Blog 4- Women's Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation

In this selection, Vandana Shiva emphasises that women's traditional roles in society make them particularly resistant to economically driven policies that threaten to destroy biodiversity. Most ecofeminists believe that their experiences as women in male-dominated societies provides them with a different way of knowing and thinking about environmental issues.

Gender and diversity are linked in many ways. The marginalization of women and destruction of biodiversity go hand in hand. Loss of diversity is the price paid in the patriarchial model of progress which pushes towards monocultures, uniformity, and homegeneity.

Diversity is, in many ways, the basis of women's politics and the politics of ecology; gender politics is largely a politics of difference.

There is a general misconception that diversity-based production systems are low-productivity systems. This is not natural, scientific measure but biased towards commercial interests for whom maximizing the one-dimensional output is an economic imperative.
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 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 and destruction of livelihoods.

The problems arise not because too few women work, but too many women do too much work of too many different kinds. Their work is also invisible because they are concentrated outside market-related work, and they are normally engaged in multi-tasks.

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 active.

Women: Custodians of Biodiversity

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.

Biodiversity is ecologically and culturally embedded. Diversity is reproduced and conserved through the reproduction and conservation of culture.

Biotechnology and the Destruction of Biodivesity

Women produce through biodiversity, whereas corporate scientists produce through uniformity. 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 of "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. It is also unjustified because nature and farmers have made the seed that corporations are attempting to own as their innovation and thair private property. Patents and biotechnology contribute to a two wya theft.

Monsanto, which is now selling itself as Green was telling us that without chemicals, millions would go hungry.