By Nina Somera

More than a decade since the World Food Summit (WFS) in 1996, the fears of women and men over the then emerging shadows of neoliberal globalisation have come true. Many farmers have been displaced; lands are becoming more concentrated to a few and contaminated; the distribution of goods has become more skewed; and hunger is increasingly on the rise, among many others. More than a decade since the WFS, another episode of food crisis is taking place in a stage of modernisation and overproduction. Of all the actors involved, women have borne most of the brunt.

Back in 1996, scores of women organised to make their voices heard in the first WFS. For its part, Isis International published the monograph series, “No Shortcut to Food Security” which featured the inputs of feminists such as Maria Mies in “A Breakdown in Relations: Women, Food Security and Trade,” Susan George in “Questionable Compatibility: Trade Liberalisation and Food Security,” Marilee Karl in “Inseparable: The Crucial Role of Women in Food Security,” and Vandana Shiva in “Caliber of Destruction: Globalisation, Food Security and Women’s Livelihood.”

We are fortunate to have Marilee Karl’s updated essay, which is included in this issue of Women in Action, “Harvest Reaped but Hard to Reach.” Nonetheless, the assertions of Maria Mies, Susan George and Vandana Shiva remain valid to the present which is not only seeing a food crisis but one that is intensified by an environmental and climactic stress at a very alarming level and a spiralling global economic crisis that has left cash economy-dependent populations jobless and homeless.

In “A Breakdown in Relations: Women, Food Security and Trade,” Maria Mies immediately pointed out WFS’ evasion of any issues that would otherwise lead to the discussions of the WTO. For Mies, food security must not be narrowly defined as the mere availability of food. Instead, it should encompass a broader process that begins with people’s access to land, their choice of crops to plant and mode of farming, their relationship with nature and other members of the community. Moreover, she questioned the additive approach that was taken on gender and environment to the current discussion of food security rather making these otherwise sectoral issues organic to the very discussion and definition of food security.

“This ignores the fact that cheap food for housewives in affluent classes and countries is available because women in poor classes and countries are exploited as workers in food production for exports, that their land and resources are not used for their own food production and that the money income they get is usually not sufficient to buy the necessary food for themselves and their families. Food security for all women is not possible in a world economy where the relationship between food consumers and food producers is basically a polarising and colonial one,” she asserted.

Meanwhile, Susan George in “Questionable Compatibility: Trade Liberalisation and Food Security” surfaces the contradictions between today's “free trade” and its alleged source: 19th century comparative advantage theory, espousing that development can take place when a country specialises on the types of production that they are best in performing. But as George remarked, “So far so good, but only so long as capital remains national! Ricardo [and] Smith would have been astonished at the idea that an English businessman might invest in the Philippines or Taiwan and not in England. Now that capital can go anywhere it pleases, every country is placed in competition with every one – an impossibility in the 19th century.”

A country’s increasing dependence on the exports of specific goods and accommodation to food imports results to migration to urban centres or industrialised areas, where farmers become labourers. As George put it, “You can make a worker out of a peasant, but you cannot make a peasant out of a worker. A worker can be retrained and moved from one industrial sector to another – and even that is difficult enough – but a peasant lost is a peasant lost forever.”

Another contentious instrument of the WTO is its Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement which allows the patenting of seeds and their marketing at a very high cost. A brainchild of the United States (US), the TRIPS Agreement orders WTO members to harmonise its laws with the provisions of the Agreement, including the patenting of local plant varieties in agriculture and medicinal processes.

Vandana Shiva in “Caliber of Destruction: Globalisation, Food Security and Women’s Livelihood” further argued for the link between women’s impoverishment with the imposition of the TRIPS Agreement: “The US IPR orthodoxy is based on a fallacious idea that people do not innovate or generate knowledge unless they can derive profits. However, greed is not a ‘fundamental fact of human nature’ but a dominant tendency in societies that reward it. In the area of seeds and plant genetic resources, innovation of both the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ systems has so far been guided by the larger common good. And in the so called “informal” system, it is the women who have been the leading innovators. IPRs are thus instruments for the transfer of knowledge and biodiversity from women farmers to the seed industry.”

She added, “Economic globalisation is the globalisation of the world view of capitalist patriarchy which has devalued nature and women. In the world view of capitalist patriarchy, greed rules over need, the market dominates the household, the global displaces the local and women’s and nature’s productivity are denied and rendered invisible.”

It is for this reason that the struggles on land and gender particularly in the agriculture and environmental sectors are quite intertwined. Women, being the most vulnerable in a free trade regime, are among the key players in opposing neoliberal globalisation. Today, such collective struggle continues.