Haunts: You have struck the woman farmer and farm worker …

August 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

It’s Women’s Month in South Africa, and the news from government is predictably grim. Women are still suffering, announced Minister for Women, Children and People with Disabilities Lulama Xingwana, and in particular for `rural women’. This comes a year almost to the day of the Human Rights Watch report, Ripe with Abuse Human Rights Conditions in South Africa’s Fruit and Wine Industries. The report described and documented the face of the abused farm worker in the Western Cape, and, to no one’s great surprise, the face is a woman’s.

A year later, the struggle continues.

For example, Worldwatch Institute issued a report this week that finds that investment in women farmers, globally, is too low. Remember, women produce half of the agricultural output in South Asia and 80 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Further, women farmers produce more than half of all food and comprise 43 percent of the global agricultural labor force. `Forgetting’ women endangers food security as it threatens food sovereignty. Beyond that, and perhaps more to the point, excluding women farmers and farm workers imperils democracy, locally, nationally, regionally, globally. Remember that the next time you bite into a piece of fruit, wherever you are.

While the situation is grim, the news is not all bad. In the United States, undergraduate women enrolled in agriculture programs outnumber undergraduate men by more than 2,900 students. That’s out of a sum of around 50,000 students. This trend corresponds with the increase in women farm operators.

In Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Senegal, the Philippines, Nepal, and beyond and between, women farmers, women farm workers, rural women activists and organizers, ordinary rural women, are breaking new ground … literally. They are moving from a field not quite her own to a field of her own. And that’s good news … for food security, for food sovereignty, for democracy. The struggle continues.

Dan Moshenberg, dmoshenberg@gmail.com

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Haunts: Women haunt land grabs and mass evictions

September 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Oxfam came out with a major report this week on land grabs in five countries, Uganda, Indonesia, Guatemala, Honduras, and South Sudan. In Uganda, over 20,000 people were evicted from land they had farmed for decades, evicted so that a British corporation, New Forests Company, could come in, create tree plantations, earn carbon credits, sell timber.

The residents were never consulted. Quite to the contrary, tales of violence abound. For example, Olivia Mukamperezida, whose house was burned to the ground. Her eldest son, Friday, was at home because he was sick. He was killed in the fire. She buried Friday, and now is not sure if he’s even in his grave. “They are planting trees,” she says.

Christine was forced off her land as well: “We lost everything we had .… I was threatened – they told me they were going to beat me if we didn’t leave.”

Christine lost more than everything she had. She lost the future. Before she and her family lived in a six-room house, farmed six hectares, sold produce, sent their kids to school. They had been doing so for twenty years. Now, they live in two rooms, eke subsistence living out of a small plot, eat once a day, and the children no longer attend school.

The Oxfam report highlights the particular vulnerabilities of women, and the specific impact of eviction on women around the world. They note that in Africa, the situation is particularly dire: “Women’s land rights are less secure and more easily targeted. They also depend more on secondary uses of land, which tend to be ignored in large-scale acquisitions. Furthermore, although women comprise the majority of farmers, men effectively control the land and the income derived from it, even if it is the fruit of women’s labour. In practice, a new commercial opportunity often means that men assume control of the land at the expense of women’s access. Thus, new sources of income from the land are likely to burden women and benefit men. The new competition for land between biofuels and food crops, leading to less availability of food and higher prices, is also likely to affect women more than men, as women tend to take responsibility for feeding the family.”

From direct physical and verbal assaults to the processes to the consequences, the entire land grabbing machinery is violence against women.

None of this is new. Previous researchers have issued reports on that describe the gendered impacts of commercial pressures on land, that wonder if land grabs aren’t simply, and intentionally, another bigger, badder yoke on women’s land rights. Activists, such as Esther Obaikol, Executive Director of the Uganda Land Alliance, have also been organizing with women farmers … for decades.

When it comes to land grabs in Uganda, as elsewhere, women farmers have been pushed harder, deeper, further. They are the first and final targets of land grabbing. Mass evictions attack women. Women haunt land grabs and mass evictions … everywhere.

Dan Moshenberg, dmoshenberg@gmail.com

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Haunts: The low spark of high-heeled African women farmers

July 7, 2011 by 3 Comments

The planet of slums is fed, clothed and sheltered by continents, and oceans, of farms, many of them small farms. Many small hold farmers are women. This is the case in China. By focusing on women farmers, China, with 10% of the world’s arable land, now feeds 20% of the world’s population.

And now, according to reports, China is turning to Africa, not in a land grab but rather in skills sharing and capacity building. China “seeks to show its trading partners in Africa that feeding their populations is only possible when women are empowered.” China is pushing for land rights for women farmers and for investing in women farmers. A key problem, however, is “the low skill base of Africa’s farmers, who are mainly women”.

What?

The clause concerning “low skills” is slipped in at the end of an article, but it’s actually a bombshell. The reason “Africa” is hungry is that its women are “low skilled”?

This would come as a surprise to those, such as Andrew Mushita and Carol B. Campbell, who have argued, “Most often, women are the keepers of the seeds, tucked away among the beams in the thatched roof, protected from pests by smoke from cooking fire. Others are stored in tins in another location. Villagers volunteer labour to build storage buildings for seed banks, protecting the treasure within the public trust.”

For centuries, and more, women farmers have tended to the seeds, nurtured biodiversity, sustained communities, developed new, and successful, medical treatments, and more.

Esnai Ngwira, a 57-year-old farmer in Ekwendeni, northern Malawi, would be surprised to hear she has a low skills base. Ngwira has been working with a program that builds social ecology in sustainable ways. Rather than using fertilizer, for example, Ngwira uses crop residue. She gets a better maize harvest, helps the soil, helps the earth. Esnai Ngwira is considered “a star innovator.”

Marie Johansson and Victoria Mulunga, of the Creative Entrepreneur Solutions (CES) in northern Namibia, would also be surprised. They, and the other women in their group, are fusing farming practices, gender-responsive environmentalism, and women’s market practices into a sustainable agricultural political economy. They haven’t done that by relying on a “low skill base.”

Likewise, in Kenya, Joyce Odari, an elderly subsistence farmer, was once arrested by forest guards for having cut down trees in a public preserve. She turned her imprisonment into a women’s sustainable agro-forestry operation, that now involves over 200 women in her region.

There are other stories, other women, other names. In the Gambia, women farmers are using simple store-powered dehydrators and dryers to preserve mangoes, which, as dried fruit, they sell to local schools. The mango is a key source of Vitamin A, and its season is short. By drying and distributing them the women farmers are combating blindness, providing extra nutrition in their own homes, and securing extra income.

The stories are everywhere because the women farmers, everywhere across the African continent, are doing what they do. Storing. Sharing. Experiment. Farming. Sustaining. Experimenting some more. Sharing some more.

The first problem for women farmers, on the African continent as elsewhere, is access. Access to land, access to market. Access to resources, access to decent and equal pay. Access to education and then more education. The second problem is security. Land tenure security, market access security. The third problem is autonomy. Global systems of exchange have no respect for the local “customs”, much less the biodiversity that women farmers have created over centuries through open and principled sharing.

“The low skill base of Africa’s farmers, who are mainly women” pretends to focus on women as it obscures the actual lives that women, in this instance women farmers, lead. Not women farmers’ low skill but women farmers’ access to real power haunts a world teetering on the brink of famine. That’s our world.

Dan Moshenberg, dmoshenberg@gmail.com

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Haunts: Let them eat pesticide

May 11, 2011 by 3 Comments

There are hunger strikes and there are hunger strikes.

For the past 37 days, six pro-democracy Iranian asylum seekers have been on a hunger strike outside the central headquarters of the United Kingdom Border Agency, in Croydon, in the south of London. Some had sewn their lips shut. Sewing one’s lips is minor compared to the torture all six had suffered in Iranian prisons. They had the medical evidence to prove the torture, and yet were initially denied asylum. Finally, today, after 37 days on hunger strike, the six refugees – Ahmad  Sadeghi Pour, Morteza Bayat, Keyvan Bahari, Kiarash Bahari, Mahyrar Meyari and Mehran Meyari – were assured their cases would be reopened and they would at least be able to apply once again. They ended the hunger strikes, and proclaimed the struggle continues.

Sometimes, hunger strikes save lives and secure at least the glimmering hope of something like justice.

Then there are the hunger strikes that are fatal and ferocious drone strikes, assaults on the body, community, and land. Globally, over 900 million people go hungry every day. That’s down from one billion the year before, but the prospects for the next year are gloomy. Food prices are on the rise everywhere. In fact, food prices are at a twenty-year high. In Asia and among Pacific island nations, food prices are skyrocketing and food `shortages’ loom large. For example, in the Philippines, thanks in large part to marketization and speculation, rice is suddenly both scarce and overly expensive.  Egypt is running out of food, as is the entire Middle East and North Africa.

But it’s not all bad news. Glencore, for example, is “a leading commodities producer and marketer.” Glencore is doing fine. Along with tons of mineral, literally, Glencore controls 10 percent of the world’s wheat, and 25% of the world’s barley, sunflower, and rape seed. Glencore takes, the world slakes. And then dies … again, literally.

Across the United States, two million men, women and children work on farms, picking by hand fresh fruits and vegetables. The US government estimates that every year 10,000 to 20,000 of those workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning.

In India, over the last sixteen years, 250,000 farmers have committed suicide. That’s one farmer every 30 minutes. And this number only includes the farmers who are acknowledged as such by the national government. Those who can’t hold title, they’re not included. Women farmers, Dalit farmers, Adivasi farmers: they don’t count in life, they don’t count in death. What killed these farmers? Indebtedness. Market liberalization. The invisible hand of the market, that hand which polished shining India, provided farmers with loans they could never pay but had to assume, with dwindling access to water, with impossible competitive demands. And so the farmers die.

And they leave behind notes, addressed to the Prime Minister, to the President, to all the lofty people who are nestled in the invisible hand that killed them.

And they leave loved ones behind. Widows. Children. Women like Nanda Bhandare, a farmer, a widow since 2008. When her husband killed himself, she had to pull her two young children out of school to work the farm. The money, if there was any, has gone to pay off the predators. The land, a small parcel, no longer provides sufficient harvest in the current economies to feed even a family of three. Who will be next to drink the pesticide in that household?

There are hunger strikes and there are hunger strikes. For every hunger strike that saves a life, even temporarily, such as that of the six Iranians in England, there are literally 900 million deadly hunger strikes. The planet is aflame with hunger strikes. Farmers are poisoned and are dying, women and children in particular are starving, and the response of the global market, and of the nation-States it supports and controls, is as it has always been. Let them eat pesticide.

Dan Moshenberg, dmoshenberg@gmail.com

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Haunts: Women farmers wait for justice

November 22, 2010 by 3 Comments

In the Washington, DC, metro area, the local food banks are swamped. Loudon County, a half hour away or so, is the wealthiest county in the United States, at least if measured by median income. For the first time ever, its food pantry is providing free food. It will feed some 2000 families this week. The same story goes for the other nearby wealthy counties, Montgomery in Maryland, Fairfax in Virginia. Food insecurity is on the rise here.

The past week’s news stories of people seeking food more often than not profile women. On the one hand, it’s the season. Thanksgiving is in a couple days. Winter is looming large, as are Christmas and other Festive Season holidays. This year, the stories are of women who had jobs, good jobs, well paying jobs, who break down into tears as they stand, for the first time, in food lines at soup kitchens, or at fast food emporia, seeking jobs that would have been unacceptable a few years ago. Readers and viewers shake our heads in sympathetic dismay, and we sigh.

The story of food security and food insecurity is more than a story of hunger, of lack. It’s a story of food from field to fork, as Raj Patel has argued. Where are women in the rising swamp that is our current food situation?

Women produce about half of the world’s food and own about two percent of all land. In the United States, women own 7% of all farms, their numbers doubled between 2000 and 2007. Women are the fastest growing demographic group among farmers in the United States.

Last Friday, the United States Senate voted to settle a claim by Black farmers against the United States Department of Agriculture. Those farmers, the ones still alive, will receive $1.5 billion. It sounds like a lot. It’s not. On one hand, this case started in 1997, when Timothy Pigford, a North Carolina Black farmer, sued the USDA for discrimination. In 1999, the Clinton administration came to a settlement. Then it was `discovered’ that thousands of Black farmers were left out of the initial deal. And so, eleven years and how many dead Black farmers later, we have a deal. Meanwhile, in 1910, Black farmers owned more than 15 million acres of farmland. In 2005, that number was 1 million.

A similar story holds for women farmers. In October 2001 Rosemary Love and nine other women farmers sued the USDA Farm Service Administration, FSA,  for discrimination, dating back to 1981, in loan making practice. That case is still pending. One of the stories of women denied loans begins in … Loudon County:

“Lind Bara-Weaver’s difficulties with FSA began in 1984 when she sought to obtain an FSA loan in order to purchase and operate a 16.5-acre farm where she planned to raise Welch ponies, holly trees and worms. Ms. Bara-Weaver was repeatedly refused loan applications by FSA staffat the Loudon County, Virginia office. She was told that there were no loan application forms or loan funds available. Yet Ms. Bara-Weaver’s husband was able to obtain a loan application during this same time period by simply calling the FSA office and requesting that an application be mailed to him. She tried to obtain a farm loan from FSA again in 1988, but to no avail. After some difficulty, she was able to obtain an application, but was told by the FSA loan officer for Loudon County that women could not run farms. The loan officer also called her patronizing names like “cutie” and “honey,” and made sexual advances toward her. While making a visit to her farm in order to appraise it during the loan review process, the loan officer again made sexual advances toward her, which she refused. Her loan application was subsequently denied. Ms. Bara-Weaver lodged a formal complaint with the FSA state office in Richmond, Virginia, and with the USDA Office of the Inspector General in Washington, D.C., but never received a response to either of her complaints. After her husband’s death, Ms. Bara-Weaver relocated to Florida and sought again to apply for a farm loan from FSA. She visited the Flagler County, Florida FSA office a number of times in 2000 before she was finally able to obtain an application form. When she submitted the completed application in person to the Flagler County office, the loan officer asked her how she expected to farm without a man around, and then he threw her application in the wastebasket right in front of her.”

Loudon County is the wealthiest county in the United States. When you read about `food insecurity’, when you read about local food banks being swamped, remember Lind Bara-Weaver, of Loudon County, and all the women farmers and Black farmers who have struggled for decades to provide us with food.

Dan Moshenberg, dmoshenberg@gmail.com

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