WUNRN
http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/gendering-peasant-movements-gendering-food-sovereignty
Latin America – Gendering Peasant Movements – Gendering Food Sovereignty
November 4,
2014
"What peasant and grassroots women want is to build
a feminism pertinent to their realities." -Pamela Caro.
Dr. Pamela Caro, Santiago, Chile
Interview Taken and Edited by Deepa Panchang and Beverly
Bell
Pamela Caro is a director of the Program of Labor Citizenship with the
Women’s Development Research Center (CEDEM),
a Chilean non-governmental organization that supports peasant women in Latin
America as they join the international feminist movement, but on their own
terms and realities. Caro is also a volunteer with the peasant women’s
organization Anamuri and the Latin
American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC).
A problem peasant women face is invisibility in the
feminist and women’s movements. A second problem is the weakness with which the
food sovereignty concept has dealt with the challenges of feminism.
To take the second problem first: Latin America has
assumed the struggle for food sovereignty as an alternative to the neoliberal
economic model. Food sovereignty is based on the conviction that each people
has the right to make decisions about its own food systems: about its own
eating habits; about its production, marketing, distribution, exchange, and
sharing; and about keeping food and seeds in the public sphere. If we establish
that food sovereignty is how people decide what to produce and under what
conditions, our question from a feminist point of view is, then: how do people
make decisions? Who decides how power is organized? Probably, in reality we’ll
see that peasant women are in secondary roles in decision-making areas.
Facing this,
peasant organizations such as Anamuri, CEDEM, the women’s sector of CLOC, and La Via Campesina
[the worldwide farmer, peasant, and landless people movement] are trying to
remove these traditional gender parameters. We are working on a campaign to
gender the concept of food sovereignty. The challenge is how to turn food
sovereignty into a tool to strengthen and empower peasant women.
Historically, women have been associated with food. Since
ancestral times they have cultivated the seeds, reproduced the seeds and
hybridized them. They are alchemists; they find new ways to prepare food,
whether in the peasant kitchen or by the campfire. However, when food passes
from the private sphere to the public one, in the areas of marketing and
distribution, men appear in the process, because the male link with food
happens in the public area. It’s then that we return to the old dichotomy
between the private-female-invisible and the public-male-visible.
We’re dealing with a struggle for visibility and
acknowledgment of the equal value of reproduction and the private world. But
this alone is not enough. It’s also necessary for men to get more involved with
food sovereignty in the early stages of reproduction, preparation, and preservation
of food, and not only in the distribution. This is the way that we’ll break the
false dichotomy between the female and the male.
This implies very concrete issues, like how to include
men in the kitchen and how to include women in marketing products. This is what
we call co-responsibility. For the CLOC women, co-responsibility is sharing the
different roles and developing symmetrical weight of those roles. It is valuing
equally the activities within the kitchen and the activities outside the kitchen.
This is a very concrete example of the struggle to include gender in food
sovereignty.
The second problem has to do with the Latin American and
global feminist movements. The Latin American peasant women’s movement and
popular grassroots women’s movements have been in the backyard of the
international feminist movement. What peasant and grassroots women want is to
build a feminism pertinent to their realities. The women’s sector of CLOC has
to wrestle with a space where feminism will fit - not a stereotypical or
traditional feminism, but one which acknowledges who indigenous and peasant
women are. They take on, carefully, topics like sexuality and reproductive
rights which are not yet recognized by peasant women. Radical feminists may see
this as more conservative, but for peasant women this feminism is a
transgressive and rebellious one, due to the conditions of traditional, ancient
sexual division of labor that exists in the peasant world.
This takes a lot of time and work to change. Measuring
this change has always been very difficult. They have not been equal across the
board. There are peasant women who continue living in conditions of extreme
subjugation and subordination. The part of the peasant movement that is active
on gender issues is very small, in the continent and globally. We have to
accept, very humbly, that what we are generating is still too little, too
marginal. We have a great challenge to expand the changes among peasants.
Among the individuals who are an active part of the
movement, who have seen beyond the campfire, you do indeed see changes. There
is huge sense of value in the activities linked with food preparation, but once
the women have gone out into public activities, they see that as a very low
ceiling. They have pushed the envelope, they have moved on, and it’s not likely
that they’ll go back. A woman who gains rights does not lose them.
Chile is a very isolated country culturally, besides
being isolated geographically due to the Andes range that separates it from the
rest of the continent. Chilean society is not very aware of or included in
international networks. But of the four indigenous and peasant organizations
who are members of CLOC/La Via Campesina, one is Anamuri, a national
organization of indigenous rural women who used to be members of women’s
sections of mixed-gender peasant unions. They rebelled and formed Anamuri in
1997.
These four organizations in the Latin America-wide
CLOC/La Via Campesina have a very big challenge trying to make themselves more
visible and less marginalized in Chile’s very conservative society. The
dominant model is extreme neoliberalism. Food sovereignty is not included in
any public policy or legislation or the constitution, unlike other countries
like Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Paraguay. But still, in Chile food
sovereignty is part of many local activities that aren’t determined by
legislation. These practices are acted on daily by right, not by decree.
In closing, we need to acknowledge the heterogeneity and
diversity of the peasant sector. There is a peasant identity that they want to
preserve, even if they don’t live in the countryside, even if they no longer
have land or farm. It’s what shapes what they are, and how they deal with the
world.
We who live in
the city need to look further; we need to give urban areas a more rural
perspective, because we, too, will gain by participating in the worldview of
peasants, farmers, and land-based people. It’s not about helping them. It’s
about enriching ourselves as urban dwellers with what these movements can
contribute, to better the quality of life of everyone.