Tape #309 - Women Farmers and The Global Economy

Before I introduce our panel this morning, my name is Beverly Brody, I'm with the Federal Women's Program Managers at Agriculture and I want to take a moment just to tell you that our panelists we have with us is Lynn McBride; she will take a moment to introduce herself.  She will be our second speaker; our first speaker will be Dr. Partau Tiarani and she will also introduce herself and tell us a little bit about the subject that we have for today.  We want to make sure each person is in the right session they want to be in and this is the Women Farmers and the Global Economy. 

 

I'm going to turn this over to you; I'm trying to get the room heat adjusted here.  I understand it's a little warm for most of you, and I'm  turning the adjustor down I see one more here; I did take care of the one in the back.  If you have questions, the interpreter has mentioned to me, especially the Spanish-speaking, questions that you may have, please come to a mike, or we'll make sure that a mike is presented to you.  We can be able to move this mike around.  We're going to use the flip charts over here, so if you need to situate yourself better to adjust those things, we will say make yourself as comfortable as much as you can, and we may have a maintenance person come if I can't get it any cooler.  O.K., at this time I'd like to turn it over to doctor Partau Tiarani.

 

My name is Partau Tiarani, I'm living in Germany, I studied in Germany, I'm a lecturer in women's studies in agriculture at the Hamburg University of Berlin, but I'm originally from Iran, and the paper I want to give deals a lot about the situation in Iran.  I titled it "Steps Towards Engendering Agriculture Policy and Economy and Iranian  Perspective on Food Security.". And I think that Iran has its relationship to the international global market due to two important items, which is oil, on the one side; we have to export oil, but we depend on wheat, to import wheat.  In this case we are among the eight countries importing most of the wheat that is produced; it is about two million tons a year.  This was the average about a few years ago, but I heard that last year this amount even increased to a very high amount, which is about six million tons. 

 

In these two  points, Iran depends upon the global market, and I want to stress as well that normally, if we think about the situation of women in Iran, we think about women who stay at home, who normally are not allowed to go out and this is an image which needs to be reflected, because I think that it is forgotten that after oil, the most important export good of Iran are the treasured Persian carpets, and carpets, at least 80% of all carpets made in Iran are products of women and young girls that live in the countryside.  It is a production which is on the household level, so about more or less the whole amount of carpets is produced by women.  This is especially important for many regions of Iran, where we have dry weather and the ecological conditions are not very  much in favor of agricultural production.  In these regions, the household economy depends 90% on carpet production.  So this handicraft production is not only important on the household level, but on the national level and it binds the way the Iranian economy is also changed to world and global economies.

On the other hand, in the northern part of Iran, where we have rice production, tea production, cotton production, due to more detailed research we can say that 77% of the production is in the hands of women and besides this, I think that much more research is to be done to really look behind the veil and find out about the power that exists behind the veil.  And this is why I think we should also look into the household economy, and it is not very easy to take these typical categories of productive and reproductive spheres. because in many rural areas of Third World countries I think that these categories don't really fit, as I gave the example of carpet production.  It is not very clear; is this now the reproductive or the productive sphere?  But, it is important that due to these categories, all the work that has been done by women in agriculture and in handicraft production, because it is not wage-labor, it is not counted in the statistics.  This is, I think, a general overall problem that women have and also a global problem, that normally the work that has been done is not recognized, due to strong, I think, male biases and perception of gender relations, not only on the national level, but on the international level as well. 

 

And I will then give some methodological remarks, because women's studies in Iran, and I don't think it is that specific for this country, but normally, methodologically speaking, women's studies have taken a gap approach, which means that they are analyzed only because of their constraints.  Rural women are compared either to men, or to urban women in terms of level of literacy, level of productivity, their share in labor force and market economy, and women's share in labor and market economy is, of course, also the main point of research in Iran and it is also women researchers who have done this.

 

The growing literature now, I think that the discussion about women in development started in Iran, as well, in the early '90s, and one important aim was to prepare a national report for the World Conference on Women in Beijing.  This was the time when a lot of activities started; many of them were, I think, used by women in Iran themselves, but also by international institutes like U.N. organizations, so this really gave the push and there are now, meanwhile, on the ministerial level, the departments of women in the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as in the Jihad Ministry, so they are trying to institutionalize, for example, women's cooperatives in the rural areas and some of them seem to be quite successful.  But, the main agricultural policy is oriented towards wheat production, which normally is not the sphere of women's activities.  So this is the point that I want to mention, that normally, if women work in the field of agriculture, they have a diverse sphere of production, and the problem of concentrating too much on wheat production will be the problem that it is then monoculture, and the technology is very much oriented towards men, like tractors, or giving them the possibility of using fertilizers, pesticides and all that, so the type, the crop is one important issue for the participation of women in the field of agriculture.  And we can see the whole sphere of diverse ecological conditions and they really have the very specific influence on the participation of women in the field of agriculture production as well as handicraft, as I mentioned that before.

Now, if we talk about food security, I think that it was interesting for myself to translate this term into the Persian language, and the outcome was something like "giving security to meals," because food is something which cannot be translated easily into the Persian language.  Food, in English, I think, you can use it as a term being good for animals as well as for human beings.  But this term doesn't exist in Persian, so we can only translate it in "security of meals."  And, if we talk about meals, the difference is that human beings do not just eat corn, or cereals, or things like that, but you have to prepare.  So we need to discuss about the security of prepared meals. In this moment, I think, if we think about human food security as human meal security, then women's role comes into the scenery, and I think that also this, the preparation of meals is something that is hidden behind the veil, and it is not recognized.  In a county like Iran, food culture is very important, I think, like in every other culture.  Even poor people are very specific about what they eat.  And the quality of food is very important.  The classification of food, I don't know whether there exists something like that, I don't know, at least in the European countries I know they don't know it, that we classify out food into warm and cold categories, which is also, I think, relevant for most Asian countries.  And due to these categories, we try to make the combinations of our food, of our daily nutrition.  The active role that women play in food preparation, which belongs, you would say, to the reproductive sphere, is not only a matter of household economy, but it is, for the Iranian society, one of the most important chains in social interaction and relationships.  This even influences the very, I would say, the very man-dominated society, because the food preparation and the rituals that accompany the whole process of nutrition, they are important because you don't eat outside, you have to contact your social relationships at home, and men's honor and prestige are very much bound to the food that is served at home by their women.  Now, in this case, she has a powerful position in her family, but of course, this is not normally recognized, and in another way, if we think about food, or let's say, food that is marketed, we don't think about the power that comes with food.  This is true, as I said, on the local level, but of course on the international level this is one of the main, I think, power items that we have.  And marketing food and wheat is not only a commodity for your hunger, but it is very important power that all those countries have producing wheat, and the others who depend on this wheat.

 

And I think that the Iranian economy, of course, due to a lot of problems that they had in the last years and decades, depend, as I said, much on these imported items, and it makes it very difficult for the situation in Iran to get more self-sufficient.  This is because, on the one hand, the whole diverse type of agriculture production is now being reduced because of this very much attention that is given to wheat production.  And all the subsidies go in this direction.  It is the subsidized wheat that is imported, and, it is again,  imported, because the Iranian society tries to give very cheap bread to everyone.  So this is the minimum of survival, that they want to guarantee. But it comes to a situation where bread now is cheaper than anything else that you can buy or feed animals.  And this is the case that I knew from Egypt that they gave up their own crop production, but then they bought the cheap wheat, and it was so cheap that it was not worth it to work in the field any longer, and they feed even their animals.  And this was the situation that I met, in southern parts of Iran a few months ago when I was there, and the people of course depend on cheap food and bread. 

But this has also been very important because our customs and food habits have changed during the last decades, and it was very much now turned into eating wheat and partly also rice, which is more or less something that we have to import into the country.  Now, the participation of women in this field is a little bit problematic, because I think that the overall general policy, going into the direction of monocultures, of either rice or wheat, doesn't really recognize the interrelationship and gender relation in the field of agriculture production.  And the small-scale women's projects which might be very successful, I think, cannot cope with this problem, that this general policy structure is going to change the whole situation.  This is also one reason why there is a lot of migration in Iran and the cities are becoming bigger and bigger, and especially Tehran, now is about ten or even twelve million inhabitants.  And there are many villages that are left alone where there are only old people are living in that area. 

 

So my conclusion would be that if food security would be more oriented towards the survival of human beings, then much more attention should be given to the fact that human nutrition is culturally bound, and the gender relation is one of the most important facts, that we should give more attention to the preparation of meals, healthy meals in the family.  And the work of women in this sphere should not be neglected because we are too much oriented towards market economy and looking what she is producing for the market, even though she is one of the most important producers of the market.  I think the most important part of her activities in Iran lies in the field of the informal sector, of social networking, of preparation of meals, which is an important symbol of social and cultural interaction.  So whenever you come to a house you are welcomed by something to eat, so this is the first way of saying hello and meeting each other.  So meals are actually, I think, that which should be at the center of the discussion of food security and also the whole problems of production and reproduction.  They are problematic, I think, if we use these terms, but it is not only, I think, a matter of, let's say, kilocalories or the nutrients that come together with the food, but the whole food culture.  And if the food security debate, and the agriculture policy and economy would focus more on food culture, and not just on some particular market-oriented food or cash crop, then the whole socio-culture process, I think, of food preparation, sharing and eating can become an important part of scientific reflection on nourishment.  I don't think that women feed; they nourish.  Feeding, for me, even though I am not English speaking, has too much the connotation of feeding animals, and I don't think that human beings do just eat; we eat always with culture.  So, even if we are very poor, we won't accept everything. 

 

And for the last point, I would say that we are discussing a lot about poverty and anti-poverty, for example, campaigns, which go together with food aid.  And we don't reflect about food culture, and we should, I think, much more think about the social interaction, the cultural factors that come together with food.  And poverty, in my culture, is not depending on your economic strength, whether you are wealthy or not, you will say someone is very poor if he has no one to eat with, if he has no one to share with. This is a category that is relevant for social human beings that are depending on their social relationships, I think, as much as on food, because they are more oriented towards social interaction and food sharing.   Then I think we could take another perspective and in the country where I live there are many people who are quite rich, but they are very much alone.  They eat alone, and from my cultural perspective, from Iran, I would say these are very poor people; they don't have anyone to share with.  I hope that we will have a culture that will really appreciate this idea of sharing food and not to use food as a means of power, but as a means of coming together and enjoying life.

Thank you very much.

.

(Question inaudible)

 

Response:  The import of wheat, as I said, statistically, they gave a number of two million tons per year during a relatively long period of time.  But the strange thing is that even as they are putting a lot of effort towards producing wheat themselves, this amount has increased during the last years, so they talked about six million tons. Iran is not a country with very much exports on the agriculture side.  But as far as we know that oil is a limited resource, they are now trying to put efforts on Iran being an agricultural country.  There are some items that are important: pistachios or let's say, for example, saffron, something that is  very much exported, but not on the general level because we have problems in our own country.  But we depend on these exports because of the money exchange, because we have to import so many things.  So we are actually also interested in becoming an exporting agriculture country.  But this is the wrong way, I think.

 

Question:  You talked about the male using the tractor, and the female using the handcrafts, and I do believe that men are not as holistic in their thinking, and the male principle of going forward, but are we as women in agriculture to divide and say this is women's¼I have a problem with encouraging, although I know that women need to do what they are good at, were you limiting women, and how should we look at that with the economy?

 

Response:  I think that in all countries the division of labor exists, especially in rural areas, maybe not in Australia, because you had another situation because you came into a land without a very deep cultural background, or even if there was one you really didn't¼  But in a country, I think, with an old tradition of agriculture production, we normally find the division of labor, which exists.  This doesn't mean that it is not going to change; sometimes even the domain of women, if it's going to be more economically lucrative or better, so men will take over.  Still, if there is a division of labor, you cannot change this immediately.  And if you try to bring in technologies which are in the field of man's work, normally this technology is going to be taken over by men, not by women.  I don't think this is only specific for Iran.  But, for example, the problem, I think, is that agriculture technology was not oriented towards the domains of women's activities like weeding.  We still don't have that much machinery or simple things that could make women's work easier in this specific field where she was normally active before.  And I don't think we should put a limitation, that women should do this or not, but we should let it be open to them, and at least appreciate all those domains where she really cannot drop out, except if she is not going to have children.

 

Question:  Who are the experts providing assistance in the area of agriculture?

 

Response:  Women can study agriculture sciences in Iran as well, and they are now going to be one of the members for the agriculture extension services.  The problem is that for women it is possible to study agriculture sciences, but on the, let's say, vocational training level, there we don't have the possibilities for women to go to learn agriculture production, not on a very scientific level.  So these are women; they are highly educated, they have done either agriculture or horticulture, and so they are now members of the extension service for agriculture

 

Question:  I particularly liked your definition of food security.  You also talked about we should measure the preparation of healthy meals as a woman's contribution.  But how would you do that, and would you consider that as part of putting a value on unpaid household labor?

 

Response:  Actually, this is a discussion--paying for household activities, and there are a few cases where they have decided to gauge something like [unintelligible phrase].  This is a term used due to the Islamic tradition that women are not supposed to work in the family of their husbands without getting any reward, getting anything back.  Now they are discussing, but this is only in cases of divorce, that if a woman gets divorced, if the man wants the divorce, then he has to pay her the equivalent wage that he should have paid for someone else.  It is discussed and it is traced back to Islamic law, because even the woman that gets a baby, she does not have to feed her baby.  She cannot be urged to do this; this is very specific.  But I think that if we want to give women's work value; this is absolutely necessary work that she is doing all over the world.  We should try to find ways to give value to this.  I don't say that she should stay at home, but normally she does, even in Germany, for a few years at least.

 

Question:  My other career is teaching English as a second language.  I work at the English for Academic Purposes program at the University of Saskatchewan, and we get a small number of students from Iran who are coming to work on master's degrees or doctorates--almost as many women as men, I'm pleased to say.  The difference is that the men almost invariably are studying large-scale agriculture or engineering, the women almost invariably studying horticulture or food and nutrition.  A lot of what you have been saying is really interesting to me on that level as well as the farming level, because it explains so much about these students of mine.  I wonder if you would just comment on the connection between that trend and the food security issue and meal security issue that we have been talking about.

 

Response:  I don't know the students now, and I wouldn't say that there is a significant difference; maybe it's true.  Because men get interested in agriculture if it could be on a large scale, but this is not very Iranian-specific.  Maybe this is one of our gender biases that exists. I don't know whether it is good or not good.  But at least we can recognize this.  Normally, men are going to it in this direction.  Of course, technology is also something, which is not only in the field of agriculture, which is relevant.  The other thing about health and nutrition--I don’t think that this is so specific, because many medical students are men, so the medical treatment and nutrition matters could also be shared between men and women.  But up to this moment the extension services are very much oriented towards giving recommendations on healthy food to mothers and to go for small-scale projects.  This is the sphere where they are active, and they think that we can give them some small project so that they are occupied, but the mainstream agriculture policy, which I think is a problem, is going into another direction and I think that this could be true also for the whole general global development, that women are very active.  We talk about women in development, women in sustainable development, we do a lot of small-scale projects and sometimes we are also quite successful.  But it is very much apart from mainstream agriculture policy and economics, so this is my problem with this gendering.  If we want to really change things, we need to change this global, more macro level, policy decision-making processes.  And not just working on small-scale beautiful women's projects in the countryside.

 

Thank you very much.  At this time we would like Lynn McBride to come forward to give her presentation.

 

I appreciate the comments of Dr. Tiarani; we hadn't had a chance to talk before we met here, in fact, this morning.  However, I'm impressed by how similar the presentation I'm about to present and hers are: the problems that are created when we have, I don't like to use this word, "cheap food policy," and the fact that we need to look at agricultural production in a broader sense.  So I think those are two excellent starting points.  And I want to keep my comments brief here this morning because I want to get as much information from you all and for us to come together and to create some sort of unified message on what the role of women farmers should be in the global economy.  I want to start by just briefly talking about myself.  Again, I'm Lynn McBride, I'm with the National Farmer's Union in the United  States.  We represent three hundred thousand family farmers throughout the United States.  Mostly we represent moderate and small-sized farmers, and we've been around for quite a while--since 1902.  We're also involved in a variety of international organizations: Via Compesina, the International Federation of Agricultural Producers.  We definitely have an international focus, and I want to talk about that a little bit later on in my comments.  I do know you all have gotten an earful, and I'm not sure how well that translates here, but you've heard a great deal about what's going on in the United States, but I just wanted to add a little bit from the perspective of National Farmer's Union and the work that we're doing here.

In February of this year there was a report that was released -- the National Commission on Small Farms report, which was a 30-member commission that was started by the Secretary of Agriculture to address some of the problems that are occurring in the agricultural sector here in the U.S.  Kathleen Sullivan Kelly, sitting in front, she was one of the co-chairs of that report; we had folks representing not only National Farmer's Union but other farm organizations as well to address some of the problems that exist in U.S. agriculture today and the fact that the number of farmers out there working and living on the land is declining, and the fact that we need to change our policies and our perspectives to make sure that people are still able to live and work on the land.  The last time a report like this was written was twenty years ago, and there was a strong message sent 20 years ago that something needed to be changed to make sure that we're able to sustain our agricultural community throughout the United States.  Twenty years later, what's happened, there's 300,000 less farmers, and the percentage of the consumer dollar that farmers receiving in this country is declining.  They say its 13% average; I expect its more than that in certain commodities.  So we are concerned about how our agricultural sector is doing.  That's an understatement, and especially this year, what we're looking at right now is something that politicians here in Washington, and there's many of them, have agreed on both sides of the political spectrum, Democrat and Republican, that there is an farm crisis occurring here in the United States and that's something they've agreed to over the last several weeks as we look at the fact that we're going to be experiencing low prices for the rest of the year for most of our major commodities, some significant drops in the amount that we're receiving and the fact that the changes that were made in the 1996 farm law, which were to make the U.S. more focused on export-driven policies, to take the safety net out of farm programs, are really going to start to cause some problems for the moderate and small-sized farmers, as well as the larger farmers, we anticipate this year.  So I see this as really a turning-point here in the United States, and I just wanted to share that with you, to have you understand that some of the problems that we've talked about this morning, with cheap food policies and lack of a safety net and the need to look at these issues in a broader spectrum, are certainly issues that we address on a day-to-day basis here in the United States. 

 

So I wanted to talk about what we've done on the international level as well, to try to get some of the issues that are important to women, that are beyond just the market-driven economies, to make sure that some of our priorities are up there at the national level.  And one of the projects that I had an opportunity to work on (I handle international relations for the National Farmer's Union), is I had the opportunity to go to the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996.  And I worked extensively for a few years about how our plan of action for the United States, as well as the coordinated approach with other countries from around the world, all the continents, virtually every country was represented, to have some sort of focus on women come out of the World Food Summit.  I'm going to try to use this overhead [inaudible]¼  I think so much of what I've been hearing at this conference, what we need to do is step back and look at some of the international documents that are out there, at some of the progress that we've made, some of the accomplishments that we can be proud of are, and that we need to remind ourselves of, or we need to promote what's already out there on the books, what's already out there in print, and which has already had a great deal of work performed on it. 

 

This is one of the statements that came out of the World Food Summit, and I'll read it.  "We acknowledge the fundamental contributions to food security by women, particularly in rural areas of developing countries, and the need to ensure equality between men and women."  I'll let you all read the remaining part of that particular part of the World Food Summit's plan of action.  That wasn't just a statement that came forth because governments decided they needed to write it.  The reason that that statement is in there is because farm organizations, because hunger organizations, because development organizations, environmental organizations came together during the World Food Summit in the form of a non-governmental organization forum, and they talked to their governments and they said, "this is what needs to be in the final plan of action for the World Food Summit."  And that's how that came about.

I know that some of you are thinking: not all of us were able to be in Rome, not all of us were able to go to these international meetings.  How in the world are we going to have that kind of impact at the international level?  Well, how we did it in the United States was, there were many people, and as you know with farming there's a lot of people that are not here at this conference; they're out doing their jobs as farmers, and so it's very difficult for them to get their input on these important decision-making matters.  So what we would do is, is do an outreach effort, much of it through the Internet, as well as through conference calls, as well as through any type of way to communicate with folks that were out there living and working on the land, so that they can get the issues that they feel were important brought up there.  Again, with an international document, it's not ever going to be what everybody wants, but I think the more we're able to rally around, the more we're able to circulate and encourage the commonalities that we have as women, as farmers, the better off we're going to be.  We don't need to be reinventing the wheel, so to speak; we don't need to be doing a lot of these things over again.  We need to be really accentuating and publicizing and repeating, and repeating, and repeating some of the messages that are already out there.

 

And I want to go to another document which you can guess where this is from; I'm not sure that you will.  But what I did is I went through the proceedings from the last conference and I picked out some parts that I thought were related to the global economy, and what's been said before by women during the conference.  What we need to be repeating as we move forward, and again, I recognize that a lot of what we've been talking about during this conference has been said before, and we need to work to join it into a common message, one that we can take.  I appreciate this document, it's an incredibly extensive document.  It's difficult to carry around; that's why I think it would be valuable for us to be able to have a shorter, more unified message, which I am hopeful will come out of this conference.  But again, I just want to go through and talk about some of the issues that are up here.

 

Again, right out of the doctor's speech, the emphasis on export-oriented agriculture has also had its effects on women.  Globally, women are the food producers; they are the subsistence farmers growing food for the immediate family consumption.  Most of their produce never even sees a local market, let alone an export one.  That's some of the realities that were brought up at the last conference, that I think we need to recognize and identify the fact that 4 years later we still have a lot of work to do.  But also, we've come along way, as well.

 

I'll let you all go through the rest of that document briefly.  Has everyone had a chance to read it?  Too long?  I can make copies; I didn't know how many people would be in the session, otherwise I would have made copies.  I can read it again: "Good land use for cash cropping has pushed women onto more marginal land, requiring more work to get an equivalent crop.  These lands are easily depleted."  I guess my main point in bringing all this up is the fact that a lot of these problems have been raised before and we need to work together to make sure that this common message comes out of the conference this year.  I will make copies and make those available.

 

For the first document, which was again the document that came out of the World Food Summit, the Food and Agriculture Organization does have a booth downstairs, and they're an excellent resource, as well as they have a Web page, where you can go in and see the documents that have already been completed, that identify the key role that women play in agriculture and the fact that it needs to be recognized, and it has been recognized, basically.

This, again, is another document that has come out of the last International Conference on Women and Agriculture, about some of the ideas about how we can move forward to accomplish our goals.  And I think I'll leave that one up there so you all have a chance to read it at your leisure.  But again, I think the only way we're going to be able to be, and have been able to be effective at the international level is by, obviously, coming together and having a common message, but also mix interrelating our message with that of other organizations as well.  I think that coalition-building can be an incredibly powerful tool.  I know that was the result during the World Food Summit context in 1996.  In terms of what's happened today with the World Food Summit context, in the United States we have an action plan that we're engaged in where we're going to continue to pursue the goals of the World Food Summit on the national level.  I know other countries represented in this room also have that same plan in mind.  But I think the reason why we've had a follow-up plan the way that it has been up til this point, has been not because of the governments coming and being able to do the work for everyone.  It's been a joint collaboration between non-government and government, taking the message to your members of Congress, as well as your elected representatives and making sure that they understand that it's a priority for yourselves.  And then it becomes a priority for them.

 

And so I think that is the message I want to leave you with, and leave it open for questions.  Thank you.

 

(Inaudible Question)  ¼and push beyond that because it gives us a basis.

 

Response:  Yes.  I definitely think it's important to have a unified message.  This was something that I again picked out of the proceedings which were rather extensive, that focused on some of the challenges that we face today.  And some of the ways that we need to work some changes in our international policies as well as come together as a group.  And I guess another one of the goals I noted off your comment is the fact that I would like to see input from this group about what they think the priorities are because this is just something that I took out of the last time's proceedings.  If there is something else that someone here feels is another important priority¼

 

(Inaudible Question)

 

Response:  What she said for the interpretation is that she feels that we need to develop on the trade context, that we need to have a specific recommendation come out of this conference because of the importance that trade plays in this issue discussion, come out of this conference beyond just the statement up here.  Just in response to what you were saying, this is again, one statement that I picked out on trade that I thought was an important issue to raise--the purchasing power that we all have, that we sometimes forget about when it comes to the impact that this has on international trade.

 

Question:  I'm also from Australia, and I endorse that comment because it gives us a very commercial focus, which I think is something, I think the message is out there.  And I think what we need to be doing out of this conference, in my opinion, is making that message far more commercially focused, and I think that point about trade was excellent.  It actually echoes a question that I also want to ask--you spoke about 300,000 less farmers in the U.S. than 20 years ago.  The same thing's happening in Australia; you spoke about the share of consumer dollar falling in the U.S., the same thing is happening in our country too. I know with beef, the gross farm production in Australia, in total, has doubled from 1990 to 1996, consumer spending on food products has also doubled, and the return to farmers is actually halved.  So I think it's fairly consistent right across the whole global economy.  You spoke about safety nets, and I think this is the real issue that comes up in relation to the international trade issue.  You spoke about safety nets in relation to small farms and in relation to medium-sized farms.  What exactly did you have in mind when you were speaking about safety nets?  Were you being global-specific or were you being country-specific when you spoke about that particular issue?

 

Response:  In terms of safety nets I think that's an issue that has been raised by other countries.  Our focus has been both global, as well as national.  We believe there is a place for a safety net in each country to make sure that farmers are able to continue to live and work on the land.  The type of approach that we're taking is, again, given there is a farm crisis going on here in the United States, there's different ways, from different  political spectrums about how to address it.  What our plan is, is to make sure that regardless of what happens in the market, regardless of all these other factors, be it the Asian financial crisis, be it a surplus in this area or that area, that the farmer is able to, as a minimum, receive a fair price for her or his product.

 

(Inaudible Question)

 

Response:  I don't want to be the only one responding to any of these questions.  If anyone would like to interject from other countries (when I get a hard one I pass it off; I'm kidding), but I just want to say that we do have a national plan as well as an international focus.  I just came back from the International Federation of Agricultural Producers meeting, where they did have a trade paper that was agreed upon during that meeting, and throughout it, coming from all parts of the world, there was reference to the need for a safety net.  So I think it's full. 

 

Question:  Why should we produce all over the world so much when the prices don't even permit us to live on the prices they pay us for our products?  In Europe there were 12 million in agriculture; now there are 8 million, because of all this price of the TLC, etc.  And they have lost the safety nets that we are talking about right now.  With the TLC our prices are not guaranteed as before.

 

Comment:  We've been talking a lot about food security here, but I think in some respects what we may mean is, and Stora, as you know from your work with Via Compesina, perhaps the real issue is food sovereignty, and our own right as individual nations to produce and be connected to our own native food source.

 

Comment:   I guess I'll just give a brief Via Campesina report on this.   Via Campesina is an international movement of farm and peasant organizations; it's about 4 years old.  It's growing very rapidly; National Farmer's Union of Canada is a member, National Farmer's  Union of the United States has just joined.  But the main bulk of the members are organizations of peasant farmers from around the world, and the bulk of our membership is actually in the developing world where most of the farmers are.  Basically, we're trying to provide an alternative to the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, which tends to be corporation-driven, in many cases, and yet pretends to speak for farmers.  The policy of Via Campesina is that agriculture has to be taken out of GATT and WTO, because agriculture, and this is one of the problems with focusing on agriculture as trade.  We have to do it because we have to make a living and we have to make it very clear that if we're going to trade our crops, we must be able to make a living out of it.  But, in addition, agriculture is not just a matter of making money on the international exchange.  Agriculture is first and foremost a matter of feeding people, and people have a right to food.  And the trouble with international trade is that it does not guarantee that the poorer members of society are going to have access to food.  Because, except in cases such as Iran, where there are subsidies that make it possible for pretty well everyone to buy bread, for the most part international agricultural trade, which is not planned for the benefit of particular countries, average people, actually increases malnutrition.  And you can take the example of Negros in the Philippines, where the year that the sugar cane prices fell, thousands of children starved to death, because the land was all owned by the companies that produced the sugar cane.  And even though there was no point in growing sugar cane, that year, so that they laid off all their workers, they then refused to allow the workers to use that same land to grow food for themselves, because they also owned the stores that sold the food, and they didn't want to lose profit.  And that is what happens when you let corporate marketplace dominate food.  And that is why, although we must pay very close attention to making sure that we have the right to trade in an open way that will give us a profit, we also have to make sure that each country is going to guarantee that its people have the right to grow food for local consumption.  And in many places that is the only way that the average person is going to get fed is if food is grown for local consumption.  So tha's the cornerstone of Via Campesino policy, for everyone's information.

 

Response:  And I think, then again, that some of the points that she raised--the fact that we need to have fair prices for our product, the fact that we need to be able to secure food for our families--those core values I think, need to be brought out here as our statement as an international group, so that we can put these forth and again spread the message.  I think that the message needs to get out, certainly.

 

Comment:  I'm Lois Tet, from Minority and Women Owned Businesses here in D.C., and I write a newsletter.  My concern, acutely, is women and minorities in business.  I wasn't here the whole time, but I want a copy of the action plan; I would like to see how that relates to the black farmer.  As we speak, these farms are being auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the farmer then is on an equal plight with the homeless, and whatever he had, he struggled for years to build these farms.  He has to go back and lease the farm from the Department of Agriculture.  This is appalling.

 

Comment:  I want to repeat something that I heard from a lady from Albania in the trade caucus on the first day.  She said that, "A country like mine, if it did not have government support, we cannot compete, and we cannot feed ourselves.

 

Response:  She had a question about what kind of a statement was I thinking about, and I was then thinking of the important fact that at the international level, to have a unified statement is one that we all need.  So I wasn't thinking of anything in particular aside from having it be a unified message and something that we're able to take back with us from this conference.  As we enter the next round of the WTO talks, and as we go in and meet with our legislators, and as we move around as women, if we can have some sort of unified message. I'm not the one to stand here and say what is, because I think it's our message and it needs to be from all of us.

 

Comment:  You mentioned the number of farmers has decreased; what can be done for women that want to start up farming as far as funds for equipment and seeds and things like that, because women, when you go to agencies inquiring about start-up funds or getting a loan, because you are a woman and you don't have collateral, then you're at zero.  So what can be done or incorporated into the plan where women would have access to buying the land, here in the United States buying the land, and also being able to acquire a loan to get the equipment and seeds and all that type of stuff.

 

Response:  And again, it comes back to many of the recommendations that were made in the National Commission on Small Farms Report if you're talking about here in the U.S.  but also in relation to the World Food Summit document that was signed off on by all the countries that were there, and that says that we need to tailor some of these services, some of the extension services, credit services, all the basic services that women need, to start an operation, they need to be focused on women and that needs to change.  So I think what we need to do is take some of the documents that, again, are already out there, and be able to show our leaders and governments, that this is something that we have agreed to, and this is one of our goals and we need to change some things to make sure we achieve it.

 

Comment:  My name is Lee Penyoy from southern Alberta in Canada, and Lynn, I was wondering if I could have a point of clarification.  When you referred to "we" several times in your presentation, specifically with regard to safety nets, is "we" then a position of the National Farmer's Union, the government of the United States, or could you define "we"?  I was interested if the American Farm Bureau (I don't know if there is anyone here from the American Farm Bureau, if they share a similar sentiment). I also thought for the people that were here, it seems interesting to note that on the Small Farm Report, that was completed by the government of the United States, the gross farm sales to qualify as a small farm are 250,000 U.S. dollars, by and large beyond what I would refer to as a small farm.

 

Response:  I think when I'm talking about "we," I'm talking about not only National Farmer's Union, but as well the groups that I worked with in preparation for the World Food Summit, which included Bread for the World here in the United States, as well as Save the Children, FAO, some of the other organizations that were part of that.  Then, in the broader context, also the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, again, had agreed on the fact that we need to have a safety net within its documents, as well as Via Compesina has had.  And because we're a member of both of those organizations, I would say, that's come through in all those organizations.  We have a statement, "Resolved, that women farmers in the global economy support every country's right to:  1) a fair price; 2) food security; 3) security of local food production by farm women and their families.  So again, that's just a start; it's not going to be perfect from the first time.

 

Comment:  I'll try to speak because I come from Italy, and from Europe.  It would be very interesting if we succeed to say that women know that agriculture is very different in the world.  Because if you don't say this, everything is difficult.  And the second idea, the agriculture is a power.  If I think this, then I can look for to find what we can do together. As you know, in the world, we have agriculture where the owners and non-owners are similar.  In Italy, for example, we are a small country, and our power is the quality.  And typical products, for example.  Our problem is the price.  But I think we have to find some points, and we can, where women can be together and speak together in the world.  This is the problem, because in the countries, in the organizations.  I am in an organization; I work for the women, these owners.  Likewise, I am with the Campesinos.  But in my work are different things.  First, I think women know that food is the first goal of agriculture, not the power, but the food.  This is difficult, but if we say all together that this is very important.  Second, we know that price is very important, because if you work you need to be paid.  Also, we speak about environment and about quality; if you have no price, you have no quality, you have no environment.  We have to find the network between women.  I know that I am very different from you, but I know also that we have something similar, and we have to work on the similar things.  Women are able to be true, not always the men.  Women are able to say that we are different.

 

Comments:  Are there ways to make your statement stronger?

 

Comments:  Did you want, in your statement, to emphasize the fact that we all start from a different base; you want that in this statement someplace?

 

Comment:   I think it could be stronger we know there are some differences, so we are looking for networking.

 

Comment:  We could say that this conference recognizes that all women start from a different culture; is that what you had in mind? 

 

Comment:  This is about the statement: Women Farmers in the Global Economy supporting every country's right to a fair price.  What's a fair price?  You go out and buy a shirt in the shops, and all the shirts are a different price, aren't they?  And you have your right to shop at a different level.  This is an agrarian revolution we're talking about here.  We're talking about shifting the whole value structure from regarding commodities in the whole global marketplace, to actually regarding them as essential food value.  Small businesses out there, people that run other small businesses, they have corner stores and bakeries, pharmacies. They don't necessarily get fair prices; they don't have a set price for anything.  70% of small businesses in Australia fail in their first year of operation, and they don't have support.  And just because they're lesser in number, they don't go out and say there were 10 million of us 20 years ago, why are there only 5 million of us now?   I'm just trying to make this forum aware that there are that there are other people in small business, just like farmers, as I think most people are here, which don't have a mechanism to say set a fair price.  I think this is a value shift, not something we can actually be pushing;  We need to change that value before we try to push this in the global marketplace.

 

Comment:  Helen Freeman: I would like to ask the Iranian speaker; you said that bringing a subsidized product into Iran has resulted in less production of wheat in Iran.  Did I understand that correctly?  In other words, what we're looking at when we're talking about a fair price in the marketplace, but providing a safety net.  We don't want to have a safety net that interferes with the marketplace in the sense that results in subsidies, and those subsidies then get dumped on the world market, and distort other markets.  We need to think about that when we're thinking about our points for discussion.

 

Comment:  I'm not sure this is the right place to put this issue, but it seems to me that at this conference we're going around trying to find common ground, points that we can agree on.  We should also, perhaps, look for common enemies, that we might also be able to agree on.   I don't know how we can push for something for this conference that doesn't at least mention the problem of multinational corporations.  In this country, the government broke up the telephone system because telephone communications was simply too critical to be allowed to be held in the hands of one company.  And they broke up the transportation system for the same reason, and are now going after Bill Gates and the Internet and Microsoft and all that because electronic communication is too important to be left to a monopoly.  How much more important are those things than food?  I think that at some point we have to bring up that issue and put it in the document, at this point, or somewhere else.

 

Response:  I want to follow up on the comment from the lady from Australia.  I think what you mentioned is a little different from what we were talking about.  You're talking about raw commodities.  It's different than a store that sells bread already made up for a profit; they already have their profit made up.  We're talking about the people who produce the wheat for the bread that you bought, and the people who produce the leather for the shoes you bought.  That's the raw commodity; that's what I thought we were talking about is farmers.

 

Comment:  At the beginning, one of the speakers mentioned in some of our countries that we have a cheap food policy, and we certainly have that in Canada.  We as producers are producing, and many of us are just going down the drain.  The fear that I have, that if there isn't some mechanism where farmers can recoup their costs of production, then the land is going to suffer, families are going to suffer, we're all going to suffer.  I know that on our own farm; we are potato producers.  One year, we may get three dollars a hundredweight for our potatoes; the next year we may get eight.  And our costs of production are between eight and eight-fifty a hundredweight.  So it doesn't take much figuring out to see how much money we're losing, and to see the terrible strain that we're putting on the whole family and on the land.  The real fear that I have, because we're trying to push for at least a four-year crop rotation in potatoes, and if we're not able to recoup our costs of production, what's happening is farmers are putting potatoes back in the same land again another year.  It's just having a terrible effect on what's happening in the whole community.  So I say, unless there's some way of us recouping our costs as farm families, we're not going to be around anyway.

 

Comment:  I would like to articulate what we're really saying, because if we say we believe this, we believe that, this is what we want, to me it seems like weak statements.  So what are really saying; are we saying pull agriculture, agriculture is not a commodity, pull it out of GATT, and NAFTA.  I mean, can we move to something more specific that we're really saying, rather than ¼  These things are so vague and they¼ But rights become policy.  You can say right all you want, but it doesn't change policy, it doesn't change an economic structure that we live with.  I would like to shift from rights and shoulds to an exact statement.  How do you make that shift? 

 

Comment:  I would just like to inject an element that I think is extremely fundamental to this discussion, and that is as long as global markets move to industrialized agriculture, as the doctor from Iran was describing in her country, that our subsidized, by the intense consumption of non-renewable fossil fuels, we are externalizing the costs of production.  We are degrading our environment, and this is further going to reduce the ability to feed our world, and until the developed nations recognize the real environmental costs of industrialized agriculture, these problems will continue and the global market will be distorted as it is now.  And women producers in the less-developed countries will suffer.

 

Comment:  I'd just like to thank Linda for bringing up the materials that have been put together before by the World Food Summit and the other conferences.  I think that one of the things that's so hard to come to terms with here, just because of the structure of what we're doing at this conference is that when these statements have been made up before, they have been thought about in groups of 20, groups of 30, groups of 5 or 6 that hammered out in extraordinarily specific detail over months period of time, that the Earth Summit in 1992 was a preliminary to a conference that focused on habitat, to a conference that focused on trade, to a conference that focused on gender issues, to conferences that focused on children, to the FAO and so forth, and that each of those conferences was preceded by literally thousands of smaller conferences that fed into it.  One of the things that I think that we lack here is the preparatory and background materials that would allow us to know what has gone before.  A lot of this stuff is available on the Web, and for those of you that have Web access, or can get to your local library, if your libraries have access, get into an Excite search engine, type "Bejing," and you'll have access to all of it, the agendas that were worked out and hammered together will be there.  If you want to take those agendas and, as an individual, circulate them at the next conference you attend, like this, or circulate them at your churches or among your farm members, and send them up to your Congresspeople, believe me, there are international issues that will be addressed there and there are an enormous number of different things that will have been pulled together.  Here, poor Linda, and some of the other people at the conference, are trying to pull together things with so little time, and it's very difficult.

I think maybe we have time for one more question, then some closing comments.

 

Comment:  I think that, as far as taking a lot of time to hammer out a statement, we have heard these same issues over and over.  I think that we can articulate these issues; they're very basic, common issues that we all are sharing, and I think that we're making a very good start.

 

Comment:  I think it's an excellent point, the suggestion you just made; we could all take the Beijing  document on agriculture, and personally send it to our member of Congress or member of Parliament or our politician.  That is something that everyone here can do; then we don't get into the difficulty of deciding what is a fair price and what is a safety net, and so forth.

 

Closing comments.  Again, I appreciate the comment that was made before about the enormous amount of preparatory work that does go on before conferences, and that's not something that we had an opportunity to do here, I think largely due to resources, and the fact that we are two years late on the follow-up to the last International Conference on Women in Agriculture.  That's why my goal was to keep at core principles, keeping it short and just having some sort of foundation to work from that would be specific to agriculture.  And again, the reason why I raised the World Food Summit document as well as I'd like to raise all the other ones: the International conference on Nutrition, the Rio Summit, the Beijing conference; these are all resources, again, that we should be using to further our message, to take advantage of the work that's gone before us, to take advantage of the amount of effort and attention and energy that's gone into this particular endeavor.  And I understand the difficulty there is with the fair price issue, and I think the fact that we leave it as broad as it is, as a fair price, is one way to deal with that issue.  In regard to the small business concerns that you raised, small business is one of the most vocal groups right here in this city of Washington, D.C., and they repeat the comment about their costs of production and the fact that it's very difficult for them to be in business.  It's a very politically sensitive issue, only because they've made it so.  You have members of our government here that are afraid to touch the small business issue only because they know they're going to have small businesspeople coming up to them and saying, "Hey, you can't do this, I'm going to go out of business."  And that's something that we as farmers need to do a better job about and be the ones that when farm issues come up, they understand the sensitivities and the fact that there's some problems when changes are made and we need to work through those problems, we need to know the impacts, we need to respond to them.  I want to thank you all for this incredible honor of being here, and we'll try to put together a series of principles.  Here, should I just read what you're writing, Kathleen, and if anyone has any comments afterwards, we're going to try to circulate just these brief documents. 

 

"Women farmers all come from diverse backgrounds, yet we all have common goals and common needs."

 

"Women Farmers in the Global Economy support every nation's right to fair price, quality, food, cultural security, healthy environment."

 

Than you very much, Lynn.

 

We're going to have one more comment from Partau.

 

I want to give a last comment.  I like the idea of saying that food security should be given to all countries and the food should be produced locally.  I think this will help, but still we have to take in mind this is not the general, mainstream agricultural economy policy.   If we are going to say this, no matter how perfect papers have been done before, this means we would say something against the mainstream economic direction.  I would agree on that, and I would tell you, if you want to say this, but we should be aware that what we are saying here would be something completely against mainstream economic world global agricultural development.  If we are strong enough to say it we should do it, at least, no matter what other conferences have said before.  I would say we can be a group of our own and be courageous enough to say it: we see a danger in the way that agricultural economy and the globalization is going.  No matter whether people are going to hear it or not, but at least this we should say.  We, from our perspective, see that this global agricultural economy is deteriorating the environment, and the possibility of giving health and nutrition to the people of all the countries.