PART 4 : ECOFEMINISM V. NEW AREAS OF INVESTMENT THROUGH BIOTECHNOLOGY

11. Women’s Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation

Vandana Shiva

Gender and diversity are linked in many ways. The construction of women as the ‘second sex’ is linked to the same inability to cope with difference as is the development paradigm that leads to the displacement and extinction of diversity in the biological world. The patriarchal world view sees man as the measure of all value, with no space for diversity, only for hierarchy. Woman, being different, is treated as unequal and inferior. Nature’s diversity is seen as not intrinsically valuable in itself, its value is conferred only through economic exploitation for commercial gain. This criterion of commercial value thus reduces diversity to a problem, a deficiency Destruction of diversity and the creation of monocultures becomes an imperative for capitalist patriarchy.

The marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity go hand in hand. Loss of diversity is the price paid in the patriarchal model of progress which pushes inexorably towards monocultures, uniformity and homogeneity. In this perverted logic of progress, even conservation suffers. Agricultural ‘development’ continues to work towards erasing diversity, while the same global interests that destroy biodiversity urge the Third World to conserve it. This separation of production and consumption, with ‘production’ based on uniformity and ‘conservation’ desperately attempting to preserve diversity militates against protecting biodiversity. It can be protected only by making diversity the basis, foundation and logic of the technology and economics of production.

The logic of diversity is best derived from biodiversity and from women’s links to it. It helps look at dominant structures from below, from the ground of diversity, which reveal monocultures to be unproductive and the knowledge that produces them as primitive rather than sophisticated.

Diversity is, in many ways, the basis of women’s politics and the politics of ecology; gender politics is largely a politics of difference. Eco-politics, too, is based on nature’s variety and difference, as opposed to industrial commodities and processes which are uniform and homogeneous.

These two politics of diversity converge when women and biodiversity meet in fields and forest, in arid regions and wetlands.

Diversity as women’s expertise

Diversity is the principle of women’s work and knowledge. This is why they have been discounted in the patriarchal calculus. Yet it is also the matrix from which an alternative calculus of ‘productivity’ and ‘skills’ can be built that respects, not destroys, diversity.

The economies of many Third World communities depend on biological resources for their sustenance and well-being. In these societies, biodiversity is simultaneously a means of production, and an object of consumption. The survival and sustainability of livelihoods is ultimately connected to the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources in all their diversity. Tribal and peasant societies’ biodiversity-based technologies, however, are seen as backward and primitive and are, therefore, displaced by ‘progressive’ technologies that destroy both diversity and people’s livelihoods.

There is a general misconception that diversity-based production systems are low-productivity systems. However, the high productivity of uniform and homogenous systems is a contextual and theoretically constructed category, based on taking into account only one-dimensional yields and outputs. The alleged low productivity of the one against the alleged high productivity of the other is, therefore, not a neutral, scientific measure but biased towards commercial interests for whom maximizing the one-dimensional output is an economic imperative.

Crop uniformity, however, undermines the diversity of biological systems which form the production system as well as the livelihoods of people whose work is associated with diverse and multiple-use systems of forestry, agriculture and animal husbandry. For example, in the state of Kerala in India (its name derives from the coconut palm), coconut is cultivated in a multilayered, high-intensity cropping system, along with betel and pepper vines, bananas, tapioca, drumstick, papaya, jackfruit, mango and vegetables. The annual labour requirement in a monoculture of coconut palm is 157 man-days per ha, while in a mixed cropping system, it is 960 man-days per ha. In the dry-land farming systems of the Deccan, the shift from mixed cropping millets, pulses and oilseeds to eucalyptus monocultures led to an annual loss of employment of 250 man-days per ha.

When labour is scarce and costly, labour displacing technologies are productive and efficient, but when labour is abundant, labour displacement is unproductive because it leads to poverty, dispossession and destruction of livelihoods. In Third World situations, sustainability has therefore to be achieved at two levels simultaneously: sustainability of natural resources and sustainability of livelihoods. Consequently, biodiversity conservation must be linked to conservation of livelihoods derived from biodiversity.

Women’s work and knowledge is central to biodiversity conservation and utilization both because they work between ‘sectors’ and because they perform multiple tasks. Women, as farmers, have remained invisible despite their contribution. Economists tend to discount women’s work as ‘production’ because it falls outside the so-called ‘production boundary’. These omissions arise not because too few women work, but too many women do too much work of too many different kinds.

Statisticians and researchers suffer a conceptual inability to define women’s work inside and outside the house — and farming is usually part of both. This recognition of what is and is not labour is exacerbated by the great volume and variety of work that women do. It is also related to the fact that although women work to sustain their families and communities, most of what they do is not measured in wages. Their work is also invisible because they are concentrated outside market-related or remunerated work, and they are normally engaged in multiple tasks.

Time allocation studies, which do not depend on an a priori definition of work, reflect more closely the multiplicity of tasks undertaken, and the seasonal, even daily movement in and out of the conventional labour force which characterize most rural women’s livelihood strategy. Gender studies now being published, confirm that women in India are major producers of food in terms of value, volume and hours worked.

In the production and preparation of plant foods, women need skills and knowledge. To prepare seeds they need to know about seed preparation, germination requirements and soil choice. Seed preparation requires visual discrimination, fine motor co-ordination, sensitivity to humidity levels and weather conditions. To sow and strike seeds demands knowledge of seasons, climate, plant requirements, weather conditions, micro-climatic factors and soil-enrichment; sowing seeds requires physical dexterity and strength. To properly nurture plants calls for information about the nature of plant diseases, pruning, staking, water supplies, companion planting, predators, sequences, growing seasons and soil maintenance. Persistence and patience, physical strength and attention to plant needs are essential. Harvesting requires judgements in relation to weather, labour and grading; and knowledge of preserving, immediate use and propagation.

Women’s knowledge has been the mainstay of the indigenous dairy industry. Dairying, as managed by women in rural India, embodies practices and logic rather different from those taught in dairy science at institutions of formal education in India, since the latter is essentially an import from Europe and North America. Women have been experts in the breeding and feeding of farm animals, including not only cows and buffaloes but also pigs, chickens, ducks and goats.

In forestry too, women’s knowledge is crucial to the use of biomass for feed and fertilizer. Knowledge of the feed value of different fodder species, the fuel value of firewood types, and of food products and species is essential to agriculture-related forestry in which women are predominately active. In low input agriculture, fertility is transferred from forest and farm trees to the field by women’s work either directly or via animals.

Women’s work and knowledge in agriculture is uniquely found in the spaces ‘in between’ the interstices of ‘sectors’, the invisible ecological flows between sectors, and it is through these linkages that ecological stability, sustainability and productivity under resource-scarce conditions are maintained. The invisibility of women’s work and knowledge arises from the gender bias which has a blind spot for realistic assessment of women’s contributions. It is also rooted in the sectoral, fragmented and reductionist approach to development which treats forests, livestock and crops as independent of each other.

The focus of the ‘green revolution’ has been increasing grain yields of rice and wheat by techniques such as dwarfing, monocultures and multicropping. For an Indian woman farmer, rice is not only food, but also a source of cattle fodder and straw for thatch. High yield varieties (HYVs) can increase women’s work; the shift from local varieties and indigenous crop-improvement strategies can also take away women’s control over seeds and genetic resources. Women have been seed custodians since time immemorial, and their knowledge and skills should be the basis of all crop-improvement strategies.

Women: custodians of biodiversity

In most cultures women have been the custodians of biodiversity. They produce, reproduce, consume and conserve biodiversity in agriculture. However, in common with all other aspects of women’s work and knowledge, their role in the development and conservation of biodiversity has been rendered as non-work and non-knowledge. Their labour and expertise has been defined into nature, even though it is based on sophisticated cultural and scientific practises. But women’s biodiversity conservation differs from the dominant patriarchal notion of biodiversity conservation.

Recent concern with biodiversity at the global level has grown as a result of the erosion of diversity due to the expansion of large-scale monoculture-based agricultural production and its associated vulnerability. Nevertheless, the fragmentation of farming systems linked to the spread of monocultures continues to be the guiding paradigm for biodiversity conservation. Each element of the farm eco-system is viewed in isolation, and conservation of diversity is seen as an arithmetical exercise of collecting varieties.

In contrast, in the traditional Indian setting, biodiversity is a relational category in which each element acquires its characteristics and value through its relationships with other elements. Biodiversity is ecologically and culturally embedded. Diversity is reproduced and conserved through the reproduction and conservation of culture, in festivals and rituals which not only celebrate the renewal of life, but also provide a platform for subtle tests for seed selection and propagation. The dominant world view does not regard these tests as scientific because they do not emerge from the laboratory and the experimental plot, but are integral to the total world-view and lifestyle of people and are carried out, not by men in white coats, but by village woman. But because it is thus that the rich biological diversity in agriculture has been preserved they are systematically reliable.

When women conserve seed, they conserve diversity and therefore conserve balance and harmony. Navdanya or nine seeds are the symbol of this renewal of diversity and balance, not only of the plant world, but of the planet and of the social world. This complex relationship web gives meaning to biodiversity in Indian culture and has been the basis of its conservation over millennia.

‘Sacredness’: a conservation category

In the indigenous setting, sacredness is a large part of conservation. Sacredness encompasses the intrinsic value of diversity; sacredness denotes a relationship of the part to the whole — a relationship that recognizes and preserves integrity. Profane seed violates the integrity of ecological cycles and linkages and fragments agricultural ecosystems and the relationships responsible for sustainable production at all the following levels:

1. Sacred seed is perceived as a microcosm of the macrocosm with navdanya symbolizing the Navagraha. The influences of planets and climate are seen as essential to plant productivity. In contrast, HYVs break links with all seasonal climatic and cosmic cycles. Multiple-cropping and photo-insensitivity are two important ways in which the HYV seeds are separated from planetary and climatic influences. But, ‘freedom’ from seasonal cycles is based on dependence on large dams and intensive irrigation.

2. Seed diversity and nutritional balance go hand in hand. Monocultures of HYV also cause nutritional deficiency and imbalance: pulses and oilseeds are sacrificed to increase the commodity-production of cereal crops.

3. Crop-diversity is essential for maintaining soil fertility. Monocultures fed on chemical fertilizers destroy the basis of soil fertility; biodiversity enhances it. Dwarf varieties yield no straw for recycling organic matter to the soil; chemicals kill soil fauna and flora.

4. Biodiversity is also essential to maintain the sustainability of self-provisioning farm units, where producers are also consumers. HYV monocultures mean that more farmers will become consumers of purchased seed, thereby creating dependency, increasing production costs and decreasing food entitlements at the local level.

6. Finally, purchased seeds displace women from decision-making and custodianship of seeds and transform them into unskilled labour. Main cereal crop associates are called akadi in Karnataka and women make all decisions relating to the akadi crop. In the words of a Lambani woman, ‘What do (men) know about the akadi, they only know how to besaya (plough).’ Due to women’s involvement in the akadi crop traditional seeds are preserved over generations. One woman said, ‘they are the seeds grown by me, and my mother in my native family, and it is the seeds grown by the daughter.’

What insights can be derived from the everyday practice of women in agricultural communities in the conservation and renewal of biodiversity?

Firstly, the meaning of biodiversity, as epitomized in navdanya indicates that biodiversity is a relational not reductionist category — a contextual not atomized concept. Conserving biodiversity therefore implies conserving the relationship from which derive balance and harmony Biodiversity cannot be conserved in fragments, except to serve raw materials requirements, as such it cannot serve as the basis of the vitality of living ecosystems and living cultures.

Secondly, the conservation of relatedness involves a notion of sacredness and inviolability. The concept of sacredness and diversity, of seed is located in an entirely different world view from that in which seed is only a commodity, with profit as its only value.

Thirdly, the self-provisioning nature of most sustainable agricultural systems implies a closed cycle of production and consumption. Dominant economics is unable to take such provision into account because it counts as production only that in which the producer and consumer are different, that means that only commodity production is production, and self-provisioning is non-productive work. This is the viewpoint that counts women’s heavy work-load as non-work. Unfortunately, it also provides the framework that informs dominant strategies for the conservation of biodiversity.

Thus, while biological resources have social, ethical, cultural and economic values, it is the economic values that must be demonstrated to compete for the attention of government decision-makers. Three categories of the economic values of biological resources are named, as:

• ‘consumptive value’: value of products consumed directly without passing through a market, such as firewood, fodder and game meat;
• ‘productive value’: value of products commercially exploited; and
• ‘non-consumptive use value’: indirect value of eco-system functions, such as watershed protection, photosynthesis, regulation of climate and production of soil.

An interesting value framework has thus been constructed which predetermines analysis and opinions. If the Third World’s poor, who derive their livelihoods directly from nature, only ‘consume’, while trading and commercial interests are the ‘only’ producers, it follows quite naturally that the Third World is responsible for the destruction of its biological wealth, and the North alone has the capacity to preserve it. The ideologically constructed divisions between consumption, production and conservation conceal the political economy of the processes which underlie the destruction of biological diversity.

In particular, it transforms women, the producers and conserves of biodiversity’s value, into mere consumers. Instead of building conservation programmes based on their culture, values, skills, knowledge and wisdom, dominant conservation strategies erode them, and thereby create conditions for the erosion of biodiversity as the basis of sustainable livelihoods and production systems.

Diversity in the dominant world-view is seen as a numerical and arithmetical factor, not an ecological one. It relates to arithmetical variety not to relational symbiosis and complexity. Biodiversity is usually defined as the ‘degree of nature’s variety, including both the number and frequency of ecosystems, species and genes in a given assemblage’. In contrast, for cultures and economies which have practised diversity, biodiversity is a web of relationships which ensures balance and sustainability. On the grand scale this involves a relationship between planets and plants, between cosmic harmony and agricultural harmony captured in navdanya.

On the more earthly level, diversity and interrelationships are characteristic of all sustainable agricultural systems. Biodiversity in this context implies co-existence and interdependence of trees, crops and livestock, which maintains cycles of fertility through biomass flows. Women’s work and knowledge is concentrated in these invisible ‘spaces between’. In addition, there are ecological relationships between the diversity of crops in mixed and rotational cropping, relationships that maintain the ecological balance through multiple functions. Mixtures of cereals and pulses create nutrient balance in the nitrogen cycle; crop mixtures maintain pest-predator balance, controlling pests without chemical or genetic engineering. Diverse mixtures also maintain the water-cycle, and conserve the soil’s moisture and fertility. This ecologically-rich meaning and practice of biodiversity has been conserved over millennia on India’s small farms, and has provided food and nutrition on the basis of sustainability and justice.

Biotechnology and the destruction of biodiversity

There are a number of crucial ways in which the Third World women’s relationship to biodiversity differs from corporate men’s relationship to biodiversity. Women produce through biodiversity whereas corporate scientists produce through uniformity.

For women farmers, biodiversity has intrinsic value — for global seed and agribusiness corporations, biodiversity derives its value only as ‘raw material’ for the biotechnology industry. For women farmers the essence of the seed is the continuity of life. For multinational corporations, the value of the seed lies in the discontinuity of its life. Seed corporations deliberately breed seeds that cannot give rise to future generations so that farmers are transformed from seed custodians into seed consumers. Hybrid seeds are ‘biologically patented’ in that the offspring cannot be used as seeds as farmers must go back to corporations to buy seed every year. Where hybrids do not force the farmers back to the market, legal patents and ‘intellectual property rights’ are used to prevent farmers from saving seed. Seed patents basically imply that corporations treat seed as their ‘creation.’ Patents prevent others from ‘making’ the patented product, hence patented seed cannot be used for making seed. Royalties have to be paid to the company that gets the patent.

The claim of ‘creation’ of life by corporate scientists is totally unjustified, it is in fact an interruption in the life flow of creation. It is also unjustified because nature and Third World farmers have made the seed that corporations are attempting to own as their innovation and their private property. Patents on seeds are thus a twenty-first century form of piracy, through which the shared heritage and custody of Third World women peasants is robbed and depleted by multinational corporations, helped by global institutions like GATT.

Patents and biotechnology contribute to a two-way theft. From Third World producers they steal biodiversity From consumers everywhere they steal safe and healthy food.

Genetic engineering is being offered as a ‘green’ technology worldwide. President Bush ruled in May 1992 that genetically engineered foods should be treated as ‘natural’ and hence safe. However, genetic engineering is neither natural nor safe.

A number of risks associated with genetically engineered foods have been listed recently by the Food and Drug Administration of the US:

• New toxicants may be added to genetically engineered food.
• Nutritional quality of engineered food may be diminished.
• New substances may significantly alter the composition of food.
• New proteins that cause allergic reactions may enter the food supply.
• Antibiotic resistant genes may diminish the effectiveness of some antibiotics to human and domestic animal diseases.
• The deletion of genes may have harmful side effects.
• Genetic engineering may produce ‘counterfeit freshness’.
• Engineered food may pose risks to domestic animals.
• Genetically engineered food crops may harm wildlife and change habitats.

When we are being asked to trust genetically engineered foods, we are being asked to trust the same companies that gave us pesticides in our food. Monsanto, which is now selling itself as Green was telling us that ‘without chemicals, millions more would go hungry’. Today, when Bhopal has changed the image of these poisons, we are being told by the Monsantos, Ciba-Geigys, Duponts, ICIs and Dows that they will now give us Green products. However, as Jack Kloppenberg has recently said, ‘Having been recognized as wolves, the industrial semoticians want to redefine themselves as sheep, and green sheep at that.’