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 Entertainment | Books | December 2007 
Women in Quest of Sustainable Future
 UNEP
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New book, "Women and the Environment", calls for greater recognition of women's role in conservation and poverty eradication.
Women are the world's great unsung conservationists, often outpacing men in their knowledge and nurturing of domestic and wild plants and animals.
That many species, some with important drought or pest resistant properties, survive and remain in cultivation is largely thanks to women and the key roles they play in society, a new publication by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) makes clear.
Women, especially in developing countries, are the farmers, the feeders and the carers in their communities relying on an intimate understanding of nature to fulfil their many and varied roles.
They are also the primary providers of water. In the mountain areas of East Africa, women may expend close to a third of their calorie intake in collecting and supplying this precious resource.
Female members of a community often bear the brunt of a natural disaster, such as famine or drought, and are the ones who shoulder the responsibility for keeping offspring alive.
"In pastoral societies, when cattle die, men migrate to new pastures or shift to a different location where they pursue other activities. Women and children may also leave but generally as a group to hunt famine foods as well as pods and other tree products to sell in distant markets," says the book, published in association with the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO).
"Other scenarios that result from loss of livestock involve men turning to idling, gambling and drinking cheap brew, leaving women as the sole breadwinners," it adds.
The book, published with financial support from the United Nations Foundation (UNF), will be launched today at the third session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues taking place at UN headquarters in New York, the United States.
Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's Executive Director, said: " Women, particularly in developing countries, are often in the front line in terms of overcoming poverty, managing the land and waterways and sustaining their communities. During times of stress and insecurity, it is generally the women who must forage further and further for food, water and fuel. During times of plenty, the fields and kitchen gardens they tend are mini-laboratories where domesticated and wild plants and animals are selected and tested for their agricultural and medicinal value".
"It is clear from this publication, that women have a central role as custodians of local and indigenous knowledge and as conservators of the natural world. It also clear that their role and their 'know-how' is often undervalued and ignored. Indeed, all too often women are treated as second class citizens with less rights and a reduced status in respect to men. It is high time that national and international policies reflect gender differences and give far greater weight to the empowerment of women," he added.
"We must breathe life into the gender dimensions enshrined in the UN Millennium Development Goals, we must build on the outcomes of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the 1995 Beijing Conference and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and cement these at the Beijing Plus 10 Conference on Women and Development next year. For if we ignore the role of women, all our collective hopes and aspirations for a better and more stable world, will be harder to achieve," said Mr. Toepfer.
The book, drawing on observations and research by numerous individuals and organizations including UNEP and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, contains numerous illuminating anecdotes and case studies that reflect the crucial and all too often ignored role of women in the environment.
It also highlights programmes, often established by individual women or women's groups, to deal with environmental and development threats.
Thailand
Studies of 60 women-managed kitchen gardens in Thailand have chronicled 230 different vegetable and other species, many of which had been rescued from a neighboring forest before it was cleared.
Pakistan
Village women in the Kanak Valley, Province of Baluchistan, Pakistan, can readily identify 35 medicinal plants they commonly use. They say that the plants "grow up with no masters", a reference to the fact that the plants have no husbands to boss them around.
A study there found that women could name 31 uses of trees on fallow land and in forests whereas men could only name eight.
Here men's traditional knowledge is actually declining as a result of formal schooling and emigration whereas women, given less access to formal education, are retaining the local indigenous knowledge and in many cases acquiring the men's.
The Green Belt Movement in Kenya, conceived by the 50,000-strong National Council for Women and launched in 1997, has founded a network of 6,000 village nurseries and led to the planting of some 20 million trees in order to combat desertification and erosion.
In Yazd, known as the "desert capital" of Iran, it is women who have devised novel methods of agricultural production including food production in tunnels constructed underground.
In south-east Mexico, women keep as many as nine breeds of local hens, as well as breeds of ducks, turkeys and broilers in their back gardens selecting the best breeds to suit local environmental conditions. In other words, women are actively conserving the genetic diversity of Mexican breeds and thus contributing to conservation.
Desertification afflicts up to half of China's population. In a dry and degraded area 1,000 km west of Beijing, communities have been mobilized by women to plant willows and poplars to halt the advancing deserts and create fertile land for vegetable production.
The Green Health programme, set up by the University of the Philippines Los Banos Institute of Biological Sciences, is teaching women (and men) in communities on the north-eastern tip of Mindanano, to use herbal plants to cure ailments and to help them to earn income. |
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