Shifting Our Platform: In Response to Current Ground Level Phenomena
Devaki Jain and Shubha Chacko
4th World Congress of Rural Women, Durban, South Africa, 23 -26 April 2007

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Section II
A summary of my arguments

In this presentation, I am using the concept of shifting – shifting our advocacy, our voice, our demand, our resolutions from calling attention to ourselves, i.e. what is called the need based approach, to calling attention to the dramatic shifts in ground level phenomena and therefore the need for us to shift our political voice, our organized solidarity voice from what are the conventional demands of a Rural Women’s Congress; to changes in fiscal policy, and international economic relations; in the engines of growth,in the protocols of South-South cooperation, in the value of food and agriculture.

I will go on to describe the changing phenomena, changed especially in the last ten years worldwide, as the shifting of various elements. I learnt this concept from my Latin American sister Lourdes Beneria (6), who for decades, has been looking at the condition of women workers in Latin America, with special reference to those in the less privileged sections of society, and finds that recent international economic ideas have ensured that risk is shifted from
- from the employer to the worker,
- from the rich to the poor,
- from the factory floor to the home,
- from the state to the citizen,
- from social cohesion to social conflict,
- from the young to the old
- and through migration from the men to the women
- and through jobless growth also from the men to the women.

Further if we are looking at macroeconomics, I would suggest that there are some other shifts, such as a shift
- in the composition of the Gross Domestic Product, the first rank of the agriculture sector has now shifted to the service sector,
- in land use from growing crops to hosting export zones,
- in the types of the crops grown – from food to cash; a shift from food security to insecurity,
- in the centres of power, from the local and national to global,
- in control over knowledge, from women and communities to corporations and international institutions,
- in cultural values, from sustainability to consumerism, and - in identity too, as the categories of rural and urban are blurred.

Thus, in my conclusion, what I would put forth to this rich assembly of sisters is : let us unite not only to protest as we do in the World Social Forum, against ideas such as capitalism and globalization; let us not only provide an assorted menu of our needs, our demands, but let us give ideas to ourselves and to the rest of the world, on how to construct an economy which can be peaceful and just. Let us show our contributions to ideas. Ideas are not the domain of intellectuals. They come from lived experience – our grandmothers. And it is ideas that have influenced the world more than the micro grassroots action we have engaged in.In fact the idea has to carry the message from the ground, from grassroots action.

In my presentation this morning, I would argue that the identity that we gave to rural women is now muted ... The rural woman now is not only a rural citizen, she is also the urban poor migrant and road construction worker, the migrant to other lands in search of work, and so on. The sectoral interest has moved from agriculture and food and water and livelihood to making a mark in the world through percentage of tradable, foreign exchange reserves and military power.

I suggest that there is need for us to shift our voice from a need based approach namely, “We the rural women of the world demand” to construction of the pillars of the new political economy. I argue that while each region in the South has different pressures on it. I still suggest and appeal to you on behalf of the poorest of poor women of the world, who are mostly located in rural areas, to come back and to take hold of the idea of economic development, especially waged employment , and the fight against inequality.

For example, I can well understand that for the African continent, destructive, frightening conflicts with thousands of refugees and devastating hunger such as is occurring in Darfur and has now spilled over into Chad, is a central concern. While I agree that issues like violence against women, the killing fields for children in India, the militarization of our economies and the reappearance of the dark ages of militant religious fundamentalism are the kind of issues that women now think about, build solidarity and try to change, development must be brought back on our agenda, even if we call it by another name, such as transformation or revolution or paradigm, or whatever. We started that in 1975,in Mexico and at the first world conference of rural women convened by FAO, I think in 1975, which I had the privilege of attending, but we have become sophisticated and broad-based. But now we need to come back to removal of poverty and inequality through employment.

A person who comes to my mind whenever I think of, a person who flags an idea arising out of women’s activism and wisdom, is Wangari Mathhai. Taking a simple idea like planting of trees, she moves all the way to an analysis of the current conflict in the world and how through planting of trees, women can bring peace: I quote from Wangari “The planting of a tree is the planting of an idea.” Wangari related a parable at the 50th year celebration at the UN in New York, in 2005, of the humming bird: “Once upon a time during a very large forest fire or bush fire all the animals fled except a humming bird which picked up just drops of water from a river and put it on the fire. When ridiculed by the rest of the animals she said, I am doing the best I can.” Wangari smiled – and said: “And may be if we do that – the best we can, we can even put out the Bush fire!”

In drawing attention to conflict, she says that even the Iraq war, amongst others like the local wars in Congo and Angola, were all for the sake of access and domination over natural resources. Therefore by attending to natural resources from local to global, we were actually fulfilling the vision of women, namely for a peaceful world.
Over the decades, we have not only generated waste creating development, but we have wasted development. And here I use the term ‘wasting’ in its harshest meaning ‘devastating’ (Webster) and in criminal parlance ‘finishing off’. We have made development into an unwanted impulse. One time in a paper I wrote for Mwalimu Julius Nyerere (7), I had asked that nations of the world need to be classified NOT according to GDP growth rates or even HDI, but according to three categories of waste:
1. Waste-generating societies: these are usually associated with affluence, with high-tech production, and until recently, with ignorance of processes of recycling material into consumable goods.
2. Waste-recycling societies: where waste utilization becomes an art, a craft, a source of income and wealth creation. By and large these societies have low access to trade, to exchange. They have dispersed isolated populations.
3. Waste-avoidance societies: These are not dissimilar from waste recycling societies but they are usually at another economic and cultural plane. For example in acute poverty there is a perception of wasting as sinful. Scare resources have to be stretched. Thus choices of both production and consumption are made that do not allow waste.

There is an associated culture of barring wastefulness as sinful, and taboos which bar people from use of certain materials and so on (8); which respect frugality. Societies which do not generate waste because they simplify their lifestyle, could have a double advantage less environmental damage but greater leveling between people. In other words, greater reduction of inequality.

Similarly with an issue that my sister Yassine Fall has highlighted – water. I ask if we could perhaps take this fundamental and multi-dimensional issue of water as a theme or pole – to move to have it recognized not only as a human right - that can then serves as a way to mobilise people around the issue, and that citizens can then have as an expectation and that poor people can demand this entitlements through legal channels. But to also recognize it as a public good that cannot be privatized- that it has to equitably distributed. There is a need for strong national strategies which includes better planning and intervention and expansion of access to the unserved; but mostly in placing it as priority.

Women scholar activists have strived to – reveal the flaw in economics in development cooperation, and given voice to ground struggle. They have also shared this knowledge with each other – there is a pool of this wisdom. We need to support one another on this journey. Our tendencies to fall into categories – rural/urban, academic/grassroots, ivory tower/soiled hands has to be overcome. We must challenge these binaries as we have done with other supposedly oppositional associations – subject/object independence/dependence active/passive public/private etc and thereby forced discussion and further scrutiny of concepts that were supposedly selfexplanatory. We must harvest the intellectual power of feminist development thinkers to lead policy design.

So I repeat that it is time for people like us gathered here, to move from our sectoral interests namely agriculture as a sector, the rural as a domain, to engaging with what I call public policy, the various elements of macro economic policy, that are affecting agriculture and rural women while drawing from our sectoral experience.

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