Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation

Vandana Shiva suggests that ecological exploitation is linked to female exploitation. She describes how "Women as farmers, have remained invisible despite their contribution. Economists tend to discount woman's work as "production" because it falls outside the so-called "production boundary". These omissions arise not because to few women work, but too many women do too much work of too many different kinds." Because the work done by women of rural communities cannot be measured in wages their contribution is usually overlooked. It is in the variety of contributions of women that makes them "custodians of biodiversity". "There are a number of crucial ways in which the Third World woman's relationship to biodiversity differs from corporate man'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 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." "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 (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade)." Though GMOs have not yet been proved unsafe Shiva states that the same groups who we are supposed to trust with GMO food are the same companies that gave us pesticides in our food. As Jack Kloppenberg has recently said, "Having been recognized as wolves, the industrial semioticians want to redefine themselves as sheep, and green sheep at that."

Citations:
Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conversation.
by: Vandana Shiva

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