Gender: Diverse Women For Diversity
Gender and Environment
Women's ecology movements had shown how the dominant models of economic development and scientific progress were based on a particular construction of production and knowledge which excluded women and Third World communities as producers of economic value and as generators of intellectual value. Economic globalisation deepens this exclusion and hence becomes a threat to the survival and integrity of local communities.
The impact of globalisation is therefore to take resources and knowledge that have hitherto been under women's control governed and the control of Third World communities to generate sustenance and survival, and put them at service of corporations engaged in global trade and commerce to generate profits.
The emerging forces of economic globalisation are dramatically structuring systems of production and systems of knowledge generation and utilisation. Globalisation is further rendering invisible and destroying women's work and intelligence and the nature's work and the integrity of ecological processes. In response to the ecologically and socially destructive and disruptive impacts of globalisation, women and local communities in India are organising afresh in new and emergent struggles for survival.
How Intellectual Property Rights Devalue Women's Indigenous Knowledge
In agriculture and in health care, women have been the biodiversity experts. In partnership with plants, third world women meet the needs for food and medicine in their societies. Women farmers are the seed keepers and seed custodians in most peasant societies - they select, store and sow and conserve seed. Women healers are the knowledge providers of plant based medicine. According to an ethnobotanical survey, there are 7500 species used as medicinal plants by the indigenous medical traditions of India. These traditions are kept alive by 360 740 Ayurvedic practitioners, 29 701 Unani experts and 11 644 specialists of Siddha, in addition to millions of housewives, birth attendants and herbal healers using village based health traditions. Seventy percent of health care needs in India are still based on traditional systems using medicinal plants. Eighty percent of seeds used by farmers still comes from farmers' seed supply. India is thus still a predominantly biodiversity based economy adn women's knowledge is very central to this economy.
This time immemorial relationship between people and plants is now being ruptured through patent regimes being expanded to cover plants, animals and microorganisms.
Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are an instrument in the GATT agreement which will dispossess rural women of their power, control and knowledge. IPRs in GATT and other international platforms aim to take seed out of peasant women's custody and medical plants out of the hands of women healers and make it the private property of TNCs. By adding 'trade related' to IPRs, GATT has forced issues of the ownership of genetic resources and life forms on to the agenda of international trade through Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs).
Women and Health
The warring polarities of patriarchal construction of women's rights in the context of environmental and health issues are threatening to generate deadlock and violence on vital issues of security, choice and life itself. Women's voices are being silenced as patriarchal powers contest for control over their bodies. Women's rights are being set up in opposition ot "fetal rights". Third World women's and children's health rights are being set up in opposition to the planet's health. Women's economic and political choice for self determination is being dispensed with while marketing new hazardous contraceptives.
The women's movement has often perceived the environmental crisis as a health crisis, since environmental pollution and ecological degradation impact on people's health in their daily lives. However, in the medical establishment, a new voice has gained prominence that supports an inhuman approach to people's health to protect the planet's health. This new eco-racism emerging from influential people in the health care system is silencing the voice of women for whom people's health and the planet's health work in positive and not negative correlation.
Women have to face the onslaught of new hazardous contraceptive technologies for providing markets to the growing appetites of the international pharmaceutical industry. This market is created by unethical research and marketing practices, often in connivance with Third World governments, forced into such a position because of loan conditionalities.
Women's health rights are also being pushed aside under the pressure of the demographic establishment, which is divesting resources from health care, and coercively or deceptively introducing hazardous contraceptives which threaten women's health. While claiming to be "pro-choice", population control programs are acting against Third World women's democratice and human rights.
Both the superpowers and the pharmaceutical industry achieve their ends through the tool of bilateral and multilateral aid. The World Bank with its structural adjustment programs, is in a unique position to force Third World governments to comply with the population requirements of the North.
