Response Post on Development from Below SYP

WOMEN, LAND STRUGGLES, AND GLOBALIZATION: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (2004)

Despite a systematic attempt by colonial powers to destroy female sys-tems of farming, across the planet, women today constitute the bulk of agricultural workers and are in the forefront of the struggle for a noncapi- talist use of natural resources (land, forests, waters). Defending subsis- tence agriculture, communal access to land, and opposing land expropria- tion, women internationally are building the way to a new nonexploitative society, one in which the threat of famines and ecological devastation will be dispelled.

How can we ever get out of poverty if we can’t get a piece of land to work? If we had land to plant, we wouldn’t need to get food sent to us all the way from the United States. No. We’d have our own. But as long as the government refuses to give us the land and other resources we need, we’ll continue to have foreigners running our country. —Elvia Alvarado1

Women Keep the World Alive Until recently, issues relating to land and land struggles would have failed to generate much interest among most North Americans, unless they were farmers or descendants of the American Indians for whom the im- portance of land as the foundation of life is still paramount, culturally at least. For many land issues seemed to have receded to a vanishing past.

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In the aftermath of massive urbanization, land no longer appeared to be the fundamental means of reproduction, and new industrial technolo- gies claimed to provide the power, self-reliance, and creativity that people once associated with self-provisioning and small-scale farming.

This has been a great loss, if only because this amnesia has created a world where the most basic questions about our existence—where our food comes from, whether it nourishes us or instead, poisons our bod- ies—remain unanswered and often unasked. This indifference to land among urban dwellers is coming to an end, however. Concern for the genetic engineering of agricultural crops and the ecological impact of the destruction of the tropical forests, together with the example offered by the struggles of indigenous people, such as the Zapatistas who have risen up in arms to oppose land privatization, have created a new awareness in Europe and North America about the importance of the “land question,” not long ago still identified as a “Third World” issue.

As a result of this conceptual shift it is now recognized that land is not a largely irrelevant “factor of production” in modern capitalism. Land is the material basis for women’s subsistence work, which is the main source of “food security” for millions of people across the planet. Against this background, I look at the struggles that women are making world- wide not only to reappropriate land, but to boost subsistence farming and a noncommercial use of natural resources. These efforts are extremely important not only because thanks to them billions of people are able to survive, but because they point to the changes that we have to make if we are to construct a society where reproducing ourselves does not comes at the expense of other people nor presents a threat to the continuation of life on the planet.

Women and Land: A Historical Perspective It is an undisputed fact but one difficult to measure that in rural as well as urban areas, women are the subsistence farmers of the planet. That is, women produce the bulk of the food that is consumed by their families (immediate or extended) or is sold at the local markets for consumption, especially in Africa and Asia where the bulk of the world population lives.

Subsistence farming is difficult to measure because, for the most part, it is unwaged work and often is not done on a formal farm. Moreover, many of the women who do it do not describe it as work. This parallels another well-known economic fact: the number of house-workers and the value of their work are hard to measure. Given the capitalist bias to- ward production for the market, housework is not counted as work, and is still not considered by many as “real work.”

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International agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Association (FAO), the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the United Nations have often ignored the difficulties presented by the measurement of subsistence work. But they have recognized that much depends on what definition is used. They have noted, for instance, that “in Bangladesh, [the] labour force participation of women was 10 percent according to the Labour Force Survey of 1985–86. But when, in 1989, the Labour Force Survey included in the questionnaire specific activities such as threshing, food processing and poultry rearing the economic activity rate went up to 63 percent.”2

It is not easy, then, to precisely assess, on the basis of the statis- tics available, how many people, and women in particular, are involved in subsistence farming; but it is clear that it is a substantial number. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, “women produce up to 80 percent of all the basic food- stuffs for household consumption and for sale.”3 Given that the popula- tion of sub-Saharan Africa is about three-quarters of a billion people, with a large percentage of them being children, this means that more than a hundred million African women must be subsistence farmers.4 As the feminist slogan goes: “women hold up more than half the sky.”

We should recognize that the persistence of subsistence farming is an astounding fact considering that capitalist development has been premised on the separation of agricultural producers, women in particu- lar, from the land. It can only be explained on the basis of a tremendous struggle women have made to resist the commercialization of agriculture.

Evidence for this struggle is found throughout the history of colo- nization, from the Andes to Africa. In response to land expropriation by the Spaniards (assisted by local chiefs), women in Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ran to the mountains, rallied the population to resist the foreign invaders, and became the staunch- est defenders of the old cultures and religions, which were centered on the worship of nature-gods.5 Later, in the nineteenth century, in Africa and Asia, women defended the traditional female farming systems from the systematic attempts that the European colonialists made to dismantle them and to redefine agricultural work as a male job.

As Ester Boserup (among others) has shown with reference to West Africa, not only did colonial officers, missionaries, and later agricultural developers impose commercial crops at the expense of food production, but they excluded African women, who did most of the farming, from the study of modern farming systems and technical assistance. They invari- ably privileged men with regard to land assignment, even when absent

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from their homes.6 Thus, in addition to eroding women’s “traditional” rights as participants in communal land systems and independent cul- tivators, colonialists and developers alike introduced new divisions be- tween women and men. They imposed a new sexual division of labor, based upon women’s subordination to men, which, in the colonialists’ schemes, included unpaid cooperation with their husbands in the cultiva- tion of cash crops.

Women, however, did not accept this deterioration in their social position without protest. In colonial Africa whenever they feared that the government might sell their land or appropriate their crops, they re- volted. Exemplary was the protest that women mounted against the co- lonial authorities in Kedjom Keku and Kedjom Ketinguh (northwestern Cameroon, then under British rule) in 1958. Angered by rumors claim- ing that the government was going to put their land up for sale, seven thousand women repeatedly marched to Bamenda, the provincial capi- tal at the time, and in their longest stay camped for two weeks outside the British colonial administrative buildings, “singing loudly and making their rumbustious presence felt.”7

In the same region, women fought against the destruction of their subsistence farms by foraging cattle owned by members of the local male elite or by nomadic Fulani to whom the colonial authorities had granted seasonal pasturage rights expecting to collect a herd tax. In this case too, the women’s boisterous protest defeated the plan, forcing the authorities to sanction the offending pasturalists. As Susan Diduk writes,

In the protests women perceived themselves as fighting for the survival and subsistence needs of family and kin. Their agri- cultural labor was and continues to be indispensable to daily food production. Kedjom men also emphasize the importance of these roles in the past and present. Today they are frequently heard to say, “Don’t women suffer for farming and for carrying children for nine months? Yes, they do good for the country.”8

There were many similar struggles, in the 1940s and 1950s, throughout Africa, by women resisting the introduction of cash crops and the extra work it imposed on them, which took them away from their subsistence farming. The power of women’s subsistence farming, from the viewpoint of the survival of the colonized communities, can be seen from the contribution it made to the anticolonial struggle, in particular to the maintenance of liberation fighters in the bush (e.g., in Algeria, Kenya, and Mozambique).9 In the postindependence period as

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well, women fought against being recruited in agricultural development projects as unpaid “helpers” of their husbands. The best example of this resistance is the intense struggle they made in the Senegambia against cooperation in the commercial cultivation of rice crops, which came at the expense of their subsistence food production.10

It is because of these struggles—which are now recognized as the main reason for the failure of the agricultural development projects of the 1960s and 1970s—that a sizable subsistence sector has survived in many regions of the world, despite the commitment of pre- and postindepen- dence governments to “economic development” along capitalist lines.11

The determination of millions of women in Africa, Asia, and the Americas to not abandon subsistence farming must be emphasized to coun- ter the tendency, common even among radical social scientists, to interpret the survival of female subsistence agriculture as a function of international capital’s need to both cheapen the cost of the reproduction of labor and “liberate” male workers for the cultivation of cash crops and other kinds of waged work. Claude Meillassoux, a Marxist proponent of this theory, has argued that female subsistence-oriented production, or the “domestic economy” as he calls it, has served to ensure a supply of cheap workers for the capitalist sector at home and abroad and, as such, it has subsidized capi- talist accumulation.12 As his argument goes, thanks to the work of the “vil- lage,” the laborers who migrated to Paris or Johannesburg provided a “free” commodity for the capitalists who hired them; since employers neither had to pay for their upbringing nor had to support them with unemployment benefits when they no longer needed their work.

From this perspective, women’s labor in subsistence farming is a bonus for governments, companies, and development agencies, enabling them to more effectively exploit wage labor and obtain a constant trans- fer of wealth from the rural to the urban areas, in effect degrading the quality of female farmers’ lives.13 To his credit, Meillassoux acknowledges the efforts made by international agencies and governments to “under- develop” the subsistence sector. He sees the constant draining of its re- sources, and recognizes the precarious nature of this form of labor-repro- duction, anticipating that it may soon undergo a decisive crisis.14 But he too fails to see the struggle underlining the survival of subsistence work and its continuing importance, despite the attack waged upon it, from the viewpoint of the community’s capacity to resist the encroachment of capitalist relations.

As for liberal economists—their view of “subsistence work” com- pletely degrades it to the level of “uneconomic,” “unproductive” activ- ity, in the same way as liberal economics refuses to see women’s unpaid

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domestic labor in the home as work. Thus, liberal economists, even when appearing to take a feminist stand, propose, as an alternative, “income generating projects,” the universal remedy to poverty and presumably the key to women’s emancipation in the neoliberal era.15

What these different perspectives ignore is the strategic impor- tance that access to land has had for women and their communities, de- spite the ability of companies and governments to use it at times for their own ends. An analogy can be made here with the situation that prevailed in some islands of the Caribbean (for example, Jamaica) during slavery, when plantation owners gave the slaves plots of land (“provision grounds”) to cultivate for their own support. The owners took this measure to save on their food imports and reduce the cost of reproducing their work- ers. But this strategy had advantages for the slaves as well, giving them a higher degree of mobility and independence such that—according to some historians—even before emancipation, in some islands, a proto- peasantry had formed with a remarkable degree of freedom of movement, already deriving some income from the sale of its own products.16

Extending this analogy to illustrate the postcolonial capitalist use of subsistence labor we can say that subsistence agriculture has been an important means of support for billions of workers, giving wage laborers the possibility to contract better conditions of work and survive labor strikes and political protests, so that in several countries the wage sector has acquired an importance disproportionate to its small numerical size.17

The “village”—a metaphor for subsistence farming in a communal setting—has also been a crucial site for women’s struggle, providing a base from which to reclaim the wealth the state and capital was removing from it. It is a struggle that has taken many forms, often as much directed against men as against governments, but always strengthened by the fact that women had direct access to land and, in this way, they could support themselves and their children and gain some extra cash through the sale of their surplus product. Thus, even after they became urbanized, women continued to culti- vate any patch of land they could gain access to, in order to feed their families and maintain a certain degree of autonomy from the market.18

To what extent the village has been a source of power for female and male workers across the former colonial world can be measured by the radical attack that, since the early 1980s through the 1990s, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have waged against it under the guise of structural adjustment and “globalization.”19

The World Bank has made the destruction of subsistence agricul- ture and the promotion of land commercialization the centerpiece of its

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ubiquitous structural adjustment programs.20 In the late 1980s and 1990s, not only has land been fenced off, but “cheap” (i.e., subsidized) import- ed food from Europe and North America has flooded the now liberal- ized economies of Africa and Asia (which are not allowed to subsidize their farmers), further displacing women farmers from the local markets. Meanwhile, large tracts of once communal land have been taken over by agribusiness companies and devoted to cultivation for export. Finally, war and famine have terrorized millions into flight from their homelands.

What has followed has been a major reproduction crisis of a type and proportions not seen even in the colonial period. Even in regions once famous for their agricultural productivity, like Southern Nigeria, food is now scarce or too expensive to be within reach of the average person who, in the wake of structural adjustment, has to simultaneously contend with price hikes, frozen wages, devalued currency, widespread unemployment and cuts in social services.21

Here is where the importance of women’s struggles for land stands out. Women have been the main buffer for the world proletariat against starvation under the World Bank’s neoliberal regime. They have been the main opponents of the neoliberal demand that “market prices” de- termine who should live and who should die, and they are the ones who have provided a practical model for the reproduction of life in a noncommercial way.

Struggles for Subsistence and against "Globalization" in Africa, Asia, and the Americas Faced with a renewed drive toward land privatization, the extension of cash crops, and the rise in food prices in the age of globalization, women have resorted to many strategies pitting them against the most powerful institutions on the planet.

The primary strategy women have adopted to defend their com- munities from the impact of economic adjustment and dependence on the global market has been the expansion of subsistence farming also in the urban centers. Exemplary is the case of Guinea Bissau, where since the early 1980s, women have planted small gardens with vegetables, cas- sava, and fruit trees around most houses in the capital city of Bissau and other towns, in time of scarcity preferring to forfeit the earnings they might have made selling their produce in order to ensure that their fami- lies would not go without food.22 Still with reference to Africa, Christa Wichterich notes that in the 1990s women subsistence farming and ur- ban gardening (“cooking pot economics”) was revived in many cities, the urban farmers being mostly women from the lower class:

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There were onions and papaya trees, instead of flower-borders, in front of the housing estates of underpaid civil servants in Dar-es-Salaam; chickens and banana plants in the backyards of Lusaka; vegetables on the wide central reservations of the arterial roads of Kampala, and especially of Kinshasa, where the food supply system had largely collapsed. . . . In [Kenyan] towns [too] . . . green roadside strips, front gardens and wasteland sites were immediately occupied with maize, plants, sukum wiki, the most popular type of cabbage.23

To expand food production, however, women have had to expand their access to land, which the international agencies’ drives to create land markets have jeopardized. In order to have land to farm other women have preferred to remain in the rural area, while most men have migrated, with the result that there has been a “feminization of the villages,” many now consisting of women farming alone or in women’s coops.”24

Regaining or expanding land for subsistence farming has been one of the main battles also for rural women in Bangladesh, leading to the formation of the Landless Women Association that has been carrying on land occupations since 1992. During this period, the Association has managed to settle fifty thousand families, often confronting landowners in pitched confrontations. According to Shamsun Nahar Khan Doli, a leader of the Association to whom I owe this information, many oc- cupations are on “chars,” low-lying islands formed by soil deposits in the middle of a river.25 Such new lands should be allocated to landless farm- ers, according to Bangladeshi law, but because of the growing commercial value of land, big landowners have increasingly seized them; however women have organized to stop them, defending themselves with brooms, spears of bamboo, and even knives. They have also set up alarm systems, to alert other women when boats with the landowners or their goons approach, so they can push the attackers off or stop them from landing.

Similar land struggles are being fought in South America. In Paraguay, the Peasant Women’s Commission (CMC) was formed in 1985 in alliance with the Paraguayan Peasant’s Movement (MCP) to demand land distribution.26 As Jo Fischer points out, the CMC was the first peasant women’s movement that went to the streets in support of its demands, and incorporated in its program women’s concerns, also con- demning “their double oppression, as both peasants and as women.”27

The turning point for the CMC came when the government granted large tracts of land to the peasant movement in the forests close to the Brazilian border. The women took these grants as an opportunity

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to organize a model community, joining together to collectively farm their strips of land. As Geraldina, an early founder of CMC pointed out,

We work all the time, more now than ever before, but we’ve also changed the way we work. We’re experimenting with commu- nal work to see if it gives us more time for other things. It also gives us a chance to share our experiences and worries. This is a very different way of living for us. Before, we didn’t even know our neighbors.28

Women’s land struggles have included the defense of communities threatened by commercial housing projects constructed in the name of “ur- ban development.” “Housing” has historically involved the loss of “land” for food production. An example of resistance to this trend is the struggle of women in the Kawaala neighborhood of Kampala (Uganda) where the World Bank, in conjunction with the Kampala City Council (KCC), in 1992–1993, sponsored a large housing project that would destroy much subsistence farmland around or near people’s homes. Not surprisingly, it was women who most strenuously organized against it, through the forma- tion of an Abataka (Residents) Committee, eventually forcing the Bank to withdraw from the project. According to one of the women leaders:

While men were shying away, women were able to say anything in public meetings in front of government officials. Women were more vocal because they were directly affected. It is very hard for women to stand without any means of income . . . most of these women are people who basically support their children and without any income and food they cannot do it. . . . You come and take their peace and income and they are going to fight, not because they want to, but because they have been oppressed and suppressed.29

Aili Mari Tripp points out that the situation in the Kawaala neigh- borhood is far from unique.30 Similar struggles have been reported from different parts of Africa and Asia, where peasant women’s organizations have opposed the development of industrial zones threatening to displace them and their families and contaminate the environment.

Industrial or commercial housing development often clashes with women’s subsistence farming, in a context in which more and more women even in urban centers are gardening (in Kampala women grow 45 percent of the food for their families). It is important to add that in defending land from the assault by commercial interests and affirming the principle that

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“land and life are not for sale,” women again, as in the past against colonial invasion, are defending their peoples’ history and their culture. In the case of Kawaala, the majority of residents on the disputed land had been living there for generations and had buried there their kin—for many in Uganda the ultimate evidence of land ownership. Tripp’s reflections on this land struggle are pertinent to my discussion so far:

Stepping back from the events of the conflict, it becomes evident that the residents, especially the women involved, were trying to institutionalize some new norms for community mobilization, not just in Kawaala but more widely in providing a model for other community projects. They had a vision of a more collab- orative effort that took the needs of women, widows, children, and the elderly as a starting point and recognized their depen- dence on the land for survival.31

Two more developments need to be mentioned in conjunction with women’s defense of subsistence production. First, there has been the for- mation of regional systems of self-sufficiency aiming to guarantee “food security” and maintain an economy based on solidarity and the refusal of competition. The most impressive example in this respect comes from India where women formed the National Alliance for Women’s Food Rights, a national movement made of thirty-five women’s groups. One of the main efforts of the Alliance has been the campaign in defense of the mustard seed economy that is crucial for many rural and urban women in India. A subsistence crop, the seed has been threatened by the attempts of multinational corporations based in the United States to impose genetically engineered soybeans as a source of cooking oil.32 In response, the Alliance has built “direct producer-consumer alliances” in order to “defend the livelihood of farmers and the diverse cultural choices of consumers,” as stated by Vandana Shiva (2000), one of the leaders of the movement. In her words: “We protest soybean imports and call for a ban on the import of genetically engineered soybean products. As the women from the slums of Delhi sing, “Sarson Bachao, Soya Bhagaa,” or, “Save the Mustard, Dump the Soya.”33

Second, across the world, women have been leading the struggle to prevent commercial logging and save or rebuild forests, which are the foundation of people’s subsistence economies, providing nourishment as well as fuel, medicine, and communal relations. Forests, Vandana Shiva writes, echoing testimonies coming from every part of the planet, are “the highest expression of earth’s fertility and productivity.”34 Thus, when

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forests come under assault it is a death sentence for the tribal people who live in them, especially the women. Therefore, women do every- thing to stop the loggers. Shiva often cites, in this context, the Chikpo movement—a movement of women, in Garhwal, in the foothills of the Himalayas who, beginning in the early 1970s, started to embrace the trees destined to fall and put their bodies between them and the saws when the loggers come.35 While women in Garhwal have mobilized to prevent forests from being cut down, in villages of Northern Thailand they have protested the Eucalyptus plantations forcibly planted on their expropri- ated farms by a Japanese paper-making company with the support of the Thai military government.36 In Africa, an important initiative has been the “Green Belt Movement,” which under the leadership of Wangari Maathai has been committed to planting a green belt around the major cities and, since 1977, has planted tens of millions of trees to prevent de- forestation, soil loss, desertification, and fuel-wood scarcity.37

But the most striking struggle for the survival of the forests has tak- en place in the Niger Delta, where the mangrove tree swamps are being threatened by oil production. Opposition to it has mounted for twenty years, beginning in Ogharefe, in 1984, when several thousand women from the area laid siege to Pan Ocean’s Production Station demanding com- pensation for the destruction of the water, trees, and land. To show their determination, the women also threatened to disrobe themselves should their demands be ignored—a threat they put in action when the company’s director arrived, so that he found himself surrounded by thousands of na- ked women, a serious curse in the eyes of the Niger Delta communities, which convinced him at the time to accept the reparation claims.38

The struggle over land has also grown since the 1970s in the most unlikely place—New York City—in the form of an urban gardening move- ment. It began with the initiative of a women-led group called the “Green Guerrillas,” who began cleaning up vacant lots in the Lower East Side. By the 1990s, eight hundred and fifty urban gardens had developed in the city and dozens of community coalitions had formed, such as the Greening of Harlem Coalition that was begun by a group of women who wanted “to re- connect with the earth and give children an alternative to the streets.” Now it counts more than twenty-one organizations and thirty garden projects.39

It is important to note here that the gardens have been not only a source of vegetables and flowers, but have served to promote community- building and have been a stepping stone for other community struggles like squatting and homesteading. Because of this work, the gardens came under attack during Mayor Giuliani’s regime, and for some years now one of the main challenges this movement has faced has been stopping the

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bulldozers. One hundred gardens have been lost to “development” over the last decade, more than forty have been slated for bulldozing, and the prospects for the future seem gloomy.40 Since his appointment, in fact, the current mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, like his prede- cessor, has declared war on these gardens.

The Importance of the Struggle As we have seen, in cities across the world, at least a quarter of the inhab- itants depend on food produced by women’s subsistence labor. In Africa, for example, a quarter of the people living in towns say they could not survive without subsistence food production. This is confirmed by the UN Population Fund, which claims that “some two hundred million city dwellers are growing food, providing about one billion people with at least part of their food supply.”41 When we consider that the bulk of the food subsistence producers are women we can see why the men of Kedjom, Cameroon, would say, “Yes, women subsistence farmers do good for humanity.” Thanks to them, the billions of people, rural and urban, who earn one or two dollars a day do not go under, even in time of eco- nomic crisis.

Women’s subsistence production counters the trend by agribusi- ness to reduce cropland—one of the main causes of high food prices and starvation—while also ensuring some control over the quality of the food produced and protecting consumers against the genetic manipulation of crops and poisoning by pesticides. Further, women subsistence produc- tion represents a safe way of farming, a crucial consideration at a time when the effects of pesticides on agricultural crops are causing high rates of mortality and disease among peasants across the world, starting with women.42 Thus, subsistence farming gives women an essential means of control over their health and the health and lives of their families.43

We can also see that subsistence production is contributing to a noncompetitive, solidarity-centered mode of life that is crucial for the building of a new society. It is the seed of what Veronika Bennholdt- Thomsen and Maria Mies call the “other” economy, which “puts life and everything necessary to produce and maintain life on this planet at the center of economic and social activity” against “the never-ending accu- mulation of dead money.”44