Other Worlds's Posts - Gender and Evaluation2024-03-28T12:16:15ZOther Worldshttps://gendereval.ning.com/profile/DeepaPanchanghttps://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2219373689?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1https://gendereval.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=0mlajznh3od4s&xn_auth=noWOMEN UP IN ARMS: Zapatistas and Rojava Kurds embrace a new gender politics.tag:gendereval.ning.com,2015-03-18:6606644:BlogPost:311832015-03-18T08:01:19.000ZOther Worldshttps://gendereval.ning.com/profile/DeepaPanchang
<p>By Charlotte Maria Sáenz, Other Worlds<br></br> <br></br> March 18, 2015<br></br> <br></br><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236431712?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236431712?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750"></img></a> "Office of Women for Dignity" at the Zapatista Autonomous Municipality "Caracol de Oventic," Chiapas, Mexico.<br></br></p>
<p>Resistance and strength manifest like weeds through cracks in Chiapas, Mexico and transnational Kurdistan where the respective Zapatista and Kurdish resistance movements are…</p>
<p>By Charlotte Maria Sáenz, Other Worlds<br/> <br/> March 18, 2015<br/> <br/><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236431712?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236431712?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a>"Office of Women for Dignity" at the Zapatista Autonomous Municipality "Caracol de Oventic," Chiapas, Mexico.<br/></p>
<p>Resistance and strength manifest like weeds through cracks in Chiapas, Mexico and transnational Kurdistan where the respective Zapatista and Kurdish resistance movements are creating new gender relations as a primary part of their struggle and process for building a better world. In both places, women’s participation in the armed forces has been an entry-point for a new social construction of gender relations based on equity.</p>
<p>While the Kurds have been fighting for their survival against ISIS in the Syrian/Turkish border town of Kobane, the Zapatistas put down their arms over 20 years ago and have maintained a non-violent struggle since. In both cases, women have fought alongside men against their own collective obliteration while making radical changes in their gender relations. Working towards more equity makes possible more direct democracy in building greater autonomy from the state.<span style="font-size: 10px;">[1]</span> In both efforts, there is also a deep connection to the land<span style="font-size: 10px;">[2]</span> that regards the value of women and the environment as essential to life itself.</p>
<p>In both resistances, women took up arms to fight alongside their male counterparts, showing both willingness and capacity to fight as soldiers. However, their principal objective in the mountains is not military. Rather, their most important task is to form new persons: men and women in a more equitable relationship to each other--a relationship that is also anti-capitalist. “Above everything, we want for our militancy to create a new personality, one that is in complete contradiction to Capitalism,” says a representative of the Kurdish Committee of Jineology (a committee of and for women founded by the transnational PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), the Kurdish Workers Party.<span style="font-size: 10px;">[3]</span> Theirs is a commitment to building democracy, socialism, ecology and feminism. </p>
<p>The Zapatistas made a similar commitment to more equitable gender relations. One of the first things to come out of their armed uprising in 1994 was the Revolutionary Law of Women. This law spelled out 10 new rules giving women unprecedented power over their lives, including choosing whether and whom to marry, the right to serve on governing councils, and the right to bear arms as <em>milicianas</em>, militia fighters, in the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in Spanish). Zapatista women also asked for the law to include a prohibition of drugs and alcohol, in order to address one of the main causes of domestic violence. After the ceasefire only twelve days after the uprising, many women soldiers transitioned to a non-military political life taking unprecedented positions of governance, education, administration, and decision-making—another ways of taking up in arms, this time with each other and with men. For the last 21 years, both men and women have been in a process of unlearning old gender norms, relearning how to be and relate to each other anew, sharing both domestic and public duties. Although the construction of gender equity is still in progress, these new relations between men and women have been a fundamental component of the construction of Zapatista autonomy itself.</p>
<p>These radical changes in gender relations are occurring in contexts of tremendous violence and war of both high and low intensity. In Kobane, near the Turkish border, Kurds have been upholding a heroic resistance to the ravages of ISIS on the one hand, and the racist and repressive manipulations of the Turkish State on the other. In Chiapas, the Zapatistas have been building their autonomy within the increasing violence of a narco-state that dominates much of the nation, where it is hard to discern the difference between government and drug traffickers. In nearby Guerrero--a southwestern state in Mexico also known for its rich natural resources, intense drug trafficking, resistance movements and community policing--women have also joined the armed ranks of the policia comunitaria. These armed patrols have risen to fill the vacuum left by corrupt police on the narco-payroll, and are on the rise in various other communities across the country. Men and women are fighting together on these different frontlines, sometimes crossing state and national borders to join in combat, like the many young anarchist women from Turkey who crossed in busses into Syria to help the Kurds in Kobane resist ISIS in the past months.</p>
<p>Certain parts of the 30 year-old Kurdish resistance have also taken on the project of forging more equal relations between men and women as a crucial part of their political project. With Kurds spread across Turkey, Syria and Iraq, the geopolitical concept of Kurdistan has been expanded trans-nationally into what some are describing as a “Democratic Confederalism” that transcends nation-state borders. This is an aspiration as of yet, not a fully developed reality, nor one embraced by all Kurds. These ideas are mainly derived from the evolving writings of the leader of the Kurdish Workers Party, (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999. His “Democratic Confederalism” aims to build a new system that works towards the just distribution of resources as well as the conservation of the environment. It seeks to create a society free of sexism, replacing traditional patriarchal societies, religious interpretations, and capitalist merchandising of women. The movement has undertaken an intense societal and educational labor to combat the patriarchal mentalities implanted in women, as a form of submission, and in men, in form of domination.<span style="font-size: 10px;">[4]</span></p>
<p>Zapatista and Kurdish resistances have taken on a radical paradigm shift that changes everything. In the Zapatista autonomous municipal administration center called “Caracol de Oventic”, there is an “Office for Women’s Dignity” where women gather to discuss the successes and failures of the Revolutionary Law of Women. Similarly, the PKK’s “Jineology Committee” studies women’s histories to understand the construction of hierarchies and nation-states that erode women’s power in society. Both communities come from intense patriarchal histories and contexts, so there is still a long way to go in both movements. Yet in a short time they have made extraordinary gains. Women are increasingly represented on governing councils and active in their armed ranks, but the real revolution is seen within the domestic sphere, where caring for children, health and home are shared labor between men and women. Both Kurds and Zapatistas offer a living example of what is not only possible, but of what is already being practiced and grown.<span style="font-size: 10px;">[5]</span></p>
<p>Working towards what the Zapatistas would call an “Other” way of relating to each other, men and women traverse spaces of war as well as of pastoral, agricultural and domestic care--learning with and from each other whether in the battlefields or making food. It is in these everyday practices of building autonomy that we begin to unearth the possibility of another kind of life, of another way of knowing, being with and relating to each other that can create and nourish better ways of living. It starts with making patriarchal habits visible. Constructing more equitable relations means a daily practice of better, kinder ways of relating between men and women. This is the learning for all of us to put into practice within our own places and with our own people, not only up in arms, but also arm in arm…abrazándonos, embracing each other.</p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 10px;">[1] For example, Mesoamerican asambleas or the first Sumerians and the decentralized organizations of clan and tribal configurations as described in “El confederalismo democrático: propuesta libertaria del pueblo kurdo.” ALB Noticias en Mar, 17 septiembre 2013.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 10px;">[2] “Land and Liberty” has been the rallying cry of the Zapatistas, both then and now, while “Land or Death” the slogan heard in the Botan district today as reported by Heysam Mislim in “Kobane Diary: 4 Days Inside the City Fighting an Unprecedented Resistance Against ISIS,” Newsweek, October 15, 2014.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 10px;">[3] Committee of Jineology as quoted by Jorge Ricardo Ottino, writing for Resumen Latinoamericano from mountains of Xinêre, areas of media defense, South Kurdistan, Republic of Iraq, 3rd July 2014.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 10px;">[4] “El confederalismo democrático: propuesta libertaria del pueblo kurdo.” ALB Noticias en Mar, 17 septiembre 2013.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 10px;">[5] For a more in-depth description of the Kurdish Women’s movement see <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/necla-acik/kobane-struggle-of-kurdish-women-against-islamic-state">https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/necla-acik/kobane-struggle-of-kurdish-women-against-islamic-state</a>.</span></p>
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<p><em>Charlotte Maria Sáenz is Media and Education Coordinator for</em> <a href="http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/"><em>Other Worlds</em></a> <em>and teaches at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco.</em></p>
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<p><span style="font-size: 8px;"><img alt="" height="20" src="/sites/default/files/images/small_copyleft.jpg" style="margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px; float: left;" width="22"/> </span><em>Copyleft</em> <em>Charlotte Maria Sáenz. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Charlotte Maria Sáenz, Other Worlds.</em></p>GENDERING PEASANT MOVEMENTS, GENDERING FOOD SOVEREIGNTYtag:gendereval.ning.com,2014-11-04:6606644:BlogPost:243612014-11-04T18:16:13.000ZOther Worldshttps://gendereval.ning.com/profile/DeepaPanchang
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236452353?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-left" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236452353?profile=original" width="138"></img></a></p>
<p><strong>"What peasant and grassroots women want is to build a feminism pertinent to their realities." -Pamela Caro. </strong></p>
<p>November 4, 2014</p>
<p>Dr. Pamela Caro, Santiago, Chile</p>
<p>Interview Taken and Edited by Deepa Panchang and Beverly Bell</p>
<p><em>Pamela Caro is a director of the Program of Labor Citizenship with the Women’s Development Research…</em></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236452353?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2236452353?profile=original" width="138" class="align-left"/></a></p>
<p><strong>"What peasant and grassroots women want is to build a feminism pertinent to their realities." -Pamela Caro. </strong></p>
<p>November 4, 2014</p>
<p>Dr. Pamela Caro, Santiago, Chile</p>
<p>Interview Taken and Edited by Deepa Panchang and Beverly Bell</p>
<p><em>Pamela Caro is a director of the Program of Labor Citizenship with the Women’s Development Research Center (<a href="http://www.cedem.cl/cedem.htm">CEDEM</a>), a Chilean non-governmental organization that supports peasant women in Latin America as they join the international feminist movement, but on their own terms and realities. Caro is also a volunteer with the peasant women’s organization <a href="http://www.anamuri.cl/">Anamuri</a> and the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (<a href="http://www.cloc-viacampesina.net/">CLOC</a>).</em></p>
<p>A problem peasant women face is invisibility in the feminist and women’s movements. A second problem is the weakness with which the food sovereignty concept has dealt with the challenges of feminism. </p>
<p>To take the second problem first: Latin America has assumed the struggle for food sovereignty as an alternative to the neoliberal economic model. Food sovereignty is based on the conviction that each people has the right to make decisions about its own food systems: about its own eating habits; about its production, marketing, distribution, exchange, and sharing; and about keeping food and seeds in the public sphere. If we establish that food sovereignty is how people decide what to produce and under what conditions, our question from a feminist point of view is, then: how do people make decisions? Who decides how power is organized? Probably, in reality we’ll see that peasant women are in secondary roles in decision-making areas. </p>
<p>Facing this, peasant organizations such as Anamuri, CEDEM, the women’s sector of CLOC, and <a href="http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php/actions-and-events-mainmenu-26/stop-transnational-corporations-mainmenu-76/1677-october-16th-world-day-of-action-for-food-sovereignty-and-against-transnational-corporations">La Via Campesina</a> [the worldwide farmer, peasant, and landless people movement] are trying to remove these traditional gender parameters. We are working on a campaign to gender the concept of food sovereignty. The challenge is how to turn food sovereignty into a tool to strengthen and empower peasant women.</p>
<p>Historically, women have been associated with food. Since ancestral times they have cultivated the seeds, reproduced the seeds and hybridized them. They are alchemists; they find new ways to prepare food, whether in the peasant kitchen or by the campfire. However, when food passes from the private sphere to the public one, in the areas of marketing and distribution, men appear in the process, because the male link with food happens in the public area. It’s then that we return to the old dichotomy between the private-female-invisible and the public-male-visible.</p>
<p>We’re dealing with a struggle for visibility and acknowledgment of the equal value of reproduction and the private world. But this alone is not enough. It’s also necessary for men to get more involved with food sovereignty in the early stages of reproduction, preparation, and preservation of food, and not only in the distribution. This is the way that we’ll break the false dichotomy between the female and the male.</p>
<p>This implies very concrete issues, like how to include men in the kitchen and how to include women in marketing products. This is what we call co-responsibility. For the CLOC women, co-responsibility is sharing the different roles and developing symmetrical weight of those roles. It is valuing equally the activities within the kitchen and the activities outside the kitchen. This is a very concrete example of the struggle to include gender in food sovereignty.</p>
<p>The second problem has to do with the Latin American and global feminist movements. The Latin American peasant women’s movement and popular grassroots women’s movements have been in the backyard of the international feminist movement. What peasant and grassroots women want is to build a feminism pertinent to their realities. The women’s sector of CLOC has to wrestle with a space where feminism will fit - not a stereotypical or traditional feminism, but one which acknowledges who indigenous and peasant women are. They take on, carefully, topics like sexuality and reproductive rights which are not yet recognized by peasant women. Radical feminists may see this as more conservative, but for peasant women this feminism is a transgressive and rebellious one, due to the conditions of traditional, ancient sexual division of labor that exists in the peasant world.</p>
<p>This takes a lot of time and work to change. Measuring this change has always been very difficult. They have not been equal across the board. There are peasant women who continue living in conditions of extreme subjugation and subordination. The part of the peasant movement that is active on gender issues is very small, in the continent and globally. We have to accept, very humbly, that what we are generating is still too little, too marginal. We have a great challenge to expand the changes among peasants.</p>
<p>Among the individuals who are an active part of the movement, who have seen beyond the campfire, you do indeed see changes. There is huge sense of value in the activities linked with food preparation, but once the women have gone out into public activities, they see that as a very low ceiling. They have pushed the envelope, they have moved on, and it’s not likely that they’ll go back. A woman who gains rights does not lose them.</p>
<p>Chile is a very isolated country culturally, besides being isolated geographically due to the Andes range that separates it from the rest of the continent. Chilean society is not very aware of or included in international networks. But of the four indigenous and peasant organizations who are members of CLOC/La Via Campesina, one is Anamuri, a national organization of indigenous rural women who used to be members of women’s sections of mixed-gender peasant unions. They rebelled and formed Anamuri in 1997.</p>
<p>These four organizations in the Latin America-wide CLOC/La Via Campesina have a very big challenge trying to make themselves more visible and less marginalized in Chile’s very conservative society. The dominant model is extreme neoliberalism. Food sovereignty is not included in any public policy or legislation or the constitution, unlike other countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Paraguay. But still, in Chile food sovereignty is part of many local activities that aren’t determined by legislation. These practices are acted on daily by right, not by decree.</p>
<p>In closing, we need to acknowledge the heterogeneity and diversity of the peasant sector. There is a peasant identity that they want to preserve, even if they don’t live in the countryside, even if they no longer have land or farm. It’s what shapes what they are, and how they deal with the world.</p>
<p>We who live in the city need to look further; we need to give urban areas a more rural perspective, because we, too, will gain by participating in the worldview of peasants, farmers, and land-based people. It’s not about helping them. It’s about enriching ourselves as urban dwellers with what these movements can contribute, to better the quality of life of everyone.</p>
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<p><em>Many thanks to Paul Baumann for translating this interview.</em></p>
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<p><em>Beverly Bell has worked for more than three decades as an advocate, organizer, and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. Her focus areas are just economies, democratic participation, and gender justice. Beverly currently serves as associate fellow at the <a href="http://www.ips-dc.org">Institute for Policy Studies</a> and coordinator of <a href="http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org">Other Worlds</a>. She is author of Walking on Fire: Haitian Women Stories of Survival and Resistance, <a href="http://faultlinesbook.org/">Fault Lines: Views Across Haiti’s Divide</a>, and <a href="http://harvesting-justice.org/">Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agricultural Systems in the Americas</a>.</em></p>
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<p>Copyleft Beverly Bell. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly Bell, Other Worlds.</p>
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<p></p>SISTER SIMONE: EULOGY FOR A HAITIAN HEROINEtag:gendereval.ning.com,2013-03-08:6606644:BlogPost:32352013-03-08T17:25:57.000ZOther Worldshttps://gendereval.ning.com/profile/DeepaPanchang
<p></p>
<p align="center">By Beverly Bell<br></br>March 8, 2013</p>
<p><i>On this International Women's Day, we rerun a 2005 piece on one of our greatest heroines, Marie Simone Alexandre. Though she died eight years ago, her life and message remain as powerful and inspirational today as any we know. </i></p>
<p>"It was thanks to God and Sister Simone." I heard this over and over in the mid-1990s as I was interviewing rape survivors in one of Port-au-Prince's shantytowns. The women were battling the…</p>
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<p align="center">By Beverly Bell<br/>March 8, 2013</p>
<p><i>On this International Women's Day, we rerun a 2005 piece on one of our greatest heroines, Marie Simone Alexandre. Though she died eight years ago, her life and message remain as powerful and inspirational today as any we know. </i></p>
<p>"It was thanks to God and Sister Simone." I heard this over and over in the mid-1990s as I was interviewing rape survivors in one of Port-au-Prince's shantytowns. The women were battling the devastating effects of rape, employed as a weapon of war by one in a decades-long series of U.S.-backed regimes.[i] My question to these women, which so often invoked Simone's name, was "From where have you found the strength to go on?"<br/> <br/> I resolved to meet this force whose name was regularly uttered next to God's. When I did, I was - like the rape survivors - utterly inspired. Our close personal and political relationship lasted for more than a decade until June 29, 2005, when she slipped away from a coma after her third operation for a large brain tumor.<br/> <br/> It turns out Simone and I had had a relationship long before we met, though each had been faceless and nameless to the other. That relationship had been forged during the years of the 1991-94 coup d'état against Haiti's first-ever democratically elected president. My end of our partnership involved generating broad publicity and international pressure against the rape, as well as the other crimes of the illegal regime. Many of the chilling testimonies and statistics I used had been faxed out of Haiti under cover of night from constantly changing underground locations. And the origin of much of that information, I learned years later, was Simone. She had gathered it at tremendous risk to her life, venturing where all others feared to tread.</p>
<p><br/> Simone told me in an interview for the book <i>Walking on Fire</i>, where she appeared under her chosen nom de guerre Louise Monfils: "I gathered information from many women, house after house. The [women] trusted me so much that if they learned of another woman, they would bring that woman to me. I couldn't write anything, absolutely nothing, in front of them. My head had to be clear. When five or ten people were telling me the story of their rapes, I had to remember all the details. As soon as I got on the road, I'd look for a place I could stop. I'd sit down and write everything the women told me. <i>Cheri,</i> sweetheart, that was very difficult work, but I had to do it.”[ii]</p>
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<p>Simone was not only a front-line human rights worker, she was also a self-taught therapist. It was easy to see why many survivors cited her as one of their two fonts of healing. In the evocative high theatric which she always used, she described how a woman “would start to cry. She'd put her head on my shoulder and cry and I'd rub her back. I'd say, 'You shouldn't be ashamed. It's those guys who should be ashamed! They're savages. Only beasts could do such a horrid act.' I'd tell her, 'Love is something too good, too precious, for you to feel ashamed when you've been a victim.' I'd tell her not to cry because we're there for her. We're there!"</p>
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<p>Here, then, would come her role as a tireless political organizer, helping the women form grassroots groups. She said, "Meeting with them as victims of rape wasn't enough. When we finished taking their testimony, we needed to get them together and form a women's organization. We gave them support and helped them understand their rights. Also, we wanted to help these women be the owners of their bodies. Nobody else can have authority over them.</p>
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<p>“<i>Cheri</i>, I’m telling you: during those years of hell, people disappeared. And if someone talked, the attackers would beat them, take them away, kill them. The rapists always said to the women, ‘Don’t you go tell the radio station about this or we’ll come back and kill you.’ And I recorded all this information in a notebook.</p>
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<p>“I could feel good during the day, but when the night came, I had trouble. I tell you, whenever I heard the noise of a straw breaking in the yard or a dog barking, I sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. I was shaking, I was so scared.”</p>
<p><br/> Simone's whole life was consecrated to helping marginalized people attain knowledge, voice, and power. In the l980s, she had organized peasant groups and Christian base communities. She had helped community members gain popular education, build collective silos to store grain and seeds, and organize themselves into the democracy movement. </p>
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<p>Much of Simone’s life, then as later, was spent underground. When she was organizing in the 1980s, she repeatedly fled from one area to another, often running with nothing but the clothes on her back. "I ran though the forest, through the woods and the bushes. I slept at different friends’ houses along the way: one night here, another night there. Once, oh! I was so hungry. I went into a stranger’s garden and pulled up a cassava plant. I took three cassavas. I said to myself, 'Well, if they want to arrest me, now they can get me for stealing.'"<br/> <br/> In l990, Simone's home and all her belongings were burned by paid thugs in the village of Piatte during a massacre of farmers demanding land reform. Simone almost lost her life, but not her characteristic nerve or quick thinking. "I ran and hid myself in some rocks beneath a waterfall. I saw all the killing, everything they did. Every little while I stuck my head out to see what they were doing, and I took notes. I unwrapped the paper from a cigarette and wrote down everything. I folded the paper, put it in the plastic wrapping from the cigarette pack, and stuck it in a hole in the hem of my dress. Even if they had searched me, they wouldn't have found anything. <br/> <br/> "I slipped among the killers and moved right along with them. People thought I had disappeared into thin air. It wasn’t true! I took a chance and walked right in the middle of the crowd that had just committed the massacre."<br/> <br/> Conversation with her was always dominated by stories of struggle. As hard as her life was, her focus was on those whose lives were much harder; she never forgot their fates for a moment. Often, thinking about her own plight, she would sigh heavily and cluck her throat in despair, but then would quickly move on to talking about the need for people - especially women - to organize to gain democracy and rights. <br/> <br/> Recounting what she called her "true Calvary" of working with rape survivors during the coup d'état, Simone said, "It was like I was walking with my little coffin under my arm. But even if the [rapists] had beaten me, it wouldn't have mattered. It would have been because I was part of something just and noble. <br/> <br/> "I didn't want to have a heavy heart when I was going to bed because my conscience was troubling me. With a conscience, when you do wrong, you know it. You can't sleep at night. When you do good, frankly, you feel well. You lie down and say, 'Dear God, I feel good,' and then sleep carries you away."</p>
<p>Sleep well, Sister Simone. <i>Ou mewite sa a.</i> You deserve it.</p>
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<div><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"/></div>
<p><a href="http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/sister-simone-eulogy-haitian-heroine#_ednref">[i]</a> See, for example, Tim Weiner, “Haitian Ex-Paramilitary Leader Confirms CIA Relationship,” <i>New York Times</i> online, December 3, 1995; Allan Nairn, “Haiti under the Gun: How U.S.-Backed Paramilitaries Rule through Fear,” <i>Nation</i>, January 8–15, 1996, 11; John Kifner, “Haitians Ask If U.S. Had Ties to Attaché,” <i>New York Times</i>, October 6, 1994; Allan Nairn, “Our Man in Fraph—Behind Haiti’s Paramilitaries,” <i>Nation</i>, October 24, 1994; and Marcia Myers, “Claiming CIA Ties, Haitian Sues over Detention in U.S.: Paramilitary Leader Had Opposed Return of President Aristide,” <i>Baltimore Sun</i> online, December 12, 1995.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/sister-simone-eulogy-haitian-heroine#_ednref">[ii]</a> Beverly Bell, <i>Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance</i> (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2001).</p>
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<p><b>Read more from <a href="http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/">Other Worlds here</a>, and follow us on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/otherworldsarepossible">Facebook</a> and <a href="http://www.twitter.com/Other_Worlds">Twitter</a>!</b></p>
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<p><i>Beverly Bell has worked for more than three decades as an advocate, organizer, and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. Her focus areas are just economies, democratic participation, and gender justice. Beverly currently serves as associate fellow at the <a href="http://www.ips-dc.org">Institute for Policy Studies</a> and coordinator of <a href="http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org">Other Worlds</a>. She is author of</i> Walking on Fire: Haitian Women Stories of Survival and Resistance <i>and of the forthcoming</i> Fault Lines: Views Across Haiti’s Divide.</p>
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<p> <i> </i><i>Copyleft</i><i> Beverly Bell. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly Bell, Other Worlds.</i></p>
<p> </p>Women's Work: Gender and the Global Food Systemtag:gendereval.ning.com,2013-03-05:6606644:BlogPost:25342013-03-05T13:19:46.000ZOther Worldshttps://gendereval.ning.com/profile/DeepaPanchang
<p>By Tory Field and Beverly Bell</p>
<p><em>“We, women from more than 40 countries, from different indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, have gathered together to participate in the creation of a new right: the right to food sovereignty. We reaffirm our will to act to change the capitalist and patriarchal world which puts the interests of the market before the rights of people. We will find the energy to establish our right to food sovereignty, carrier of hope…</em></p>
<p>By Tory Field and Beverly Bell</p>
<p><em>“We, women from more than 40 countries, from different indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, have gathered together to participate in the creation of a new right: the right to food sovereignty. We reaffirm our will to act to change the capitalist and patriarchal world which puts the interests of the market before the rights of people. We will find the energy to establish our right to food sovereignty, carrier of hope in constructing another world. We will carry this message to women all over the world.”</em></p>
<p><em>- Women’s Declaration on Food Sovereignty (excerpted), Nyéléni, Mali, February 27, 2007</em></p>
<p>Women produce 60 to 80 percent of all food, both as subsistence farmers and as agricultural wage laborers. They are the primary providers for the majority of the world’s 925 million hungry people, obtaining food, collecting firewood and water, and cooking. And yet they have less access to land and the resources necessary to grow on it than their male counterparts. Inequitable distribution of land, labor, and resources leaves farming women triply burdened by work: in the fields, in the home, and in society.</p>
<p>How do the agricultural policies of powerful governments and international institutions affect women? They often exacerbate gender norms and force women globally to bear the brunt of harmful changes. In the US, a corporate agribusiness model leads to violations of women’s rights in all aspects of the food system. We have adapted the following from Gender Action’s 2011 <a href="http://www.genderaction.org/publications/fdsec/primer.pdf">report</a> on gender and the food crisis:</p>
<p>• Local and domestic agricultural markets in many countries are often devastated by global trade policies engineered by governments like the United States and by international financial institutions (IFIs). In country after country, for instance, such policies make it possible for subsidized US agricultural products to flood domestic markets and undercut local producers. This dynamic often forces men to travel to other countries in search of work, leaving women behind to tend to family and work family farmland;</p>
<p>• The same dynamic often leads women to migrate alone or with children, undergoing dangerous border crossings, facing a fragile and transient existence as undocumented immigrants in the US, and dealing with the very real threat of deportation. All these circumstances put women at heightened risk of gender-based violence and give them a disproportionate burden of running (often singly) households in an unfamiliar and hostile environment;</p>
<p>• IFI pressure on many governments to abolish taxes on food imports and repay debts reduces governments’ ability to pay for healthcare and education. Spending cuts in these sectors inevitably cause the most harm to women and girls;</p>
<p>• Rising food prices put additional pressure on already strained household budgets. When women enter the formal work force to help support household consumption, girls are often forced to leave school to attend to household chores and care for younger siblings;</p>
<p>• Agricultural investments from large international aid agencies and IFIs usually support big businesses, not women farmers. IFI investments tend to focus on agroprocessing and commercial agriculture, which mainly utilize male laborers and focus on external markets. These investments tend to overlook women, who are often restricted to subsistence farming, and instead mainly benefit the transnational corporations that win IFI procurement contracts;</p>
<p>• Women workers in the US food system systematically receive lower wages and face harassment and gender-based violence.</p>
<p>Though facing difficult challenges, women around the world have been making strides both in changing national policy and land movements themselves. In some places, women are gaining greater access to arable land, technology, credit, markets, training, equipment, and control over agricultural knowledge. In certain countries, they have won the right for their name, not just their husband’s, to go on the land title, making them direct beneficiaries of land reform.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>To learn more about women and the global food system, see the following resources and groups:</p>
<p>• Nyéléni 2007, “Women’s Declaration on Food Sovereignty,” February 27, 2007, <a href="http://www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article310">http://www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article310</a>.<br/> • Alexandra Spieldoch, “A Row to Hoe: The Gender Impact of Trade Liberalization on our Food System, Agricultural Markets and Women’s Human Rights,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, March 2007.<br/>
• Alana Fook, “Gender, IFIs and Food Insecurity,” Gender Action, April 2011, <a href="www.genderaction.org/publications/fdsec/primer.pdf">www.genderaction.org/publications/fdsec/primer.pdf</a>.<br/>
• World Food Programme, “Women Shoulder Heaviest Burden in Global Food Crisis,” March 5, 2009, <a href="http://www.wfp.org/stories/women-shoulder-heaviest-burden-global-food-crisis">http://www.wfp.org/stories/women-shoulder-heaviest-burden-global-food-crisis</a>.<br/>
• Mary Bauer and Mónica Ramírez, “Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry,” Southern Poverty Law Center, 2010, <a href="www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/injustice-on-our-plates">www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/injustice-on-our-plates</a>.<br/>
• Women, Food, and Agricultural Network, <a href="www.wfan.org">www.wfan.org</a><br/>
• Via Campesina’s Food Sovereignty and Trade webpage, <a href="www.viacampesina.org/en">www.viacampesina.org/en</a><br/>
• Food Chain Workers Alliance, <a href="http://www.foodchainworkers.org">www.foodchainworkers.org</a></p>
<p>Download the <a href="http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/sites/default/files/documents/Harvesting%20Justice-Transforming%20Food%20Land%20Ag_0.pdf">Harvesting Justice pdf here</a>, and find action items, resources, and a popular education curriculum on the <a href="http://harvesting-justice.org/">Harvesting Justice website</a>. Harvesting Justice was created for the US Food Sovereignty Alliance, check out their work <a href="http://www.usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org">here</a>.</p>
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<p><em>Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Tory Field and Beverly Bell, Other Worlds.</em></p>