And the reason they came out with this was because the Green Revolution, by the '80s, was going into a negative economy. Farmers were getting into debt. There were more pests. There was more pesticide use. The nitrogen fertilizer was having to be used more and more, with no gain and yield right now. The yields are going down that much. The soils were dying, the water was disappearing, the farmers were angry. And they took to the gun. There were protests. The protests weren't listened to.

Something very similar is actually happening right now in Syria. But so rapidly our minds have become so fragmented and we forget so fast. Now, I remember reading in newspapers just a few years ago how there was a major drought in Syria. And just as the Indian peasants had revolted in the '80s, instead of offering a solution through food democracy, through the rights of farmers to have seed sovereignty and food sovereignty, instead of creating a more fair system of pricing of food, the military was sent to the Golden Temple, which is the sacred shrine of the Sikhs in Amritsar.

The Sikhs felt outraged. They had assassinated Indira Gandhi by the end of the year. And in response, the congress killed 3,006 in a terrible program. And the justice on that issue hasn't yet been done.

But in Syria, as the drought continued to intensify, 800,000 Syrians, farmers and herdsmen in the area around the town of Daraa, were losing their livelihoods. 75% of the crop had finished. 85% of the herds were dead. And they came into the city protesting. They were rested, they were thrown into jail, and that is what created the anti-Assad movement. Assad himself had locked into the globalization paradigm of new liberalism where agriculture has to be either destroyed or ignored. And global trade is what gets priority.

With the drought, the farmers started to mine more water where they could. And the NASA figures are there, both for Punjab as well as for Syria, which is in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. 144 cubic meters were being lost because of excessive drilling. In Punjab, the water level is falling by a foot a year. This is a land where, in my days, younger days, wherever you went in Indo-Gangetic Plain, you would see Persian wheels, which would be getting water at 10 feet. More than 26 cubic miles of water disappeared in Punjab.

Why is so much water being wasted and misused? Because whether it's in Syria or in India, crops that use less water have been displaced. Whether it is drought resistant rices or barley or wheat or the millets which I call the foods of the future. The millets are the most nutritious crops. You think they just bird food. No, they are authentic human food. We did a calculation that if we grew millet, we would have 400 times more food using the same amount of water in India.

The Green Revolution, which is based on chemicals, is water intensive. Not for the plants, but for the chemicals. Uses 10 times more water. Globally, between 75% to 95% of the water in different countries is going into an intensive agriculture which is not bringing us any gains in food security. In fact, it's undermining food security by destroying water availability.

Because the limiting factor for the production of food is not limits of land. We've got so much land. But the land is not always able to grow food because of limits on water. And in desert cultures, the indigenous people of this land or in Rajasthan or the semi-arid tracts of the Deccan, farmers evolve the most amazing ways of conserving water and using less.

Now of course there's a lot of fashion about crop per drop. But it's not yet at the systems level where you have ecosystems conserving more water and using less. I have seen, of course, on the flights to this country sometimes napkins served that say, "We put more water back than we take." Now that is arithmetically impossible. But Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola try and convince us that they are creators of water.

So water wise, these systems were hugely non sustainable. And because we have developed very reductionist mechanistic ways of thinking about the world since the Industrial Revolution, and these have been defined as the only way you can approach science. But we have now the advantage of the birth of ecological sciences all over.

At no point was a response made in terms of food democracy. Not in Syria, not in India. Not in Sudan, not in Nigeria. Every conflict we see around the world today that is defined as a religious conflict has at its roots resource use. And how we grow food is the single biggest determinant of resource use. Most people in the world farm. Because we use the figures up how much of humanity lives in cities, we forget that in most of Africa, 90% to 95% people are involved in agriculture, most of them women.

So narrowing it down into a conflict based on religion, we then create an amazing narrative of enemies out there. I wish President Obama was not sending drones and fighter jets to drop bombs, but was allowing Syria and Iraq, which gave agriculture to the world, to be able to rejuvenate their biodiversity, to be able to rejuvenate their agriculture. I work very closely with Professor Chicorelli, who was, for most of his life, in Aleppo, where there is an International Center of Arid Zone agriculture research ICARDA. Of course, Aleppo has been bombed.

But Dr. Chicorelli works with us on how participatory breeding with farmers is our only security today. He works with us on evolutionary breeding that in times of climate change you've got to allow the plants to evolve to adapt. Put the seeds out in that seed bank in Norway. They call it the doomsday seed bank. I don't think we can ever talk about the seed in terms of dooms days. The seed is what carries hope and the future.

And it is evolving. When it goes through a hot period, it evolves to deal with it. When it goes through a flat, it evolves with it. And when a seed has to be in areas where you have cyclones or salt water in the backwaters, farmers have evolved salt tolerant varieties in Navdanya seed banks. We just saved every seed we could.

We've created 120 community seed banks. Because we were not making a judgment about nature and our ancestors. We knew they had intelligence. And then when the super cyclone hit Orissa in 1999, we were able to distribute salt tolerant seeds from our seed banks. And Orissa jumped back in agriculture.

In 2004 when the tsunami hit, the farmers were members of Navdanya and were growing salt tolerant seeds. Gifted two truckloads to Tamil Nadu. Now, I've gone to Tamil Nadu when the tsunami happened, and agriculture department said we can't do agriculture for five years. And we don't know what to do with our farmers.

I said, you can do agriculture right now. We'll bring you the seeds. And the seeds didn't just survive. They did so well that they've been getting distributed. They've traveled all the way to Indonesia. A farmer came up to me on my recent trip in Indonesia to say, I'm bring the salt tolerant seeds we received from Navdanya.

So seeds are the hope. These are seeds of hope. This diversity is our real insurance for the future. Whether it is to deal with climate change or it is to create democracy or it is to deal with the pests and insects and diseases that are typical of the monoculture model. And yet the monoculture paradigm destroys that diversity.

In 1995, the food and agricultural organization did a conference on plant genetic resources, to make an assessment of how much have we lost and why have we lost it. And every country was asked to do this assessment of biodiversity in agriculture. '95 they found 75% of the diversity in agriculture had disappeared because of industrial monocultures. And in '95, globalization was just being born through the free trade rules of what became the World Trade Organization.

Because of my work on the Green Revolution, I'd started to get invited to agriculture meetings. And I'm a perennial learner. Any place I find I can learn something new, I'll be there. Because I don't think one ever learns enough with a degree or a university or a PhD. I think more PhDs should go back to learn all over again, something they've never did a PhD on.

[LAUGHTER]

So I get invited to this conference in 1987 on biotechnology. 1987 there were no GMO crops. It was a small meeting organized jointly with the United Nations and the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation. Dag Hammarskjold was the first Director General of the UN. And it was called Laws Of Life. What are the implications of the new biotechnology? It was pre commercialization. And the industry was very honest, which was the industry that was starting to think of biotechnology, the old chemical industry.

Who was this old chemical industry that brought us the agrochemicals? The old war chemical industry. I'm reading my book for my trip this time. It's not a very pleasant book. It's called Hell's Cartel. And it's about the chemical industry that made chemicals for the war, for killing people in concentration camps. There was then tried in Nuremberg. They moved into agriculture after the war, not wanting to give up their habit of selling chemicals for profits.

But they did a very, very good job of making it look like without their chemicals we could not grow food. So unless you could kill every insect you saw, we would starve as human beings. Every insect was in competition with us. Textbooks on pest control say the war against pests. We have to keep escalating it because they are getting smarter. Pesticides have created more pests. 1,200% is what the figure was a few years ago.

Now, at this meeting, industry said very clearly the reason we've got to do genetic engineering is it's the only way we can continue to grow. Only through genetic engineering can we claim patents on seeds. By adding a new gene, we can now say we have created another life form and claim a patent. And they also said it wasn't good enough. The sampling is the rich world is a very small market when it comes to food. Europe and the USA are small compared to the billions in our parts of the world. And everyone must eat.

And most farmers are in the south. Every fourth farmer is an Indian peasant. So it's not good enough to have laws of patenting of seed for Europe and America. We've got to have it globally and therefore we need an intellectual property rights agreement. In what became the GATT, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff, is what became the World Trade Organization.

In 1995, a Monsanto representative in a speech in Washington, DC said, "We've achieved something absolutely unprecedented. We wrote an agreement, gave it to our government, which then had it moved through the GATT. We also went directly to the GATT secretariat and moved the treaty. And we were the patient, diagnostician, physician, all in one."

And what was the problem? What was the disease? The disease was farmers are saving seed. Now, a patent is a right of an inventor to exclude anyone else from making, using, selling, distributing what is invented. The problem is when it comes to seed, seed is not an invention. Seed evolves. Farmers co-evolve with the seed to breed varieties. Seed is evolution. And I'm so glad Pope Francis has said evolution happens.

[LAUGHTER]

Evolution is real. Just gave a speech the other day. So the invention of seed being built into law for me was so outrageous. Because I had been working to defend the integrity of species, the intrinsic value of every life form of this planet. And to suddenly be told the life forms are inventions was a very, very deep violation. But I kept thinking, these companies are talking about five of them controlling the seed supply in the future. That's what they said. They said we are too small, so we must become bigger.

And right now you see Monsanto is controlling so many seed companies. That meeting there was Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz. They merged to become the pharmaceutical firm Novartis and then they joined with Astra and Zeneca to become Syngenta, the second biggest corporation that controls seed, especially genetically modified seeds.

So after I'd heard the corporations talk about their future, I said I'm going to save seeds. And I took inspiration from Gandhi's spinning wheel. Realizing that the British empire ran on control over the textile industry and the raw material for the textile industry. And the living seed was being reduced to raw material for the biotechnology industry. Because you don't invent the seed, you take it from somebody. Usually you just steal it.

And so much of my life has gone in dealing with what I call biopiracy. Now seed exchange has always happened. Exchange is not piracy. But you come to me and you take the seed and then you patent it and say I created it and now you pay me royalty, that's bio piracy.

So the four cases we have fought and won. The first was Neem, that wonderful tree I took to Bhopal. 10 years later I find it's patented. And world's first biopesticide from Neem. So we started a campaign and I took 100,000 signatures to the European Patent Office as well as to the US Patent Office.

Now, the US Patent Office wrote and said, "What's your commercial interest?" We said we don't have a commercial interest. We have a public interest. We have an ecological interest. Sorry, we only entertain commercial competition between two people claiming a patent. But the European law has a clause on public interest, so they admitted it. For 11 years we fought that case and we won. And the patent was held jointly by a company called WR Grace and the US Department of Agriculture.

I remember when we first filed a case. The lawyers, they were common lawyers, and they're pointing to me in the courtroom of the European Patent Office and saying, "She can't be here because she's not a European." So I just smiled and said, "No, are you?" Because they were Americans.

[LAUGHTER]

But of course there's this thing of how can a brown woman in a sari come and challenge us? But when it's illusions of that scale that cause so much harm to the democracy of life on this planet and our food democracy, then I will challenge. There was another case where a Texas company claimed to have invented our beautiful basmati, for which my valley, Doon Valley, is famous. And we had to do campaigns on that. I had to fight cases.

And eventually they had to drop most of their claims. We even did an action where I came to Texas and worked with church groups to send postcards. So it's US Patent and Trademark Office, which becomes USBTO. And the postcard just said, if you don't revoke this patent, we will have to call you the US Piracy and Theft Office. And they dropped the patents.

And then everyone's getting gluten allergies because wheat has been bred in a way that it's expressing too much gluten. We in India have wheats that don't express the gluten. Our ancient wheats don't lead to gluten intolerance. So when Monsanto realizes a huge market. Some figures I've read is every third American has problems with the wheat now. So there's a market. They pick up an Indian wheat variety and say we've invented all its properties and now we're going to control and monopolize all products made from, all the seed, the grain, and all products made from wheat.

In this particular case, by the time I went to file the patent in the European Patent Office and the head of the patent office is coming out in the snow, I'm trudging through and saying, I'm so happy to see you again, Dr. Shiva. I said, you should be ashamed to see me again, because it just means you keep issuing bio piracy patents, which is illegitimate and illegal and violates the law. Because piracy is theft. It's not an invention.

Sadly, this idea of a totally constructed intellectual property in seed and life is being pushed very, very hard. And it is having very high costs. I don't know how many of you have because of patents on seed, on GMO seeds. American farmers are spending $10 billion extra for royalty. Because that's the main intention of genetically engineered seed, to collect a royalty.

In India, I won't give you the long story of what happened to India's cotton, but before globalization, before Monsanto entered the country, if it was a farmer's own seed, it was 0 cost. If it had been bought from a public institution or a local company, it was five rupees or 10 rupees a kilogram of seed. Monsanto enters with 450 gram packages 1,600 rupees. It's more than 3,600 for a kilogram. And as a Monsanto representative said to a parliamentary committee that was investigating, the crisis related to GMOs. They said, yeah, half of it is royalty collection.

But can you imagine? Here's the seed that's growing and evolving. Here are farmers who have worked to evolve that seed. They're doing the hard work in the field. And the royalties come to Monsanto. There've been so many investigations on the banking system. There've been so many investigations on Ponzi schemes of all kinds. One thing that hasn't being investigated, and I hope the amazing institutions that are hosting this lecture will get into this, intellectual property rights on seed patents, on seed are a Ponzi scheme.

[APPLAUSE]

Of course, this Ponzi scheme is upheld with claims of miracles from GMOs, the first claim being that they produce more food and the world will go hungry and there'll be 10 billion people on the planet and without GMOs you won't have food. Because of GMOs we don't have food. Only 10% of the GMO corn and soya which accounts for the largest expansion of acreage in the world in the recent years. Only 10% goes for food.

The UN data has clarified that 70% of the food we eat comes from small farms. And I would assume that if we add the gardens, urban gardens, organic farms, we would have figures that would cross 80%. So in fact the industrial system is a minority system when it comes to food security. But it is the major system that is causing both the ecological crisis as well as the crisis of democracy.

What is a dictatorship? A dictatorship basically is control of an absolute kind. And look at what's happening to our food system. See the first link in the food system is being controlled like we've never seen before. It was not controlled before. It was shared. We had public universities breeding seed and they'd share the seed. Farmers shared seed amongst each other. I have learned so much from the peasant cultures of India and the cultures of seed saving and seed sharing.

But what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning of this new system. We've had industrial agriculture. We've had the Green Revolution. But this thing called the Second Green Revolution, precision agriculture, one agriculture for the entire world, that's what they're talking about. That future vision is a disaster.

So can GMOs produce more food? They can't. The technology is not for breeding. The technology is for shooting a gene that doesn't belong to the plant. The yield comes from the original plant. You don't really know what's happening when you shoot a gene. It's not a precise technology. It's a highly inaccurate and imprecise technology. But it brings new risks, which is why we have international law on bio safety.

In the US, you don't have such laws because President Bush came back and implemented a principle which is totally unscientific, a principle of substantial equivalents. If I have a corn that has evolved as a corn and crossed with other corns, and I have a corn with a BT toxin in it that has taken a gene from a soil organism and is now expressing toxins in this corn, this BT corn is not the same as the ordinary corn.

We make a difference between chemically farmed and organic crops. And here we are tampering with the very genome of the crop and saying it's the same. I've called this ontological schizophrenia because when it comes to owning the seed through patents, you say never existed before. I'm the creator. I'm the inventor. I am the one who's brought something novel in the world. So give me a patent.

Then say, OK, this thing you brought into the world that's so novel, can we please look at it and see what impact it has on the environment, on the pollinators, on the soil organisms? Can we please look at what it does to our health? Can we please look at what does it do to farmers economics?

We are told no, just like nature made it. We don't have to look. We don't have to see. We don't have to find. And by not doing anything, we declare safety. And then we go around bullying the world which does experiments on safety to say it's unscientific.

Now Europe has safety laws and they do tests. The first was a test done by the-- The UK government commissioned the top lectin expert of his time, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, to do tests on GMO crops, because the movements were very strong. And he was actually pro GMO. He didn't expect to find anything different. But he found that the rats he was testing in the three month study, their brain had shrunk, the pancreas had expanded, their intestinal walls were damaged, and their immunity system was compromised.

So he went to his director and said, this is serious. Three months of feeding? What will happen to lifelong eating? Come on, humans, we must warn the public. So they did a press conference. It went all over the world. Next day there was a call from the United States to Tony Blair. Shut this man, shut this lab. Put a gag order. Putting a gag order on scientists who are telling us what's really going on at the level of science means not just sowing the seeds of dictatorship, but preparing us for ignorance of what's happening.

The next victim was Ignacio Chapela at Berkeley, who did studies on the contamination of the corn in Mexico. His paper was published in Nature, and suddenly there were letters to Nature saying withdraw this paper. Nature had never experienced this before, so they withdrew the paper. Turns out, there's a system called viral marketing, and it was a British journalist who tracked it, where on one computer I can cook up 1,000 names of scientists who don't exist, bombard the journal, and have them panic. There were no scientists complaining to Nature. It was viral marketing.

The more recent case is that of Seralini, Eric Seralini, who used to be a regulator at University of Caen for bio safety. And he used to see the dossiers that the companies were bringing. And he says, this is so sloppy. There's no research here. They're just declaring safety. And he went back to France where he had been a scientist and opened a lab to look at bio safety. He's the first person who did a two year study on genetically engineered corn. It hasn't been done before. Most trials are for three month feeding. He did a two year feeding study.

And because he knew what happens, he kept it very quiet, got it published in the Journal of Chemical and Food Toxicology. It was published. Then this viral marketing started. They said, withdraw the paper. They said the rats were too few. He said, my rats were more than the Monsanto number. Wrong species. Same species. This is the one that's used all over the world for lab trials. Anyway, they started putting out saying, unscientific.

And Dr. Seralini's Wikipedia doesn't talk to Dr. Seralini's research, it talks about Seralini affair, like he's some shady scientist cooking up his data. And when they couldn't get away getting his paper withdrawn because the journal just said, sorry, this is peer reviewed, it's gone through all the tests, and we are not going to withdraw it, they just changed the editor.

A Monsanto man was planted and he withdrew the study. Seralini published it in another journal, but you can see that the issue of food dictatorship begins with the seed, goes into food, goes into our knowledge systems, goes into how our decisions are made, because governments are being hijacked. I feel very sorry to see the White House, whether it was under Bush or under Obama, only doing what Monsanto asks them to do.

I won't go into details of the new trade treaties, but I will talk a little about the fact that in spite of GMOs not producing more food, in spite of GMOs not reducing chemical use. That was the promise, that we won't have to spray. There'll be no chemical uses. Everything will be done. I'll just run through.

In India, BT cotton is not working to control the bull worm, but has created new pests. Aphids, weevils, and mites. But new epidemics, more pesticide use. In China, 12 fold more use pesticides in the BT crops. In the US, herbicide use increased 15%. And right now in Argentina, overall glyphosate use has tripled because of Roundup Ready soya.

And then if you look at the impacts, you see the Argentinian studies on the birth defects, children being born without brains, children being born with no anus. And these are pediatricians of the government doing these studies. Chemical use hasn't gone down. Production hasn't increased. Farmers' incomes haven't increased, because you now have the burden of additional chemicals as well as the royalty payment for seed, seed which should be a commons, seed which should be in every farmer's hands. Seed sovereignty is the very basis of food sovereignty, which is the basis of food democracy.

The alternatives are doing so much better. Every UN study has shown that agroecology produces more food. There's a UNEP study called Preventing Future Famines, Defending the Ecological Foundations of Agriculture. A UNCTAD study called The Wake Up Call To Governments saying don't go down this non sustainable path. FAO study showing that even in Africa agroecological systems are producing much more food.

And our own studies, the Health Breaker, which shows that man measured in terms of nutrition, biodiverse ecological systems can feed not just the 10 billion they would like us to be scared about, but 14 billion. But we shouldn't become 14 billion. We are too many already.

And I won't go into too much detail about how, an agriculture that removes people from the land has a big role in population growth. Because as long as people are secure in their land, they know how large the family should be. So when they're displaced, that they have to sell their labor power, they've got to have a child who grows up enough, who survives until they are old. All of that combination of insecurity, which on the one hand is creating conflicts, which is being labeled as religious conflict. And on the other hand, is triggering the need for larger numbers in the context of insecurity. The roots are in removing people from agriculture.

We've also done a new report that agriculture minister just released. It's called Wealth Breaker. I've done a PhD in the foundations of quantum theory, very tricky combination of non-separability and unpredictability and it's tough to get your head around it. And I would very often not solve a problem and then I'd go to sleep and in the morning I'd start writing my chapter in my PhD.

But the globalized industrial system is like 10 PhDs. Here you have high cost seed with a patent royalty, and it ends up as cheap food. In fact, the other day I had the debate where the biotech industry was saying, only we can produce food that's cheap. I said no, you produce seed that's costly. The subsidies produce food that becomes cheap.

[APPLAUSE]

400 billion is the global subsidy. $1 billion a day. In the US, the industrial system would collapse if that tax money was diverted from subsidizing toxic food that's destroying the planet and destroying our health to being shifted to growing food that protects the planet and protects our health and generates employment in the process.

Let me revisit the destruction on the planet. 75% of planetary damage, water, soil, biodiversity. 40% of the greenhouse gases come from the globalized industrial system. We are talking about the biggest impact on the planet. And yet ecological farming and local food system can be the place where we do the opposite, we rejuvenate bio diversity, we save seeds. We build up organic fertility of the soil, we conserve water.

And we mitigate and adapt climate change. We literally have capacity through organic farming to take out much more of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than is being put into it. But of course, we get rid of nitrogen oxides that come from nitrogen fertilizers. We get rid of methane that comes on the one side from factory farming and on the other side from wasting 50% of the food. That's the figure for this country. 50% food is wasted. It's wasted on the farm through imposing uniformity. It's wasted in supermarket shelves because of the long distance travel, with a best before date.

And I was so happy I had to do a convocation in one of the Washington colleges. And the students cooked a wonderful dinner for me. So I innocent asked, I said, which organic farm supplied the dinner? And they all had grins on their face and they weren't telling me. I said, what's the secret? They said, it's all a dumpster dived.

[LAUGHTER]

And they explained to me about this new culture of preventing food waste in doing dumpster diving. I really pay tribute to the young people. They come up with such amazing things to face these giants and to change the insanity to sanity.

Because all these initiatives are growing, organic is growing, local food is growing, seed saving is growing, there's a new attempt at seed and food dictatorship. There's now an attempt to criminalize seed saving. Already in Pennsylvania and Maryland, notices have been served to seed libraries. In the case of Pennsylvania, a statement was made.

Agroterrorism is a very, very real scenario. And where does agroterrorism come? From the ancient seeds that we have grown for hundreds of years. Herited seeds and ancient seeds pose a threat. GMOs are totally safe. They should be deregulated.

The law basically is a law imposing uniformity. Says, it shall be unlawful to sell, offer for sale, expose for sale, which is exchange between people, or transport any seed subject to the provisions of this act. Any seed. They tried the same last year in Europe. And we built a huge seed freedom movement there with the European Parliament.

There's a new French film made by the French called Seed Wars, and they just sent me the link for YouTube. I looked at it and it was really nice to go back to last year and the mobilizing we did. The law was sent back to the European Commission. But there are 19 states with such legislation to make biodiversity and local seeds illegal. 19 states, and Arizona is one of them.

Now, a similar law was introduced in India. Same year, 2004, when your laws are changing, they've been kind of kept in cold storage all these years, and they're being brought out now. And the fact that they're being brought out now is because the dictators are panicking because of democracy. If all these seeds are available, how will they collect royalties from toxic GMO seeds? Sooner or later, that market will shrink.

So the only way to make that market grow is shut down the rest. And in 2004 they tried to do a similar law. And I can just see how 2004 they became very active. And I saw these two lines in our financial papers. So I immediately got in touch with parliamentarians, got a text of this seed act. These acts are called seed acts. And therefore compulsory licensing and compulsory registration of any seed.

I've studied it. I've traveled the country. When any occasion like this happens, I just get out there with communities and travel the country and inform them and show them and translate into different languages. And by the end of it, hundreds of thousands of farmers had signed a petition telling our prime minister, which I carried to him, that we are in the land of Gandhi. And when the British tried to impose salt laws, Gandhi walked to the beach, picked up the salt from the sea, said nature gives it for free. We need it for our survival. We will continue to make salt. We will not obey your laws.

And we take inspiration from the salt satyagraha. Satyagraha was Gandhi's word for the force of truth. Satya Is truth, agraha is the force. Truth, force. And he said, as long as the illusion exists that unjust laws must be obeyed, so long will slavery exist. And he worked on this first in South Africa against the apartheid regime. 1930, he used it against the salt laws. So I told our prime minister, we are in the land of Gandhi. And if you impose such a law, we will have to do a seed satyagraha.

So it won't work anyway. Because we have higher duties to higher laws. Laws of corporate monopoly are degraded laws. Laws of protecting biodiversity and providing good food to all through saving good seed is the higher law both in terms of the laws of the earth and the planet as well as laws of justice and human rights and human dignity and human freedom.

We now have to decide our role in the future of food. Will it be a role of engaging, of building the alternatives that allow all life on earth to prosper while bringing us big food? Or will it be a future where we witness impassivity, this unfolding of a deeper dictatorship? You know, the other dictatorships were around speech. If I can't speak my beliefs, I don't die. The difference between this dictatorship over seed and food and all earlier dictatorships is because this is touching on the very basis of our survival.

So we have to move beyond reductionist mechanistic science that separates and fragments and creates illusions that we are doing better in our food system, even while we are losing our ecological endowment, and while we are losing our health and we're losing our freedom. We have to go beyond reductionist economics, which defines people as labor and then labor as an input and the earth as land and land as an input into a system where mysteriously value gets created somewhere else.

I deeply believe that human beings are a creative force, not capital. Toxic chemicals are not a creative force. They're a destructive force. Human beings as a creative force are an outcome of a good agricultural system. And in a similar way, rejuvenated biodiversity, rejuvenating soils, rejuvenated water, a stable climate are outcomes of an agriculture system. They are the objective. Taking care of the earth is the objective.

I always tell people who come to our earth university where we run courses on agroecology, we run courses throughout the year. There's a biodiversity farm, a research farm, a training farm in Doon Valley. I say our first work in creating earth democracy and in creating food democracy is earth care. We just have to take care of the earth and the biodiversity in the soil. The rest biodiversity does for us. She controls the pests. She rejuvenates the water. We only have to do our duty to the earth.

And I can tell you in these years since we've started the work, we don't have pests that damage. We have insects that are doing all the work. Ladybirds and spiders on every plant. Volunteer crops that are food, that would be the source of nutrition if they weren't sprayed with Roundup. And then they want to do bio fortification by genetically engineering rice and banana. Rice for vitamin A, banana for vitamin A and iron.

Biodiversity is thousands of percent more efficient in getting us the nutrition we need. These new reductionist tricks, for a short while, will work only because there's lots of advertising money. I've been told $400 million has been spent to kill labeling laws in the last few years. And talking about democracy and freedom, besides the fact that there's this new attempt to shut down seed libraries, there is of course the attempt to prevent labeling.

64 countries of the world have mandatory labeling of GMOs. This country doesn't only me not have labeling, every time citizens organize to get labeling, 40 million is put in, 30 million is put in, California, Washington, right now Oregon is going on. Well, Vermont's too small and it went through. They got their labeling law. And I am traveling from here to Vermont for solidarity.

[APPLAUSE]

Not only do we have a dictatorship, we have a dictatorship of fictitious persons.

[LAUGHTER]

Vermont is being sued for its labeling law because Monsanto and others say that citizens knowing what they're eating and having the freedom to choose what they eat is robbing the cooperation of their freedom of speech.

[LAUGHTER]

I feel the challenge we have for food democracy is to realize that democracy is populated by real beings. Earth democracy is all the beings of the earth. Food democracy, the human beings involved in producing food and eating food. And it's their freedom that comes first. Not a fictitious person of corporations. That's a construct and it's now becoming a construct that's threatening both food and democracy. We have neither bread nor freedom if this kind of false freedom, of folds beings, is allowed to unfold.

So we have all the evidence that working with the earth, we produce more food. Working with the earth, we produce better food. And this is scientific. It's scientific to work with the laws of nature. It's unscientific to cook up laws and impose them on nature and humanity.

So the earth is inviting us to create food democracy as a way of restoring earth democracy. To decline her invitation at this point of our species evolution would be to live in a dictatorship for a short time and not live at all in the long run. And that, I'm sure you agree, would not be a very intelligent choice. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Adamson: So because we have such a limited amount of time, we have asked all of the people who reserved tickets for tonight to submit questions. And so I'm going to be reading the questions that were submitted by those of you who sent in questions. And I'm going to just read them the way they were submitted. So in fact, you might have already sort of answered some of these questions, but this will give you a chance to elaborate a little bit further.

Some researchers are saying that 80% of people will live in cities by 2050 or 2080. Can you talk about how your work answers questions about the looming increases in urbanization of the world's population?

Shiva: First I don't treat it as an inevitability that cities will continue to grow. Cities are growing because of a dysfunctional agriculture system that's making agriculture livelihoods un-viable because of the way farmers are being exploited. Farms don't earn anything anymore because of all those subsidies that are used to dump cheap products, especially in our parts of the world.

But when farmers are in a distressed system where there's only one buyer, a Cargill is the only one you'll sell your corn to. Cargill fixes the prices. And they always fix the prices downwards, never upwards. And I've been told this here corn and cotton are in such low levels of price for farms, there's going to be more distress.

So we do need to correct the agrarian system for fairness and sustainability. The fact that cities have grown recently doesn't get rid of that responsibility to correct our agricultural system. As far as cities are concerned, cities are dependent on food. Food is their metabolism.

I was just reading a Mitsubishi ad saying the same thing. There will be bigger cities, more cities. And therefore, we are the smart ones who'll deliver food. And we'll do it through logistics and we'll do it through GPS systems. No, you can do it with local farmers. That's what the CSA's about. That's what urban agriculture's about.

[APPLAUSE]

And if we just realize that food is the metabolism even of cities, then you first begin to grow in the city what you can grow in the city. You can have CSAs linking to the city. And then you have food sheds linking on a larger level. A larger city will have a larger food shed, but it'll still be local to that city. And a smaller city will have a smaller food shed. So cities don't mean local doesn't work, organic doesn't work. It's just an illusion of the mind to say, because there are cities, let's trash the planet. There'll be no food on a dead planet.

Adamson: What would you say or recommend to students interested in food systems about how they can make a career out of making our food systems more sustainable and democratic?

Shiva: Well, the first is I really do believe that being a farmer is the highest vocation in today's world.

[APPLAUSE]

And it's as the young people, as you students, get into it, you're going to change it. You're going to change the terms. I was giving a talk and the moderator just asked the students, how many of you would be farmers if you could? The whole hall put up its hands. If you could.

It's also necessary to undo this deep inequality between the countryside and the city. With the assumption that the people in the countryside have no brains. All the brains are in cities. And of course that thesis doesn't work. Because how could someone with no brain when they migrate to the city suddenly have brains?

[LAUGHTER]

I have a new book coming out for the expo 2015 that's going to be held in Milan. And I worked in that book how it is so important to see agriculture as the place where opportunities for employment and livelihood grow. I meet young people who've been at our farm in training, and I meet them in Brazil or I meet them somewhere else. They've started organic cafes. Someone is an organic farmer, someone else is a city dweller. They are creating partnerships of the most amazing kind.

So the food system is so rich. It's inviting you as produces. Its inviting you as researchers. It's inviting you as entrepreneurs. But the most important issue is, it is time to stop looking down on those who give us food. It's time to put them at the pedestal of being the custodians of the land. They're not producing commodities. They're taking care of the land and the biodiversity and the water and even the atmosphere. Because when they do organic farming, they are reversing climate change.

And when we realize agriculture's about these multi-dimensional, multi-functional activities, then the shift will start to happen. And then you'll be the ones who make sure that farmers aren't getting 2% of the consumer dollar, but getting 50%. And that'll make anyone's life possible in agriculture.

[APPLAUSE]

Adamson: We have several of our local farmers here today and CSA honors, and I just want to give a nod to those people who are here with us today. Yay.

[APPLAUSE]

Next question. Is there a way that you think small scale farmers and conventional agribusiness can coexist? Given our need to feed the world, are there things that the small scale sector could learn from agribusiness and vice versa?

[LAUGHTER]

Shiva: Well, I think I can see farmers running classes for agribusiness. But frankly, what has agribusiness brought us? They brought us toxic chemicals. And I think agriculture and food systems are better off without them. And we now have the data that shows that ecological agriculture produces more food. Agribusiness has brought us global distribution chains. Do we need more food coming from far away or less?

So this long distance globalized supply chains is, again, not a relevant issue. I would be so happy to see agribusiness realize that they depend on the land and the biodiversity and the farmers to create relationships of respect and then take permission from the earth as well as farmers tell us what is our role. If they have a role, farmers will decide.

Adamson: Very nice. What would you say to our students who don't want to be farmers or who don't want to go back to the land? I'm just reading the questions.

Shiva: I absolutely don't think everyone should be farmers and it shouldn't become a new imposition of any kind. It should be an inspiration. If it matches your passions, then we have to change the terms so that it's fulfilling and satisfying and meaningful and dignified for you. But you can't run away from food no matter what. You can run away from farming. But you've got to eat.

So all students just have to become more concerned about where does their food come from, how was it grown. They need to become active, if not as farmers, as eaters. And that is both about the sustainability of the planet and it's about the sustainability of your health. I don't have to tell you about the obesity epidemic of this country, which is all related to bad food. We've created structures which have imposed bad food and deprived people of good food.

Now, that health literacy is vital for everyone. And that role in spreading that literacy, you have a particularly special responsibility because you've been to a wonderful university which is the top on sustainability. How can we have non-sustainable health and a sustainable planet?

Our health itself is reaching limits of total non-sustainability with the disease epidemics. And that's another area where constantly research is shut down and good researchers are ridiculed. So you need to join in that side of it. If you don't want to be at the beginning of it, at least be at the end of it.

Adamson: Given that most everything we and our ancestors have ingested over the years has been genetically tweaked, what make the contemporary methods used to alter genetic makeup of a crop taboo? And why, at the end of the day, when practically every crop in existence was modified ages ago even make the distinction between GMO and non GMO?

Shiva: OK, the word that's used for genetically engineered seeds has become GMOs by default. It's become GMOs because industry never wanted genetic engineering to be the word communicated. And in fact, in the UN treaty on convention on biological diversity, they went further and said no, not even GMOs. Talk about it as living modified.

Now, there were two reasons this was done. Each of you is a living modified version of your parents. Offspring are never clones of their parents. They're a little variation. Living modified, genetically modified, and from it to GMOs. The difference between what is called genetic tweaking and genetic engineering is this.

In nature, plants have evolved in a dynamic way. Farmers have worked with plants as breeders in co-evolution. All farmers breeding, which accounts from 99.9% of all of breeding, is a core evolution with nature. Working with the evolutionary patterns of the plant and the seed. Even cross breeding works within those laws. And cross breeding is within the same species, as is hybrid seeds. They are all within the same species.

The distinctiveness of all breeding and genetic engineering is genetic engineering allows you using the tools of recombinant DNA research to introduce genes into a plant that don't belong to that plant. And because it's an unreliable technology, you don't just introduce new genes of BT toxins or herbicide tolerance.

You add antibiotic resistance markers just for marking and separating the failed introduction from those that were successful and viral promoters. No plant has ever had genes from unrelated species through evolution's history or through plant breeding. And that's what we are calling on for testing and research and safety. Pigs with human growth hormones.

In England, the ladybird beetle controls aphids beautifully in wheat plants. They've killed the beetles and now they want to genetically engineer the wheat with a cow like gene. And when I asked my colleagues in England, asked what this cow like gene is, they said we can't tell you. Trade secret.

So we don't know what the cow like gene is. A wheat has never had cow like genes before. A cabbage has never had scorpion genes before. There was a Dr. Bishop doing this work. Corn has never had BT toxin genes in it before being expressed in every cell all the time, impacting the butterflies. Monarch butterflies died when they were fed BT pollen.

We've done studies on soil organisms, 22% gone in four years of planting. So it's not the same. There is a distinction. That is why substantial equivalents or the argument that we've always tweaked genes or nature has always tweaked genes and therefore we can mess up the genetic code of plants in our food systems is unscientific to begin with and irresponsible to everyone.

Adamson: Thank you. That's, I think, a really wonderful ending of the lecture And so yes, let's give her a hand.

[APPLAUSE]

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Future of Food: Dictatorship or Democracy?

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Future of Food: Dictatorship or Democracy? October 30, 2014 | Dr. Vandana Shiva discusses how the future of the planet is intimately linked to the future of food, both because everyone must eat and because industrial agriculture has the largest impact on ecosystems and our health.

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The seed industry is more concentrated today than it ever was before. The ten largest seed corporations dominate three quarters of the commercial seed market. The top three of these, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta, represent more than half (53 percent) of the market. Even more striking are the figures of genetically modified (GM) seeds - according to Greenpeace, Monsanto sold 90 percent of GM seeds worldwide in 2009.

There are however regional differences. While agriculture in industrialized countries is predominantly sourced from commercial seed providers, many developing countries are still relatively independent of these, for now. The portion of commercial seeds present in Indian agriculture is approximately 30 percent, and Africa as a whole has less than 10%.

Although one third may not sound like a game-changing figure, the commercial seed market and Monsanto in particular have had a devastating effect on Indian farmers. Cotton farmers especially have been strained as Monsanto controls 95 percent of the cotton seed market through its genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

How did We Get Here? From the Farm to the Corporation

Behind the growing domination of commercial seeds in developed and developing countries is a story of agricultural changes, targeted company merges and take-overs, the use of patenting and legal frameworks.

To understand how a handful of agro-businesses were able to gain mass control over something as basic as seeds in agriculture, we have to look back. Traditionally seeds made a full circle, after harvest a portion of the seeds were preserved for the following year and the cycle was never interrupted.

Agriculture began to become industrialized at the beginning of the 1950s and this only intensified in the 1960s and 1970s. As a result, production processes became increasingly mechanized and rationalized. In many regions of the world the so called 'Green Revolution' was introduced with the aim of significantly increasing crop yields and warding off a crisis of widespread food insecurity.

To comply with these new modes of intensified industrial agriculture, farms needed to become larger and preform more specialized tasks. Agriculture as we know it has significantly changed from what it previously was, as have the markets within it. Specific markets for stockbreeding, seeds, animal feed, fertilizers, and pesticides emerged. In such a system, farmers no longer produce their crops autonomously, but merely become members of a production chain.

As agricultural mega corporations, like Monsanto and co, entered on the stage, middle-sized farms and businesses were forced to exit. These transnational corporations were able to expand by buying out others, or merging their businesses. As a result the competition in the agricultural economy began to dwindle, and with it the variation of seeds on offer and fair pricing for them. Additionally, the corporations that are responsible for producing seeds are in many cases also the providers of the pesticides that accompany the seeds they sell. Both the seeds and the pesticides are aimed at raking in the greatest possible profit, and this scheme is applied best by Monsanto.

What are the big corporations like Monsanto offering? Farmers become hooked hearing that with high performance seeds they will be able to gain much greater crop yields, which will grow robustly and with enhanced resistance to pests, as well be efficiently and cost effectively harvested with machines. To really take business to the next level, further increase their yields and maximize their profits, there are hybrid seed varieties.

As Genius as it is Fatal: Hybrid Seeds

Since the inception of agriculture, farmers have always saved a portion of their harvest to select seeds with which they could sow for the next growing season, or trade with their neighbor. In many countries across the world this reuse of seeds remains common practice. However from the perspective of seed engineers and providers, replanting the gains of their seeds or trading these seeds would mean losing potential customers. And that is what makes hybrid seeds so ingenious.

The first harvest of hybrid varieties, with the optimal irrigation, fertilizer and pesticides, yields may increase by 15 - 30 percent. However the second generation of these seeds does not yield the same thing, instead it develops into a multitude of plant forms. Therefore re-planting hybrid seeds is not possible and farmers are forced to repurchase seeds every season. For the seed distributors this is truly genius, their business is protected and engineered into the very product they sell.

It is said that hybrid seeds are applied to gain high yields, produce more pest and disease resistant crops, which are, technically speaking, much more easily harvested. Critics however find that these results may also be realized with natural seed varieties, and are concerned with questions of the quality of the crops being produced, the high costs required to produce them, the dwindling diversity of crops in existence, and the growing dependency on large seed corporations for hybrid plants.

Hunger instead of 'Progress'

In the USA and countries across Europe a handful of large corporations have formed a firm grip on the market. The monopoly control they have gained is problematic for the following reasons according to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD):

The monopoly power leads to the concentration of research and development being invested into only a small number of seed varieties

Concentrated market control may also prevent other firms from entering the seed economy which may be able to offer alternative products and business model

The competition stifling effects of a dominated market place may lead to massive hikes in the prices for seeds. Since the introduction genetic modification of organisms the prices for cotton seeds in the United States has risen three to four fold. Substantial increases in the price for cotton seeds can also be seen in developing countries.

The picture of market power, hybrid seeds and rigorous patenting of seeds has had fatal consequences in countries located in the global South.

Monsanto in India

Vandana Shiva is an Indian activist, author, and founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology and argues that Monsanto's monopoly of seeds in India has become the root cause of the increase in farmer suicides. In an article published on Aljazeera, Shiva argues that "Monsanto and its PR men are trying desperately to delink the epidemic of farmers suicides in India from its growing control over the cotton seed supply. For us it is the control over seed, the first link in the food chain, the source of life which is our biggest concern. When a corporation controls seed, it controls life. Including the life of our farmers."

Monsanto has had a presence in India since 1988 when the World Bank introduced a new Seed Policy that required the government to deregulate the seed sector, one of the many measures accompanied by the Structural Readjustment Policies. Shiva identifies five significant changes that have arisen since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market:

Indian companies became bound to Monsanto through joint ventures and licensing arrangements, which enabled it to secure a strong grip over the sector

The Monsanto seeds were defined as 'intellectual property', which meant that Monsanto could collect royalties - these are an agreed-upon percentage of the gross or net revenues earned or a fixed price of the harvests.

Furthermore the seeds which were once a renewable resource became non-renewable because the natural, open-pollinated cotton seeds were replaced by patented hybrids and GMOs.

Cotton, which could previously be grown in harmony with other crops, became a monocrop which was more vulnerable to pests, diseases, drought and crop failure and more dependent on expensive pesticides and fertilizers.

And lastly Monsanto began to subvert government regulatory processes and even gained access to public resources to promote non-renewable hybrids and GMOs through 'public private partnerships' or PPP.

Shiva goes on to say that "the creation of seed monopolies, the destruction of alternatives, the collection of superprofits in the form of royalties, and the increasing vulnerability of monocultures has created a context for debt, suicides, and agrarian distress."

For years she has been opposed to Monsanto's monopoly power in India. Thanks to having bullied, and bought out their competition, it almost wholly controls the cotton production. As a result Indian cotton farmers do not have an alternative to Monsanto's genetically modified plants.

However for the majority of farmers the seeds are more than they can afford, and the yields lie substantially below expectations. Further problematizing the situation are the new diseases which have been cropping up and damaging the cotton plants, or completely ruining the harvest.

In contrast to the traditional cotton plants that are suited to weather and soil conditions of the regions in which they grow, the genetically modified plants have not adapted to the climate. Additionally costly, health-damaging and environmentally unfriendly fertilizers and pesticides need to be used in order to protect the mutant crops.

A vast number of Indian farmers have been financially ruined and indebted thanks to Monsanto, some have even turned to suicide seeing no other way out. Nearly 75 percent of rural debt in India is attributed to purchased inputs according to the Government of India. As farmer debt grows, so does Monsanto's profits and it is in this system that their seeds have been given the name "seeds of suicide". Shiva notes, "the price per kilogram of cotton seeds [has gone] from 7 to 17,000 rupees...Monsanto sells its GMO seeds on fraudulent claims of yields of 1500 kg/year when farmers harvest 300-400 kg/year on an average."

For years large seed corporations have flooded the markets of developing countries, in which the presence of commercial seed providers was small. Whilst infiltrating these economies, they have played to the hope that through seed growth and genetic engineering miraculous solutions to global problems, such as climate change, can be found. However the data supports a different story, according to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) approximately half of the 868 million people suffering from hunger worldwide are resource-deprived farmers who farm on small plots of fertile land.

Despite this, massive seed corporations invest a meager 1 percent of their research and development budget into seeds that are appropriate for the climate of many developing countries. Simultaneously, they are able to prevent competitors from catering to these markets by acquiring strict patents on genes which are stress and heat resistant, which in turn assures that any corporations wishing to enter the market need to first align themselves with them.

Olivier De Schutter, who compiled a report titled 'Seed policy and the right to food' for the Right to Food program of the United Nations, stated that to combat poverty and hunger in the global South it is important that small scale, subsistence farmers have access to seeds. Through informal networks and local structures these can be sold, traded and appropriately developed for the climactic, ecological and cultural needs.

Biodiversity under Threat

As a result of a monopolized seed economy and the limited engineering of seed varieties, the overall loss of plant diversity has significantly increased. Over the course of the 20th century, according to the FAO, approximately 75 percent of crop diversity has been lost. Before the Green Revolution in India there were roughly 50,000 rice varieties, and within twenty years this number dropped to a mere 40 - 40 from 50,000. Many of the new hybrid variations being created would not be able to keep up considering they share many genetic characteristics.

It sounds like a lot of loss looking at these figures, but is it really so important to preserve crop diversity? It is, because diversity entails countless genetic characteristics which may serve as viable options to be grown in the face of climate change. Let us not forget that our environment is drastically changing and with it our agricultural practices, or at least what we plant, may need to change as well. If climate conditions change it may be that an old variety of plant might be more suitable. For example, in the 1970s a large amount of rice harvests in India were destroyed by a virus. However, of the 6,273 remaining rice varieties there was one which was resistant to the virus.

A major UN and World Bank sponsored report which compiled the knowledge of 400 scientists and was endorsed by 58 countries concluded that genetically modified crops have little to offer to the challenges of poverty, hunger, and climate change. Better alternatives are available, and the report championed organic farming as the sustainable way forward.

It's Time to Get Busy

It is a cause for concern that a handful of seed corporations dominate the seed market, and, subsequently, the foundations of our food production system.

If you want to become more active on this issue, why not start with signing some petitions?

Care2, a petition site is calling on Monsanto to intervene in the crisis of farmer suicides by providing financial assistance to farmers suffering from otherwise inescapable debt, sign if you want it to as well.

The online activism organization Avaaz is leading a petition against Monsanto expanding its patent right, read more about it here.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/help-indian-farmers-devastated-by-genetically-modified-crops/
If this topic interests you, you may be interested in seeing Dirty White Gold a documentary by Leah Borromeo which aims to shed light on how the global fashion industry and international consumer habits contribute to the lives and deaths of Indian farmers by examining the cotton supply chain.

Bitter Seeds ( http://www.itvs.org/films/bitter-seeds), directed by Micha Peled, follows the story of a teenage girl whose father took his life because of insurmountable debt. It poignantly shows Monsanto's dishonest dealings with farmers and their consequences.

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The Privatisation of Seeds | Biodiversity

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Year in and year out farmers are losing the seeds from their own plants, and are forced to purchase them anew from seed providers. Monsanto has monopolized the seed market which has significantly limited the variety of plants available on the market.

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Ecofeminism, also called ecological feminism, branch of feminism that examines the connections between women and nature. Its name was coined by French feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974. Ecofeminism uses the basic feminist tenets of equality between genders, a revaluing of non-patriarchal or nonlinear structures, and a view of the world that respects organic processes, holistic connections, and the merits of intuition and collaboration. To these notions ecofeminism adds both a commitment to the environment and an awareness of the associations made between women and nature. Specifically, this philosophy emphasizes the ways both nature and women are treated by patriarchal (or male-centred) society. Ecofeminists examine the effect of gender categories in order to demonstrate the ways in which social norms exert unjust dominance over women and nature. The philosophy also contends that those norms lead to an incomplete view of the world, and its practitioners advocate an alternative worldview that values the earth as sacred, recognizes humanity's dependency on the natural world, and embraces all life as valuable.

Origins of ecofeminism

The modern ecofeminist movement was born out of a series of conferences and workshops held in the United States by a coalition of academic and professional women during the late 1970s and early 1980s. They met to discuss the ways in which feminism and environmentalism might be combined to promote respect for women and the natural world and were motivated by the notion that a long historical precedent of associating women with nature had led to the oppression of both. They noted that women and nature were often depicted as chaotic, irrational, and in need of control, while men were frequently characterized as rational, ordered, and thus capable of directing the use and development of women and nature. Ecofeminists contend that this arrangement results in a hierarchical structure that grants power to men and allows for the exploitation of women and nature, particularly insofar as the two are associated with one another. Thus, early ecofeminists determined that solving the predicament of either constituency would require undoing the social status of both.

Early work on ecofeminism consisted largely of first documenting historical connections between women and the environment and then looking for ways to sever those connections. One founder of ecofeminism, theologian Rosemary Ruether, insisted that all women must acknowledge and work to end the domination of nature if they were to work toward their own liberation. She urged women and environmentalists to work together to end patriarchal systems that privilege hierarchies, control, and unequal socioeconomic relations. Ruether's challenge was taken up by feminist scholars and activists, who began critiquing not only ecological theories that overlooked the effect of patriarchal systems but also feminist theories that did not interrogate the relationship between women and nature as well.

By the late 1980s, ecofeminism had grown out of its largely academic environment and become a popular movement. Many scholars cite the feminist theorist Ynestra King as the cause of that popularization. In 1987 King wrote an article titled "What Is Ecofeminism?" that appeared in The Nation. There she challenged all Americans to consider the ways in which their belief systems allow for the exploitative use of the earth and the further oppression of women. With the help of King's article, the concept of ecofeminism grew both in support and philosophical scope.

Radical ecofeminism and cultural ecofeminism

As ecofeminism continued to develop, it witnessed the first of several splinterings. By the late 1980s ecofeminism had begun to branch out into two distinct schools of thought: radical ecofeminism and cultural ecofeminism. Radical ecofeminists contend that the dominant patriarchal society equates nature and women in order to degrade both. To that end, radical ecofeminism builds on the assertion of early ecofeminists that one must study patriarchal domination with an eye toward ending the associations between women and nature. Of particular interest to those theorists is the ways in which both women and nature have been associated with negative or commodifiable attributes while men have been seen as capable of establishing order. That division of characteristics encourages the exploitation of women and nature for cheap labour and resources.

Cultural ecofeminists, on the other hand, encourage an association between women and the environment. They contend that women have a more intimate relationship with nature because of their gender roles (e.g., family nurturer and provider of food) and their biology (e.g., menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation). As a result, cultural ecofeminists believe that such associations allow women to be more sensitive to the sanctity and degradation of the environment. They suggest that this sensitivity ought to be prized by society insofar as it establishes a more direct connection to the natural world with which humans must coexist. Cultural ecofeminism also has roots in nature-based religions and goddess and nature worship as a way of redeeming both the spirituality of nature and women's instrumental role in that spirituality.

Not all feminists favoured the bifurcation of ecofeminism. Some women, for instance, worried that cultural ecofeminism merely enforces gender stereotypes and could lead to further exploitation. Others wanted a greater emphasis on nature-based religion, while still others insisted that a celebration of Western organized religions could accommodate nature-based worship. Those same groups also differed with regard to the romanticization of nature and the roles that various practices (such as vegetarianism or organic farming) ought to play in the application of ecofeminist principles. As a result, the movement continued to grow and expand in order to accommodate those variations, and most self-identified ecofeminists celebrate the myriad definitions and applications available under the general rubric of ecofeminism.

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Ecofeminism | sociology and environmentalism

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Ecofeminism, branch of feminism that examines the connections between women and nature. Its name was coined by French feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974. Ecofeminism uses the basic feminist tenets of equality between genders, a revaluing of non-patriarchal or nonlinear structures, and a view of

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Women and Life on Earth: what is ecofeminism?

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If you aren't aware of the term 'ecofeminism', that's completely okay. Neither are most people. What emerged as a powerful activist as well as academic movement in the 1970s, gradually lost its relevance. But as more and more movements seeking climate action and justice gain momentum worldwide, so did the idea of ecofeminism. But what exactly is this feminist movement about? And is it of any relevance to today's climate discourse? Let's find out.

What Is Ecofeminism?

Is it a possibility that women and nature are closely related to each other? We often think of nature in terms of 'Mother Earth' and 'Mother Nature', see it as a 'provider' of basic resources like water and food. One might argue that we are all connected to nature- which is true, of course. But what if there's a close link between both nature and women that brings them together in ways more than one? Ecofeminism as a movement acknowledges these links that connect the exploitation and domination of both nature and women under a patriarchal society. Mary Mellor, a British academic, defines ecofeminism as "a movement that sees a connection between the exploitation and degradation of the natural world and the subordination and oppression of women."

But what if there's a close link between both nature and women that brings them together in ways more than one? Ecofeminism as a movement acknowledges these links that connect the exploitation and domination of both nature and women under a patriarchal society.

This activist and academic movement truly emerged in the developing world in the last few decades of the 20th century. But one has to understand that ecofeminism wasn't just one single movement that arose out of a single place and then went on to spread across the world. It was actually India's Chipko movement in the early 1970s, the Green Belt movement in Kenya later that same decade, women's participation in the anti-nuclear, pro-environment movement in the West in the 1980s and 1990, and similar movements which were themselves unique but also collectively shaped the central philosophy of ecofeminism- that women and nature are interconnected in their domination and exploitation, and that nature could only be saved by what is traditionally considered a feminine practice of "healing and nurturing". Having a more empathetic and reciprocating relationship with the environment and rejecting the capitalist exploitation of nature is supported by ecofeminism.

Even this relationship between environmental damage and the subjugation of women can take different forms. The two major forms of ecofeminism turn out to be: radical and cultural ecofeminism. While the former sees the exploitation of women and the planet by men as one- like men traditionally having more control over the amount of food that can be obtained from nature and controlling women's access to the procured resources- the latter focuses more on how ecological problems affect women more than men and on the idea that women are more connected to nature in the way that they have a sustainable relationship with nature rather than an exploitative one. Cultural ecofeminism is thus considered more empowering by many because it encourages the idea of women taking action against environmental damage rather than seeing the link between them as degrading.

Ecofeminism In India

One of the leading pioneers of the ecofeminist movement in India and in the world, Dr. Vandana Shiva agrees that women do share a special relationship with nature, and that this relationship is reciprocal and unexploitative. Shiva holds colonialism responsible for the "destruction of nature and women's work", and underlines how what might be considered development by many actually doesn't benefit women and nature in the way that it "perpetuates domination and centralisation through patriarchal control". Bina Agarwal, professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester, has pointed out that Shiva's theory tends to put all women in developing countries under one category and that it doesn't take into account other factors such as India's historical, cultural and social processes that have impacted the relationship between women and nature in India. Agarwal argues that the Shiva doesn't talk about the impact of precolonial structures such as caste and class inequality that also shaped the environment's destruction and the suppression of women.

Agarwal argues that the Shiva doesn't talk about the impact of precolonial structures such as caste and class inequality that also shaped the environment's destruction and the suppression of women.

Criticism and Relevance

Much like any other social and cultural movement, ecofeminism is not without criticism, most of which is aimed at the movement's now incoherent ideology and its idea of the ties between women and nature. In her piece called "Ecofeminism is Not What You Think", author Rosemary Fonseca argues, "The foundation of Ecofeminism is the notion that a woman's ethics are more closely related to the environment in comparison to those of a man. For example, the female tendency to be a giver and gentle is echoed in nature's qualities to provide everything necessary for survival. While arguably this can be seen as true, the differentiation between feminine qualities and masculine qualities presented in Ecofeminism play right into the notion of patriarchy. By presenting men as conquerors and women as gentle givers it undoubtedly creates a divide between men and women, contradicting the feminist movement of equality."

So is the idea of ecofeminism relevant today? Well, in the context of modern environmental discourse, one might agree that it is. Environmental damage is a feminist issue and so is climate change- both of which are one of the most urgent social issues worldwide today.

Radical ecofeminism too, receives its own criticism. Since it promotes the idea of eliminating hierarchical structures and replacing them with "communal decision-making and equal valuing of all people" - it rejects the popular notion of cultural ecofeminism that wants women to be a part of the hierarchy and take action against environmental degradation.

So is the idea of ecofeminism relevant today? Well, in the context of modern environmental discourse, one might agree that it is. Environmental damage is a feminist issue and so is climate change- both of which are one of the most urgent social issues worldwide today. By exploring the sustainable relationship between the environment and women, the fight for environmental protection needs to have more and more women at its helm. But for it to be truly intersectional, we have to not just focus on the relationship women and nature have with each other but also on the relationship that women have with each other in a society. For example, indigenous women who live in close proximity to nature have to suffer a lot in the face of environmental degradation. We especially need to empower and support communities that have a close relationship with the environment if we want to protect the said environment from further degradation.

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Is Ecofeminism Relevant Today? | Feminism In India

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If you aren't aware of the term 'ecofeminism', that's completely okay. Neither are most people. What emerged as a powerful activist as well as academic movement in the 1970s, gradually lost its relevance. But as more and more movements seeking climate action and justice gain momentum worldwide, so did the idea of ecofeminism.

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What is Ecofeminism? The Connection Between Women and the Environment - Public Goods Blog

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Ecofeminism is a feminst movement that examines parallels between the oppression of nature and women. Here are the basics of ecofeminism.

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What is Ecofeminism? The Connection Between Women and the Environment

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PHILIPPINES: WOMEN BEARING THE CROSS OF GLOBALIZATION

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GABRIELA -- Women's Update: P.O. Box 4386, Manila 1800, PHILIPPINES "GABRIELA National Alliance of Women in the Philippines resumed publication of the GABRIELA Women's Update, a quarterly newsletter starting with Volume 8, Number 1 (January -- March 1998).

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Aside from being a health and economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens gains on gender equality. In Philippines, we see that in trade, manufacturing and the public sector, a larger share of women than men have lost their jobs during the pandemic. Read about how the World Bank supports the Philippines reduce inequalities between men and women, boys and girls in the Country Gender Action Plan (FY20-24) here: http://bit.ly/PhCGAPFY20

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Supporting women and girls in the Philippines

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Aside from being a health and economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens gains on gender equality. In Philippines, we see that in trade, manufacturing and the public sector, a larger share of women than men have lost their jobs during the pandemic.

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How multinationals can advance gender equality in developing countries | UNCTAD

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Multinational enterprises (MNEs) can, through their policies and practices, foster gender equality in the workplace in the developing countries that host them, says a new UNCTAD report launched on 8 March to mark International Women’s Day. These firms can promote gender equality in developing count…

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Why do multinationals pay women less in developing countries?

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Multinational companies are closing the gender wage gap in advanced economies – but not outside. It could have a decisive effect in the battle for global gender parity

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PTI

NEW DELHI: Investments by multi-national companies in developing countries have created jobs for women, but risks of "exacerbating gender inequality" at the workplace remain prevalent, an UNCTAD report said today.

Developing countries need to pay particular attention to select labour-intensive and export oriented sectors where women often make a strong workforce, it said.

"Investment by multinationals has been instrumental in creating job opportunities for women, particularly in labour- intensive, largely export-orientated industries.

"But the report also identifies a number of risks, such as poor working conditions and limited access to training for women, especially when the jobs created are confined to low- paid activities or occur in the informal sector," it said.

The report has proposed targeted government policies and actions to be effected by MNCs to address these challenges.

"Governments need a specific strategy for women's empowerment that complements efforts to achieve economic and social development. Governments should also consider how foreign investment can support women's equality, not undermine it," it suggested.

The report has also suggested a set of guidelines on gender equality that should be included in the business model of MNCs.

The suggestions include promoting women's empowerment, respecting equal rights and developing gender-sensitive divestment models.

There is also a need for targeted policies and corporate action to ensure that the activities of MNCs translate into real benefits for women in developing countries, it said.

"Women employees are more at risk of being marginalised when firms upgrade or when low-cost, labour-intensive industries decline," the UNCTAD report said.

The positive impact of such initiatives is not automatic and it may vary over time as well as the country and context, it added.

The report also said that legal and socio-cultural impediments can prevent access to employment for women.

"...despite having access to education, legal restrictions often prevent women from participating in the labour market. Patterns of job segregation deeply rooted in social structures may restrict women's opportunities for employment, upgrading skills and career progression," the report said.

In a separate report on 55 stock exchanges, UNCTAD said there was substantial progress, engagement and a set of emerging best practices among exchanges regarding promotion of sustainability and business efforts.

It said there is a potential for the sector to do more. "The report notes that many developments in the policy and regulatory landscape have been supportive of late and highlights practical measures that policymakers and stock exchanges can take to promote sustainability, even in the face of systemic obstacles to sustainable capital markets," it added.

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Women at MNCs in developing nations risk gender inequality: UNCTAD

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NEW DELHI: Investments by multi-national companies in developing countries have created jobs for women, but risks of "exacerbating gender inequality" at the workplace remain prevalent, an UNCTAD report said today. Developing countries need to pay particular attention to select labour-intensive and export oriented sectors where women often make a strong workforce, it said.

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Gender inequality is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality in the world. It denies women their voices, devalues their work and make women's position unequal to men's, from the household to the national and global levels.

Despite some important progress to change this in recent years, in no country have women achieved economic equality with men, and women are still more likely than men to live in poverty.

Lower-paid, unpaid, undervalued: gender inequality in work

Low wages. Across the world, women are in the lowest-paid work. Globally, they earn 24 percent less than men and at the current rate of progress, it will take 170 years to close the gap. 700 million fewer women than men are in paid work.

Lack of decent work. 75 percent of women in developing regions are in the informal economy - where they are less likely to have employment contracts, legal rights or social protection, and are often not paid enough to escape poverty. 600 million are in the most insecure and precarious forms of work.

Unpaid care work. Women do at least twice as much unpaid care work, such as childcare and housework, as men - sometimes 10 times as much, often on top of their paid work. The value of this work each year is estimated at at least $10.8 trillion - more than three times the size of the global tech industry.

Longer workdays. Women work longer days than men when paid and unpaid work is counted together. That means globally, a young woman today will work on average the equivalent of four years more than a man over her lifetime.

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Why the majority of the world's poor are women | Oxfam International

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Gender inequality is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality in the world. It denies women their voices, devalues their work and make women's position unequal to men's, from the household to the national and global levels.

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4 ways to empower women in the world's poorest countries

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From trade to technology and the media, here's how women in the least developed countries can lift themselves up and transform their countries' future.

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This is part of a blog series from undergraduate and master's students who participated in internships and work experience schemes at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership.
On International Women's Day 2019, the UN Women Partners met with BNP Paribas to promote women's economic empowerment by supporting women in agriculture and sustainable development in Senegal. With this project, the UN aims to demonstrates its commitment to promoting women's empowerment in order to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 5 - to achieve gender equality and empower women and girls. But, as Acting Regional Director for West and Central Africa, Oulimata Sarr, states it's not just about furthering equality, women are actually key to the economic development of third-world countries like Senegal: "Women are at the centre of Senegalese development and we want to support them in promising agricultural value chains to ensure their sustainable economic empowerment."

Giving women greater economic empowerment means enabling women to increase their right to economic resources and their control over meaningful decisions that benefit themselves, their households and their communities. These include the right to control their own time, their income and access to participation in existing markets equally. Greater empowerment improves their well-being and economic status.

Gender inequality remains an issue in the Sub-Saharan Africa region, it is one of the most unequal areas in the world and progress is much slower than in other regions. Much of the gender inequality in developing countries is caused by the prevalence of cultural norms that aggravate favouritism towards males.

Gender inequality comes at a significant economic cost as it hinders productivity and economic growth globally, countries are losing $160 trillion in wealth because of differences in lifetime earnings between women and men. In addition, an IMF staff note paper showed that the obstacles to women entering the labour market have more economic cost than was believed to be the case, and benefits from reducing the barrier of gender inequality are likely to be larger than initially thought. Reducing gender inequality is therefore key to economic development.

Empowering more women to work, results in better growth of third-world economies. This is because women's economic empowerment, increases economic diversification, boosts productivity and income equality, resulting in other positive development outcomes. As a study from the IMF shows, policies that improve access to educational opportunities and finance for women can contribute to a reduction in inequality and an increase in economic growth for the developing country. Providing women and girls with more educational opportunities contributes to: "reductions in fertility rates and increases in labour force participation rates, and in which thereby better quality of human capital of the future economy and generations."

In Sub-Saharan Africa, fewer girls enrol in primary school than boys and there is an even lower enrollment rate in secondary school for girls compared with boys. Girls in this region are often prevented from attending school due to poverty and work demands at home, this is then further aggravated by higher rates of child marriage amongst girls in this situation.

However, poverty decreases when more women and girls are educated. This is because with basic education, a woman is more likely to obtain a job and earn a higher wage since one percentage point increase in female education raises the average level of GDP by 0.37 percentage points.

It's not only about women earning higher wages, women also benefit their families and communities as they are often more likely to spend money on things that support their children, the household. This then improves the chances of their family to achieve health and prosperity.

Giving girls equal access to education and opportunities, enables them to eventually grow into educated, resilient women able to take on leadership roles in their countries, resulting in significant positive developmental outcomes for that country. This in turn helps to speed up the reduction in gender inequality, as having more women in leadership roles, means they develop policies that will increase support for women and girls.

For example, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Africa's first female president, advocated the safety of women, empowerment of women, and women's rights to participation in peace-building work. In countries such as Rwanda, an increase in the number of female politician and lawmakers has furthered gender equality by implementing reproductive rights and equal land rights for women, which has helped increase investments in land by 18 percentage points, twice the level observed for men. They have also established gender desks at police stations to help women who face domestic violence and other forms of violence.

Women are crucial to the economic development of countries. By empowering women through policies such as greater access to educational opportunities and finance, this results in better economic development for everyone as women with economic resources and control over meaningful decisions tend not only to benefit themselves but also their households and communities. Women's equality is vital to increasing sustainable economic growth in developing countries, in order to empower more women and girls, there needs to be better access to education, health and opportunities in the labour market.
Aisha Abdi is an undergraduate student in International Development in her second year at King's College London. She did a work experience post at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership.

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Women are the key to economic development in third-world countries

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This is part of a blog series from undergraduate and master's students who participated in internships and work experience schemes at the Global Institute for Women's Leadership. On International Women's Day 2019, the UN Women Partners met with BNP Paribas to promote women's economic empowerment by supporting women in agriculture and sustainable development in Senegal.

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Climate change is one of the greatest global challenges of the twenty-first century. Its impacts vary among regions, generations, age, classes, income groups, and gender. Based on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is evident that people who are already most vulnerable and marginalized will also experience the greatest impacts. The poor, primarily in developing countries, are expected to be disproportionately affected and consequently in the greatest need of adaptation strategies in the face of climate variability and change. Both women and men working in natural resource sectors, such as agriculture, are likely to be affected. ¹ However, the impact of climate change on gender is not the same. Women are increasingly being seen as more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change, mainly because they represent the majority of the world's poor and are proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources. The difference between men and women can also be seen in their differential roles, responsibilities, decision making, access to land and natural resources, opportunities and needs, which are held by both sexes. ² Worldwide, women have less access than men to resources such as land, credit, agricultural inputs, decision-making structures, technology, training and extension services that would enhance their capacity to adapt to climate change. ³

Why women are more vulnerable
Women's vulnerability to climate change stems from a number of factors -- social, economic and cultural.

Seventy per cent of the 1.3 billion people living in conditions of poverty are women. In urban areas, 40 per cent of the poorest households are headed by women. Women predominate in the world's food production (50-80 per cent), but they own less than 10 per cent of the land.

Women represent a high percentage of poor communities that are highly dependent on local natural resources for their livelihood, particularly in rural areas where they shoulder the major responsibility for household water supply and energy for cooking and heating, as well as for food security. In the Near East, women contribute up to 50 per cent of the agricultural workforce. They are mainly responsible for the more time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks that are carried out manually or with the use of simple tools. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the rural population has been decreasing in recent decades. Women are mainly engaged in subsistence farming, particularly horticulture, poultry and raising small livestock for home consumption.

Women have limited access to and control of environmental goods and services; they have negligible participation in decision-making, and are not involved in the distribution of environment management benefits. Consequently, women are less able to confront climate change.

During extreme weather such as droughts and floods, women tend to work more to secure household livelihoods. This will leave less time for women to access training and education, develop skills or earn income. In Africa, female illiteracy rates were over 55 per cent in 2000, compared to 41 per cent for men. ⁴ When coupled with inaccessibility to resources and decision-making processes, limited mobility places women where they are disproportionately affected by climate change.

In many societies, socio-cultural norms and childcare responsibilities prevent women from migrating or seeking refuge in other places or working when a disaster hits. Such a situation is likely to put more burden on women, such as travelling longer to get drinking water and wood for fuel. Women, in many developing countries suffer gender inequalities with respect to human rights, political and economic status, land ownership, housing conditions, exposure to violence, education and health. Climate change will be an added stressor that will aggravate women's vulnerability. It is widely known that during conflict, women face heightened domestic violence, sexual intimidation, human trafficking and rape. ⁵

Improving women's adaptation to climate change
In spite of their vulnerability, women are not only seen as victims of climate change, but they can also be seen as active and effective agents and promoters of adaptation and mitigation. For a long time women have historically developed knowledge and skills related to water harvesting and storage, food preservation and rationing, and natural resource management. In Africa, for example, old women represent wisdom pools with their inherited knowledge and expertise related to early warnings and mitigating the impacts of disasters. This knowledge and experience that has passed from one generation to another will be able to contribute effectively to enhancing local adaptive capacity and sustaining a community's livelihood. For this to be achieved, and in order to improve the adaptive capacity of women worldwide particularly in developing countries, the following recommendations need to be considered:

* Adaptation initiatives should identify and address gender-specific impacts of climate change particularly in areas related to water, food security, agriculture, energy, health, disaster management, and conflict. Important gender issues associated with climate change adaptation, such as inequalities in access to resources, including credit, extension and training services, information and technology should also be taken into consideration.

* Women's priorities and needs must be reflected in the development planning and funding. Women should be part of the decision making at national and local levels regarding allocation of resources for climate change initiatives. It is also important to ensure gender-sensitive investments in programmes for adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer and capacity building.

* Funding organizations and donors should also take into account women-specific circumstances when developing and introducing technologies related to climate change adaptation and to try their best to remove the economic, social and cultural barriers that could constraint women from benefiting and making use of them. Involving women in the development of new technologies can ensure that they are adaptive, appropriate and sustainable. At national levels, efforts should be made to mainstream gender perspective into national policies and strategies, as well as related sustainable development and climate change plans and interventions.

Notes 1 ILO, 2008. Report of the Committee on Employment and Social Policy, Employment and labour market implications of climate change, Fourth Item on the Agenda, Governing Body, 303rd Session (Geneva), p. 2.
2 Osman-Elasha, 2008 "Gender and Climate Change in the Arab Region", Arab Women Organization p. 44.
3 Aguilar, L., 2008. "Is there a connection between gender and climate change?", International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Office of the Senior Gender Adviser.
4 Rena, Ravinder and N. Narayana (2007) "Gender Empowerment in Africa: An Analysis of Women Participation in Eritrean Economy", New Delhi: International Journal of Women, Social Justice and Human Rights, Vol.2. No.2., pp. 221-237 (Serials Publishers).
5 Davis, I. et. al. 2005, "Tsunami, Gender, and Recovery".
6 IUCN 2004 (a), "Climate Change and Disaster Mitigation: Gender Makes the Difference". Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001. Climate Change: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC.
7 IUCN 2004 (b), "Energy: Gender Makes the Difference".
Gender Action, 2008. Gender Action Link: Climate Change (Washington, D.C.), http://www.genderaction.org/images/Gender%20Action%20Link%20-%20Climate%...
Third Global Congress of Women in Politics and Governance, 2008. Background and Context Paper for the Conference, Manila, Philippines, 19-22 October, www.capwip.org/3rdglobalcongress.htm
IUCN 2007, "Gender and Climate Change: Women as Agents of Change".

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Women...In The Shadow of Climate Change | United Nations

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Women are increasingly being seen as more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change, mainly because they represent the majority of the world's poor and are proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources.

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Climate change is a planetary phenomenon that will impact all people, but its effects are being shaped by pervasive and entrenched gender inequality.

Heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme storms disproportionately affect women.

That's because women are more likely to live in poverty than men, have less access to basic human rights like the ability to freely move and acquire land, and face systematic violence that escalates during periods of instability.

These factors, and many more, mean that as climate change intensifies, women will struggle the most. In fact, the Paris climate agreement includes specific provisions to ensure women receive support to cope with the hazards of climate change.

"The IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] found that gender inequalities are further exaggerated by climate-related hazards, and they result in higher workloads for women, occupational hazards indoors and outdoors, psychological and emotional stress, and higher mortality compared to men," Verona Collantes, an intergovernmental specialist with UN Women, told Global Citizen.

"Gender inequality hampers women's capacity and potential to be actors of climate action. These gender inequalities - access to and control over resources, access to education and information, and equal rights and access to decision-making processes - define what women and men can do and cannot do in a particular context of climate change," she added.

The future environment is daunting, but it's not all grim. Women are showing remarkable resilience around the world. They're leading climate action movements, championing clean sources of energy, and building alternative models of community that focus on sustainability and cooperation.

"It's really important to emphasize that women aren't merely helpless victims when it comes to climate change," Mayesha Alam, an expert on climate, women's rights, and conflict at Yale University, told Global Citizen. "Their participation and leadership can have transformative effects in their countries and communities."

Running the Household

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, becoming the worst storm in modern US history. Nearly 3,000 people were killed by the storm. And tens of thousands of people across the island were displaced. After the storm, women were hit the hardes when it came to recovering from the destruction, a report from Oxfam found.

"Women were usually the ones who spent hours wringing sodden towels by hand and hanging them to dry, carrying containers of water into the kitchen, bathing children in buckets, or washing floors with rainwater collected in cans. It was exhausting, and demoralizing," the report said.

Women often have to shoulder a larger burden, in countless settings, and it deepens existing gender inequalities, according to Alam.

"In rural communities across the globe, women and girls overwhelmingly undertake the labor of gathering food, water, and household energy resources," she said. "As droughts worsen and forests burn, they have to travel further distances and spend more time acquiring these resources."

Climate change is making it harder to manage household responsibilities like cooking, cleaning, gathering resources, and caring for children.This is especially felt in remote rural communities.

Natural disasters and saltwater intrusion from rising sea levels can tarnish water quality. Women in parts of India and Bangladesh, for instance, have faced health consequences and seen their economic prospects diminish as rivers become saltier.

When droughts and extreme temperatures dry up sources of water, women have to travel longer distances to collect water for cooking, cleaning, and managing gardens. As a result, they have less time to pursue other sources of income, which prevents them from becoming economically independent.

Stephanie Buechler studies the intersection of water scarcity and women's rights along the US-Mexico border at the University of Arizona. She found that decreasing water availability reduced women's ability to invest in their careers.

Women in Sonora, Mexico, who make cheese to sell for additional income, have had a harder time acquiring milk because livestock owners replaced cows that needed a lot of water with cows that need less. The new cows produce less milk.

"The women had less immediate access to milk, so they had to go further afield to a community about an hour away that still had more groundwater than they did," she said. "In terms of the cheese, it's basically a live culture, and it can die in extreme temperatures."

With less water available, women who rely on community gardens and farmers' markets are less able to cultivate and process produce. They're also spending more on water and energy bills.

Sources of clean drinking water are disappearing in other ways that harm women. In Senegal, for instance, women have had to travel farther distances to retrieve water for everyday use, which limits their ability to be independent farmers.

Women represent around 43% of the global agricultural workforce, but they face countless barriers to economic independence.

In fact, women are denied property rights in half of the countries around the world. They are often barred from borrowing money for fertilizer and tools, which prevents them from successfully guiding their crops to harvest. They also can have trouble accessing markets to sell their harvest.

As soil quality worsens and water becomes more scarce, women will be less able to find the credit and financing they need to be resilient to the changing conditions. And without any possibility of buying new property, many female farmers will be stuck with ever-declining yields on their existing land.

"The majority of women lack deeds or titles to the lands that they farm, so their avenues for compensation or redress are limited when climate change adversely affects their agricultural output," Alam said. "Generally speaking, it's not as if smallholder farmers have insurance, either, so they have to look for alternative income-generating activities, which can leave them desperate and vulnerable to exploitation."

Dangerous Situations

Gender-based violence and exploitation rise as resources dwindle, land becomes increasingly unlivable, and climate change increases, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"Climate change impacts the availability of resources," Collantes said. "You have shrinking resources because you get droughts, flooding, and sea level rise."

These environmental stressors have helped to fuel the rise of organizations that engage in human trafficking and extreme labor exploitation. Women and marginalized groups are most vulnerable to these human rights violations.

In Northeastern Nigeria, the terrorist group Boko Haram has targeted populations, particularly women, who have been displaced from their land by drought.

"Violence against women is often employed as a way to reinforce gender imbalances and maintain control of limited resources in these situations," Collantes explained.

Rising ocean water temperatures and acidification are causing fish populations to decline. Women who depend on fish for their livelihoods are increasingly being forced to sell sex for food, IUCN reports.

"Sex for fish is a form of gender-based violence - women are trading sex for access to fish, access to markets, access to livelihood," Cate Owren, senior gender program manager at IUCN said. "It is that negotiation of power, and negotiation of access to natural resources in unequal structures, that makes gender-based violence a tool."

Climate-related displacement is also rising globally and the majority of those forced to leave their homes are women, the UN found. That's because women are more likely than men to live in poverty and have fewer resources to recover in the aftermath.

"There are more displaced people today than ever before in recorded history, and we're already seeing a significant uptick in climate change-induced displacement, both within and across international borders," Alam said.

When girls and women are displaced, they're often unable to continue their education and pursue economic opportunities. Refugee girls are half as likely to be in school as refugee boys.

Women and girls also face higher rates of child marriage, domestic violence, sexual violence, and human trafficking due to climate change.

In Malawi, for example, the disruptions of climate change could create 1.5 million additional child brides in the years ahead. In Australia, domestic abuse spikes after bushfires, which have become more intense and longer-lasting in recent years.

"As climate change exerts economic pressure on families, and leads to loss of land, livelihoods, and homes, thereby overall security and stability, the risk of child marriage goes up," Alam said. "Marrying off daughters early becomes a coping mechanism."

In Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees are stuck in displacement camps that often lack basic resources. While the refugees fled genocide in Myanmar, climate change could prolong and worsen their displacement, Alam said.

Many of the camps in Cox's Bazar are unsafe for women and incidents of child marriage, human trafficking, and sexual assault have surged.

"What you have, in essence, are refugees living in extremely cramped conditions, in a coastal area that is very susceptible to natural disasters, flooding, and soil erosion," she said.

If flooding, landslides, or other natural disasters strike the camps, the refugees living there will be further displaced and vulnerable to harm.

Climate change could also increase the likelihood of armed conflicts and exacerbate existing conflicts, two possibilities that threaten women's health, rights, and overall life outcomes.

Displacement also threatens women's health in a number of gender-specific ways.

When pregnant women are displaced, they're less likely to receive adequate pre- and post-natal care, which can negatively impact their health, as well as the health of their babies, Alam said.

"Without access to hospitals, nurses, community health centers, it becomes more difficult to give birth in safe, hygienic conditions," she said.

More than half of the women who die during childbirth are in countries ripped apart by conflict, where health care systems have been heavily disrupted. Pregnant women are also at heightened risk of infectious diseases like cholera that spread in displacement camps.

Climate change threatens the health of women more broadly still, in times of both peace and conflict, according to the US National Institute for Health.

Food and water insecurity prevent pregnant women from getting the nutrients they need. Worsening heat waves expose women who have to travel to get water and fuel sources to health problems like dehydration, heat stroke, and sexual violence. The pressure that changing environment conditions exerts on family budgets, also makes it harder for women to seek medical treatment.

"There has to be a realization at the global level that climate change impacts men, women, and other genders differently, so the responses will [need to] take into account gender inequalities at the same time as climate actions," Collantes said.

Rising Up

Activists like Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate have helped to spur a global environmental movement. World leaders like Christiana Figueres spearheaded the Paris climate agreement. And women in countries like Kenya and India are transforming their communities by adopting sustainable practices.

While climate change may have an unfair impact on women, it has also led them to seize the levers of power in a moment of intense uncertainty, to rewrite the rules of society when the current systems of power and economy no longer seem reasonable.

"We already know that climate change is going to exacerbate our fragilities, our vulnerabilities, our weak spots," Owren said. "It is such a serious, urgent call to action to shine the spotlight on climate change as a human rights issue."

Women in diverse settings are rising up to overcome these challenges.

Charlot Magayi is helping women in Kenya replace dirty cook stoves with clean alternatives. This improve community health outcomes, and also reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Solar Sister, a women-led initiative in Africa, helps communities build small-scale solar grids to become energy independent. These grids reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in the process. The Barefoot College trains women to be solar engineers to install and maintain clean sources of energy in their communities.

Female scientists across Africa are bringing firsthand knowledge of local conditions and agriculture to laboratories and research departments, helping to close gender disparities in these scientific institutions.

Alam said that women have historically been excluded from domestic, regional, and international negotiations around climate change, biodiversity, and resource use - but that's beginning to change.

When societies have higher levels of gender inequality, deforestation, air pollution, and resource loss get worse, the UN found.

As women gain more representation within decision-making bodies, countries are beginning to develop gender action plans that combine climate action with efforts to improve gender equality.

"Any given country that is already experiencing the adverse impacts of climate change or wants to be thinking about how to mitigate risks or enhance adaptation can develop policies and frameworks to address the gendered impact of climate change and integrate gender equality into all their approaches," Alam said.

Collantes echoed this point, saying that in recent years, governments and organizations have dedicated more attention to the gendered impacts of climate change.

"Every time we have conferences," she said. "Gender and climate change always come up. Even this past G7 had gender and climate change."

International financing funds like the Green Climate Fund now require grant applications to detail how women will be incorporated into a program, and groups like the International Fund for Agricultural Development prioritize women farmers affected by climate change.

Still, Collantes said there's a gap between visibility of the problem and the implementation of long-term, community-oriented solutions.

"I don't think we're short of policies," she said. "But what do we do when we say we're doing a gender-responsive action? Are we just training women one-off and that's it? That's not enough."

"There has to be tracking and monitoring of the specific components of a gender-based program to really make a difference for women and girls for generations, to change their lives, and make a meaningful change to achieve gender equality," she said.

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Understanding Why Climate Change Impacts Women More Than Men

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Climate change is a planetary phenomenon that will impact all people, but its effects are being shaped by pervasive and entrenched gender inequality. Heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme storms disproportionately affect women.

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Women are more likely than men to be affected by climate change, studies show.

UN figures indicate that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women.

Roles as primary caregivers and providers of food and fuel make them more vulnerable when flooding and drought occur.

The 2015 Paris Agreement has made specific provision for the empowerment of women, recognising that they are disproportionately impacted.

In central Africa, where up to 90% of Lake Chad has disappeared, nomadic indigenous groups are particularly at risk. As the lake's shoreline recedes, women have to walk much further to collect water.

"In the dry season, men go to the towns... leaving women to look after the community," explains Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, coordinator of the Association of Indigenous Women and People of Chad (AFPAT).

With dry seasons now becoming longer, women are working harder to feed and care for their families without support. "They become more vulnerable... it's very hard work," Ibrahim recently told the BBC's 100 Women initiative.

A global problem

It is not just women in rural areas who are affected. Globally, women are more likely to experience poverty, and to have less socioeconomic power than men. This makes it difficult to recover from disasters which affect infrastructure, jobs and housing.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, African American women were among the worst affected by flooding in Louisiana. As sea levels rise, low-lying cities like New Orleans will be increasingly at risk.

"In New Orleans, there was much higher poverty among the African American population before Katrina," says Jacquelyn Litt, professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University.

"More than half the poor families in the city were headed by single mothers," she told BBC News.

"[They] are reliant on interdependent community networks for their everyday survival and resources. The displacement that happened after Katrina essentially eroded those networks. It places women and their children at much greater risk."

In the immediate aftermath of extreme events, emergency shelters can be inadequately equipped to support women. The Superdome, in which evacuees were temporarily housed after Hurricane Katrina, didn't have enough sanitary products for the women accommodated there.

Increased incidences of violence against women, including sexual assault and rape, have also been documented in the wake of disasters.

'Natural' disasters?

Much as climate change is accelerated by human behaviours, the impact of weather and climate events is influenced by societal structures. Disasters do not affect all people equally.

In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, an Oxfam report found that surviving men outnumbered women by almost 3:1 in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India.

While no one cause was clear, there were similar patterns across the region. Men were more likely to be able to swim, and women lost precious evacuation time trying to look after children and other relatives.

Another study spanning 20 years noted that catastrophic events lowered women's life expectancy more than men; more women were being killed, or they were being killed younger. In countries where women had greater socioeconomic power, the difference reduced.

Half the world

In recognition of this vast disparity, governments and organisations working on climate change are gradually moving to include women's voices in policy and planning.

The UN has highlighted the need for gender sensitive responses to the impacts of climate change, yet the average representation of women in national and global climate negotiating bodies is below 30%.

The numbers don't improve at the local level.

"Women are often not involved in the decisions made about the responses to climate change, so the money ends up going to the men rather than the women," environmental scientist Diana Liverman told the BBC's Science in Action programme on the World Service this week.

As an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports influence climate change policy, Liverman has been monitoring the numbers of women involved.

Twenty-five percent of those nominated to participate in the next report are women. "IPCC has been very receptive to this and is actually discussing how they can support women better," explains Liverman.

"Women are half the world. It's important they participate in all major decisions,"

"Climate change is not a fight for power," points out Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, "it's a fight for survival."

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Climate change 'impacts women more than men'

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Women are more likely than men to be affected by climate change, studies show. UN figures indicate that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. Roles as primary caregivers and providers of food and fuel make them more vulnerable when flooding and drought occur.

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Vandana ShivaAlthough Vandana Shiva’s work, theories and Point of view can be hard to understand I definitely believe that she is a brilliant mind. While nearly everyone including those in the scientific community nowadays seem to blindly follow any goal or “advancement” especially when eco-friendly/green is used to describe or associated with this, Vandana Shiva seems to be one of the only people challenging these ideas with actual science and a level of understanding. One of her biggest issues with what is known as the green revolution it's a very valid point. She argues that even though yes, these movement towards genetically modified foods and the production of extremely efficient edible plants specifically grains is good to feed people but it has larger downside the outweigh these benefits. She argued that this international movement is Creating a western ideology in terms of food production that is being pushed upon nearly every country. She believes that this mechanical idea of food production destroys cultures, lifestyles, Increases pollution, decreases indigenous and cultural food products available and increases the dependency of poor farmers on the supply of costly chemicals from the western world to protect their GMO crops. she believes that this move towards mass production of food disconnects the find emails from their work and further pushes the ideologies constructed by the western worlds that technological advancement Trump's all other factors such as culture and further divides classes by increasing income gaps and allows what she sees as toxic globalization to rapidly increase in speed. 

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Vandana ShivaAlthough Vandana Shiva’s work, theories and Point of view can be hard to understand I definitely believe that she is a brilliant mind. While nearly everyone including those in the scientific community nowadays seem to blindly follow any goal or “advancement” especially when eco-friendly/green is used to describe or associated with this, Vandana Shiva seems to be one of the only people challenging these ideas with actual science and a level of understanding. One of her biggest issues with what is known as the green revolution it's a very valid point. She argues that even though yes, these movement towards genetically modified foods and the production of extremely efficient edible plants specifically grains is good to feed people but it has larger downside the outweigh these benefits. She argued that this international movement is Creating a western ideology in terms of food production that is being pushed upon nearly every country. She believes that this mechanical idea of food production destroys cultures, lifestyles, Increases pollution, decreases indigenous and cultural food products available and increases the dependency of poor farmers on the supply of costly chemicals from the western world to protect their GMO crops. she believes that this move towards mass production of food disconnects the find emails from their work and further pushes the ideologies constructed by the western worlds that technological advancement Trump's all other factors such as culture and further divides classes by increasing income gaps and allows what she sees as toxic globalization to rapidly increase in speed. 

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Article 4 (article 1)  - How multinationals can advance gender equality in developing countries 

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Article 4 (article 1)  - How multinationals can advance gender equality in developing countries 

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How Multinationals can advance gender equality in developing countries:

·      MNE’s have the ability through their policies and practice to foster gender equality in the workplace in the developing countries that host them. This means these firms can promote gender equality in developing countries through employment through practices in the foreign locations and indirectly via spill overs in local labour markets.

·      Studies in Bangladesh reports that downstream business partners of MNEs in relation to textile and garment industry have 50% more female administrative employees than other local enterprises, while domestic firms sharing suppliers with MNE’s that hire more women.

·      This has been indictive depending on the values of the customer & stakeholder base within those developing areas that the outcome can be positive.

·      Ensuring the inclusion of women’s’ talents and experiences in sustainable development efforts requires the actions of all stakeholders such as policymakers, civil society and the business sector.

·      There has been evidence shown within UNCTAD that gender practices’ have indirect spill over effects on local firms and labour markets.

·      It states the importance of active enforcement of gender equality – by the promotion of equal access to training, provision of maternity leave without repercussions and the avoidance of unfair dismissals. These are inherently necessary to translate global policies across societal and cultural differences.

·      Policies in both home and host countries of MNE’s are key to promoting gender equality, with inherent focus that host-country policies and programmes aimed at strengthening local absorptive capacity and developing inclusive linkages.

·      There has been reports on progress in over 70% in the largest MNE’s in this areas , but women’s representation remains unequal due to the poor representation of women in managerial work and the additional lack of implementation of gender equality policies in relation to flexibility of working hours and childcare.

·      The report is indicative of the importance of including gender equality objectives in trade and investment agreement.

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Why do multinationals pay women less in developing countries:

·      Gender wage gaps remains a paramount issue at the centre of achieving gender equality. MNC’s play a monumental role in setting pay and diminishing this pay disparity. Women working for MNC’s in developing countries are paid more poorly in comparison to domestic firms.

·      Melinda Gates opinion is that to make an impact, focus should be on the barriers faced by women at work and the responsibility of businesses for realizing gender equality, with huge importance placed on the gender wage gap.

·      Currently women are earning on average 20% less than men for equally valuable work. Despite variations worldwide, the gender wage gap ranges from 3% in Luxembourg to 37% in South Korea, with not a single country having achieving income equality.

·      Closing the wage gap is crucial for the achievement of gender equality, with firms playing a gargantuan role in achieving this, as the ones providing employment, they directly determine hiring and promotion polices – as well as pay differences.

·      MNC’s have been inherently scrutinised for the impact they have on local economies recently, there have been studies done questioning if women are better off working for multinationals in relation to wages – this has come to show that the gender wage gap is smaller in multinationals than in domestic firms, but exclusively in developed countries. There is larger wage disparity in multinationals in developing countries.

·      Within developing countries multinationals are found to be associated with an even larger gender wage gap than domestic firms. This could be due to the cultural based perception of the role of women in the family and society and how they differentiate across countries. For example, women may have expectations of being the care-taker, or experience limitations in travelling internationally which plays a substantial role in working for multinationals.

·      Thus, while it has been proved multinationals has reduced the wage gap between men and women within developed countries, this study has called that multinationals in fact contribute to widening instead of reducing the gender wage gap in developing countries. Multinationals have a decisive role to play here by tackling the gender disparity in both developing and developed countries.

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Philippine women bearing the cross of globalisation.

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Philippine women bearing the cross of globalisation.

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Women bearing the cross of globalisation-Philippines

Globalisation, the supposed cure for underdevelopment and poverty in Third World countries (modernisation theory) resulted in the Philippines of the further marginalization of the working women.

In mid-1997, currency devaluation hit hard countries in the Asia Pacific, followed by massive layoffs of local and migrant workers and bankruptcy of financial institutions. The policies of liberalization, deregulation and privatization as imposed by the IMF-and the World Bank, and regional economic cooperation such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), had made it possible for these economies to be vulnerable to attacks..

By the start of 1995, after the government signed GATT-WTO in December 1994, Filipinos were threatened with an oil price increase. Also, a by-product of the structural adjustment program, (the GATT-WTO), the Philippine government also pledged to import rice from foreign countries, causing a rice crisis to occur. Deregulating government subsidies had caused the sudden increase in rice price.

As of March 1997, the government had approved applications for land conversion covering 50,720 hectares of agricultural land. it had also cancelled land awards given to Filipino farmers covering 23,847 hectares. The crop-conversion and land-conversion policies only worsen the displacement of Filipino peasant women. More than 3 million hectares of rice and corn-producing lands are being converted, threatening the livelihood of two thirds of the total population of peasant women.

Of the 2.3 thousand women directly involved in agricultural work, 1.4 are not even compensated. And of these, they earn less than 10 centavos for every peso earned by their male counterpart. Even this meagre source of livelihood is at the threshold of vanishing. In Southern Mindanao, plantations of bananas, cocoa, sugar, and rubber are now in deep trouble with the weakening export of these products.

The Export Processing Zones (EPZ's), proof that the Philippines is indeed on its way towards becoming a newly industrialized country, was expected to benefit from the peso devaluation. In truth, they suffered as much setback as the rest of the industries with imported components comprising 35-40% of the production cost in these EPZ's. About 80 to 90% of the total workforce in these EPZ's are women.

The government policies continually deescalate the already narrow opportunities for Filipino women. Of the 30.5 thousand labour force in the country, 11.35 thousand or 37.2% are women ... 3,107.000 or 27.3% of women in the labor force remain unemployed or underemployed. Most of them can be found in agriculture, fishery and forestry; community social and personal services; wholesale and retail services and manufacture.

The privatization of hospitals and health institutions is also widespread, further diminishing health services for women. Women coming from the poorer sections of society within Manila usually avail of the cheap, sometimes free services of the Jose Fabella Medical Center, a hospital specializing in maternal care. With its planned privatization, this specialized hospital is expected to become profit-oriented, thus making it inaccessible to marginalized women.

Trafficking of Filipino women in other countries for prostitution, sex slavery or labour bondage has become widespread. In Canada, many Filipino women work as 'dancers' in clubs. There are around 20,000 Filipino mail-order brides in Australia.

Around 5,000 Filipinos have entered the US as mail-order brides every year since 1986. Poverty-stricken women and children migrating from rural to urban areas have also become targets of syndicates involved in the sex trade.

Sex trafficking of women is nothing more than an extension of the sex tourism dominating the local tourism industry. Sex tours, which originated in the 70's continue to this day. In the past five years, the number of registered 'sex workers' have increased in areas which are targeted as growth centres and where tourism is a thriving industry. The number of prostituted women increase just as the number of entertainment establishments increase. From the rural areas to urban centres, in and outside the country, Filipino women are being displaced and commodified.

Even as 'globalisation' is being branded as the economic philosophy, militant women in the Philippines, as well as in other countries, vow to continue the struggle towards the true liberation of women."

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BBC Article, "Climate change impacts women more than men"

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BBC Article, "Climate change impacts women more than men"

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- 80% of people displaced by climate change are women
- Women's roles as the primary caregiver makes them more vulnerable during periods of flood and drought
- 90% of Lake Chad has dried up

- Men go to the towns in central Africa, which leaves the women behind in towns to look after their community.
Since the dry season lasts longer, women need to work harder without support
-Women generally have less socioeconomic  power globally, so rebuilding and recovery due to climate change is much more difficult

- In New Orleans, more than half of poor families are led by single mothers
-There has been increased levels of violence against women after natural disasters
-Women are disproportionally affected, in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India a tsunami in 2004 left 3 times as many men survived than women. Catastrophic events like these also lowered female life expectancy.

-Representation of women in climate negotiating bodies is below 30%.

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UN Article "Women in the Shadow of Climate Change"

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UN Article "Women in the Shadow of Climate Change"

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-Seventy per cent of the 1.3 billion people living in conditions of poverty are women. In urban areas, 40 per cent of the poorest households are headed by women. Women predominate in the world's food production (50-80 per cent), but they own less than 10 per cent of the land.

-Women represent a high percentage of poor communities that are highly dependent on local natural resources for their livelihood, particularly in rural areas where they shoulder the major responsibility for household water supply and energy for cooking and heating, as well as for food security. In the Near East, women contribute up to 50 per cent of the agricultural workforce. They are mainly responsible for the more time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks that are carried out manually or with the use of simple tools.

-Women have limited access to and control of environmental goods and services; they have negligible participation in decision-making, and are not involved in the distribution of environment management benefits. Consequently, women are less able to confront climate change.

-During extreme weather such as droughts and floods, women tend to work more to secure household livelihoods. This will leave less time for women to access training and education, develop skills or earn income. In Africa, female illiteracy rates were over 55 per cent in 2000, compared to 41 per cent for men.⁴ When coupled with inaccessibility to resources and decision-making processes, limited mobility places women where they are disproportionately affected by climate change.

-In many societies, socio-cultural norms and childcare responsibilities prevent women from migrating or seeking refuge in other places or working when a disaster hits.

-Climate change will be an added stressor that will aggravate women's vulnerability. It is widely known that during conflict, women face heightened domestic violence, sexual intimidation, human trafficking and rape.

-For a long time women have historically developed knowledge and skills related to water harvesting and storage, food preservation and rationing, and natural resource management. In Africa, for example, old women represent wisdom pools with their inherited knowledge and expertise related to early warnings and mitigating the impacts of disasters. This knowledge and experience that has passed from one generation to another will be able to contribute effectively to enhancing local adaptive capacity and sustaining a community's livelihood.

-Women's priorities and needs must be reflected in the development planning and funding. Women should be part of the decision making at national and local levels regarding allocation of resources for climate change initiatives. It is also important to ensure gender-sensitive investments in programmes for adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer and capacity building. Funding organizations and donors should also take into account women-specific circumstances when developing and introducing technologies related to climate change adaptation and to try their best to remove the economic, social and cultural barriers that could constraint women from benefiting and making use of them.

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Over a period of time (during 2006-2011)  there was a major drought in Syria. Instead of offering a solution through food democracy, through the rights of farmers to have seed sovereignty and food sovereignty or instead of creating a more fair system of pricing of food (fair trade), no meaningful impact was pursued to help local farmers/producers. This ignorant response only consolidated the issue, as the drought continued to intensify leading to 800,000 Syrians, (farmers and herdsmen in the area around the town of Daraa), gradually losing their livelihoods. Figures continued to worsen at a much bleaker pace ad 75% of the crop had finished, 85% of the herds were dead. Farmers responded by coming to the city  to protest. They were arrested and  thrown into jail, all the while their issue being treated like a matter of total insignificance. in an attempt to counteract the drought, the farmers started to mine more water where they could. However, 144 cubic meters of water was lost because of excessive drilling. This loss of water occurs is so impactful, in places like Syria or India, as crops that use less water, or are more sustainable in terms of resource drain have been displaced in an attempt to maximise output rather than protect producers. This is as a direct correlation of The Green Revolution, which is based on chemicals  and is heavily water intensive, not due to water needed to grow the crops, but due to the major necessity in the experimentation and implementation of chemicals within the aforementioned crops, meaning the process requires the use of up to 10 times more water. This can also be seen on a global scale as between 75% to 95% of the water in different countries is going into an intensive agriculture which is not enhancing gains in food security but prioritising output. In fact, it actually undermines food security by depleting water availability.

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General:

Majority of the worlds poor are women

Lower wages than men

Unpaid labour is very important, women have longer workdays than men when this is taken into account

Cultures in poor countries are frequently patriarchal and oppose women in the workforce which can be detrimental to a country’s own economic development

Article 1

Women do at least twice as much unpaid care work as men, such as childcare and housework, sometimes 10 times as much.

The value of this work each year is estimated at at least $10.8 trillion

In Latin America an increase in the number of women in paid work between 2000 and 2010 accounted for around 30 percent of the overall reduction in poverty and income inequality - empowerment of women alleviates poverty.

Article 2

Focuses on “Least Developed Countries” (LDCs) and on entrepreneurship / empowerment of women and through business

Proposes:

1. Make trade safe for women

2. Bring more women into the workforce

3. Make spaces for female expertise

4. Facilitate equal access to technology

Article 3

“Giving women greater economic empowerment means enabling women to increase their right to economic resources and their control over meaningful decisions that benefit themselves, their households and their communities.”

Again: Empowerment of women = economic development = less poverty. “women’s economic empowerment, increases economic diversification, boosts productivity and income equality, resulting in other positive development outcomes.”

Education really important. “one percentage point increase in female education raises the average level of GDP by 0.37 percentage points.”

Article 4

Article published in 1997 in ‘Foreign Policy’ journal.

Like the others emphasises the economic need for female empowerment

Capitalistic argument for feminism and basic human rights: “If not out of altruism, then for reasons of bald self-interest, developed countries should work to expand the economic opportunities of poor women.”

Attached table shows some figures around female poverty over 20 years.

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a branch of feminism that looks between the connection of the oppression of women and the domination of nature
ecofeminism believes that the same mindset that leads to women's oppression leads to  environmental degradation.....

essentially ecofeminism is all about the way both the environment and women are treated badly by patriarchal structures/capitalism... and how due to patriarchal structures/capitalism/industrialisation... it is women and the environment that suffer the most.
ie indigenous women who live in close proximity to nature have to suffer a lot due to environmental degradation while those at the top of the capitalism patriarchal hierarchy thrive.

(could draw parallels to dependency theory, say that women are worst impacted by it)

""…everywhere, women were the first to protest against environmental destruction. As activists in the ecology movements, it became clear to us that science and technology were not gender neutral; and in common with many other women, we began to see that the relationship of exploitative dominance between man and nature, (shaped by reductionist modern science since the 16th century) and the exploitative and oppressive relationship between men and women and prevails in most patriarchal societies, even modern industrial ones, were closely connected…

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ecofeminism started in India in the 1970s, while many people outside India share in the beliefs of ecofeminism, it would seem that ecofeminism is vocalised and implemented more in India.

Dr Vandana Shiva:

Shiva holds colonialism responsible for the “destruction of nature and women’s work”

to disprove the essay title:

criticism of Shiva :

"Shiva’s theory tends to put all women in developing countries under one category which doesn’t take into account other factors such as India’s historical, cultural and social processes that have impacted the relationship between women and nature in India.

Shiva doesn’t talk about the impact of precolonial structures such as caste and class inequality that also shaped the environment’s destruction and the suppression of women.

criticism of ecofeminsim as a whole

"The foundation of Ecofeminism is the notion that a woman’s ethics are more closely related to the environment in comparison to those of a man. For example, the female tendency to be a giver and gentle is echoed in nature’s qualities to provide everything necessary for survival. While arguably this can be seen as true, the differentiation between feminine qualities and masculine qualities presented in Ecofeminism play right into the notion of patriarchy. By presenting men as conquerors and women as gentle givers it undoubtedly creates a divide between men and women, contradicting the feminist movement of equality"

us ecofemisnism truly intersectional then? claims to support the rights of all... one of main points of ecofeminsm is that indegenous women who live in close proximity to nature suffer the most, but how can that suffering be measured worse then the men who also live in these areas?

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GD Industrialisation, Women, and the Environment Essay 2