Women on the Verge of an Economic Breakdown

Vandana Shiva and Devaki Jain have much in common. They spend a lot of time speaking about their problems. That's because they've made the problems of hundreds of millions of people their own. And, as they see it, that is inescapable, since a large number of those people are among the disenfranchised of India—Shiva's and Jain's native land.

Addressing separate sessions—"Science, Technology and Globalization," and "Poverty Reduction and Development Cooperation"—at the State of the World Forum, both women made passionate pleas for a new ethic toward addressing world poverty and the gender inequality that it fosters in an era where technology has created an unfortunate divide.

"At the moment, we are faced with an information divide that arises from an unequal system in information and knowledge, an unequal capacity to use the information for development," said Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and National Research Policy in India. "The divide is economic, ecological, political and particularly gender-based."

According to estimates from World Development Indicators, inequality continues to plague women across a broad spectrum. Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, but earn only 10 percent of the world's income and own less than one percent of the world's property. Almost a quarter of the global population lives in extreme poverty, on less than the equivalent of one dollar per day. Seventy percent of those people are women, and Shiva and Jain are accustomed to seeing those women in India.

Said Jain: "They are bearing burdens beyond imagination—highest maternal mortality, highest illiteracy…and now add that to the grotesque figures of crimes against women in the household and in the theatres of war, and you want to bow your head in shame."

The Harvard University study "The Global Burden of Disease" estimates that gender violence causes more deaths and disability among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war. Within this context, Shiva painted an alarming picture with a depressing backdrop, emphasizing that things taken for granted in the industrial world are scarce or non-existent for the billions living in poverty in the developing world.

"Twenty percent lack access to safe drinking water, 40 percent lack adequate sanitation, 20 percent live in inadequate housing, 25 percent of the world's countries have less than one telephone per one hundred people, and 30 percent of the world's children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition.

The idea that science is a means to curing much of the world's ills, said Shiva, is an exciting one, but she also pointed out that, in places like India, it remains a hope, not a reality.

Jain concurred, saying, "While the 'old poor' continue, there is a new assault on livelihoods, a deeper sense of insecurity than before, due to the speed and hype of what is called globalization. I call this form of globalization economic terrorism."

Shiva cited as one example of this "terrorism" the fact that the spraying of pesticides has deprived millions of people, most of them women, of their livelihood. "The poorest of women can maintain their goats because fodder is for free, as long as fodder exists. You start spraying around in these ecosystems, that's the theft of the livelihood of 50 percent of rural India, and I would apply that to Africa and Latin America and the rest of Asia.

"New independent studies are coming out that there is now evidence of very large yield drops. The yields are actually coming down as you re-engineer crops to have traits like plants resistant to herbicides, to have traits like plants producing their own herbicides."

Before globalization, said Jain, "The aim of development cooperation has to be national self-reliance and then regional self-reliance. This may look weird and in total dissonant conflict with a world that yearns for borderlessness through globalization."

Shiva added that we must address gender inequalities in parallel with technological and economic gaps.

"If we are going to have a world different from the one we have known in the past," said Shiva, "we must make sure that [women] have a role in making decisions…and policies [must be] launched not only to protect investment, intellectual property, and individual privacy, but also to promote the rights of women to participate in development.

"We need open and well-regulated information and communications markets, but also policies that enhance women's participation in these markets. We need education policies that not only favor a skilled labor force, but also a system that encourages women's participation in this labor force. We need effective regulatory and standard-setting institutions that are just and equitable for all."

Shiva sums it up in this context: "In many developing countries, there is now a nearly critical mass of educated women ready to participate and ready to act as intermediaries for raising consciousness and organizing the grassroots. Technology has changed the possibilities for communication, not simply in terms of facilitating the imparting of knowledge from one group to another but, more importantly, in terms of allowing all groups to take part in creating knowledge. This is a way of saying that, as we move into the 21st century, women will increasingly have to take on the responsibility of defining the dimensions of the good life. That is, a plentiful, but also a just and equitable life, as we become partners in a world whose parameters are determined by forces not only beyond individual control, but sometimes seemingly beyond national control."

copyright © 2000 State of the World, Inc.