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Harvesting Justice #4: Women’s Work – Gender and the Global Food System

women transplanting rice in madagascar

Women and the Food Sovereignty Movement

Food sovereignty movements explicitly recognize the importance of women in agriculture. Via Campesina, the 70-country coalition of farmers, other food producers, and land-based people, has made challenging gender inequity a central goal, both within the coalition and in the global food system. Via Campesina has hosted three international women’s assemblies, led campaigns challenging gender-based violence, hosted trainings and exchanges for women, and committed to integrating a gender analysis into each of its program areas. Internally, it now requires that one woman and one man from each region participate in the international coordinating committee. It has set a goal of having 50 percent of delegates in all committees and conferences be women. It challenges its member organizations to ensure that women play an equally significant role in all leadership structures.

Juana Ferrer is a member a member of the International Commission of Women of Via Campesina. She is also a member of the board of the National Confederation of Women Campesinas (CONAMUCA) in the Dominican Republic. Here she discusses women’s role as protagonists in changing the global food system as well as the food sovereignty movement itself.

The contributions that women gave to constructing the international campesino [peasant farmer] movement, and to confronting the agricultural and economic model: it’s a contribution from below, from communities. We as women have a very spiritual and very political commitment that has been passed down to us by our ancestors – a commitment to better conditions for our families, our community, our people.

One very important thing for us is valuing our responsibilities, because it’s not the same when a woman goes out to struggle: we have to make breakfast for the children, make coffee, clean the house, see if Grandmother is doing well. The men go out anywhere they want – around the community, outside the country.”

In the early 90’s, in the process of building the Via Campesina movement, women’s participation – especially at the international level – was almost invisible. Women came in with all their history of responsibility in [social] movements, but that wasn’t reflected in decision-making. A lot of the compañeras that started with the movement were pregnant – imagine that. A lot of us had to give the most we could in political work while nursing our children. It’s the double burden of raising family and doing political work. Some people might think that’s marvelous, but the level of sacrifice each of us had to make was very big. In the course of it, we women have gained more of a place in our houses, in our families, in our communities, and in our organizations.

In some countries, like the Dominican Republic, our struggle, our debate, our alliances with other movements have achieved a reform of the agrarian code. Previously, women only had access to the land when the husband died, and then only if there wasn’t a brother in the family. Since passing this law, women are equal to men in access to land, credit, and other resources. Clearly there’s a problem in applying this law; generally speaking, campesinos and campesinas have little access to land, but women have least. One important statistic is that only 1% of productive land with access to water to grow food on is in the hands of campesinos and campesinas. The rest is in the hands of big producers, transnationals, politicians, government functionaries. But women are much more discriminated against in the application of the agrarian reform law in application.

At the international level of Via Campesina, one achievement has been the recognition of women’s rights to access to land, to fight for an agrarian reform that benefits men and women, that respects our natural resources.

Food sovereignty is another of the most important issues that we work on. We in Via Campesina assume that food sovereignty is our right as peoples. It involves access to resources, the ability to produce the food that we need to support our people, the ability to decide what we want to produce. The women are present in that struggle. Participation of women in the seed campaign of Via Campesina has been really important because we’ve historically been promoters of agriculture, the ones who saved seeds.

We have an International Commission on Women, which shares responsibility with men to work toward gender equity. In the past, only women assumed that responsibility. We had a Commission on Gender, but all the rest of the commissions – agrarian reform, food sovereignty, human rights, and others – were comprised solely of men. Now on the coordinating committee of the Commission of Women, we are nine men and nine women. But what we have struggled for is not equality in numbers, but equality in participation and decision-making.

You have to respect the people’s culture, but you also have to work so that that culture implies real possibilities of life. We have been able to unify our strengths as women, and also plant the struggle against machismo and other things that oppress us as a responsibility of the men and women of Via Campesina.

Next: Resources on gender and food

Image credit: IRRI Images via photopin cc

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