WUNRN
|
Intervention
by Anita Nayar of DAWN at the Rio+20 Intersessional - On Behalf of the
Women's Major Group |
Rio+20
Intersessional - 15-16 December 2011
Anita
Nayar, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era on Behalf of the
Women’s Major Group
I would like to raise
five priority actions toward Rio+20:
1. Twenty years ago
the global women’s movement secured over 172 references to women and an entire
chapter on women in Agenda 21. I was a youth activist at that time, inspired by
the sustainable development paradigm and that it cannot be realized without
gender equality. Today I see a radical regression, as there is little to no
mention of women in the inter-governmental process leading up to Rio+20.
So our first call to action is for governments to
reaffirm that gender is crosscutting in development processes and that gender
equality and women’s human rights are vital to achieving sustainable
development. As we frame the proposed Sustainable Development Goals, we simply
cannot let these two processes fall back on separate tracks.
2. But how do we
realise the promise of sustainable development in the midst of coping with
repeated crises? There is an urgent need to change mindsets and to realise that
limitless economic growth does not equate with wellbeing or sustainability. New
indicators and data show us that what counts for wellbeing is more equal
societies and some developing countries are achieving these well-being
indicators with very low carbon emissions.2
So our second call is to recognize the unequal and
unfair burden that women carry in sustaining our collective wellbeing. We
therefore need indicators of the time women spend on performing unpaid or
underpaid work in order to value social reproduction and reflect it in
macroeconomic policy making.
3. We must also
realise that in times of economic crisis and in the absence of social insurance
systems, women’s unpaid labour acts as a stabilizer and increases their burden.
So our third
call is for a
universal social protection floor3 that entails basic social security and health care
including comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services. This is critical
especially for women living in poverty who are locked into precarious
reproductive work and in many places are deprived of their bodily, reproductive
and sexual rights. We simply must respond to the demands of the 99% and pursue
policies that favour human rights and social provisioning over profit.
4. Such a human
rights-based approach would also monitor, regulate and hold corporations
accountable for their ecologically and socially unsustainable practices. This
means protecting small farmers from financial speculation and land grabbing
including for large scale agrofuel plantations; banning technologies such as
geoengineering and GMOs and subjecting any new technologies to comprehensive
assessments including their environmental health implications; phasing out
nuclear energy and seeking fresh and up-scaled financial resources to provide
essential energy access to women in developing countries and shift the world to
renewable energy.
So our fourth call is to halt the privatization
and commodification of our commons and protect women’s rights to land, water,
energy and other resources, as well as to food, health, education and
employment. This will benefit all of humankind.
5. Finally, we are
seeing a disturbing return to neo-Malthusian arguments linking population with
the food and climate crises. Let me share two examples from contributions to
the Zero Draft for Rio+20. Some UN agencies claim “early stabilization of
world population would make a crucial contribution to realizing sustainable development.”4 Demographers claim that “slowing population
growth, makes many environmental problems easier to solve and development
easier to achieve.”5
These
arguments represent a serious regression from the Rio, Cairo and Beijing
agendas.
So our fifth call is to recover this consensus
that “the major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment
is the unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, particularly in industrialized
countries, which are a matter of grave concern and aggravate poverty and
imbalances.” Rio+20 must be clear that policy responses to population reaffirm
the Cairo principles to prioritise women’s and girls sexual and reproductive
rights and health in the context of fulfilling sustainable livelihoods, meeting
basic needs, protecting their rights, and creating an enabling environment for
their empowerment, leadership and political participation.
1 See Pickett
and Wilkinson http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/13/the-spirit-level
2 See Social
Watch http://www.socialwatch.org/node/13774
3 See Social protection floor: for a fair and inclusive
globalisation from the Social Protection
Advisory Group chaired by USG Michelle Bachelet.
4 See Joint Submission by UNFPA and the Population Division
5 See The Laxenburg Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development