Women struggling for climate justice and against the commodification of nature

Climate change has impacts on communities and peoples around the planet, but, once again, women are hardest hit. These impacts are consequence of the place women occupy in patriarchal and capitalist society and the tasks that are assigned to them by the sexual division of labor.

In the chain of food production, women are responsible for the queue for food, medicinal plants, fibers and seeds. Her work is directly affected by changes in the calendar of rainfalls; prolonged droughts and floods cause losses, delayed planting and the discontinuity in the production of fruits that are harvested.

Climate changes increase women’s workload; they have to perform simultaneously tasks of cultivation and collection, to walk more than before to collect the water needed for consumption or cultivation and to queue the same quantity of food and different sources of protein or calories to her family. Moreover, the lack of drinking water or floods cause diseases and increase women’s caring work. Over exploitation of women’s work reduces their autonomy as well: women are the first to leave school in order to rebuild their homes after disasters.

Women are also the largest number of fatalities from natural disasters: in the 2006 tsunami, 3 to 4 women died for each dead man; women represented 90% of deaths caused by the cyclone that hit Bangladesh in 1991. The reasons for so higher death rates have close links to the patriarchal society: women frequent not know how to swim or climb trees (activities traditionally attributed to boys and men); they were in the private space of their homes at the time of disasters or because they care first to the lives of their children and other family members.

Climate changes also result in more violence against women, who are beaten or raped in collective shelters where homeless people are brought. They also suffer the economic violence: after disasters, they are driven to exercise precarious, more intense and less well paid work than men.

What women say about the climate change negotiations?

The environmental crisis is one side of a systemic crisis of a social reproduction model, based on the commodification of people`s relationship and the commodification of the relationship between peoples and the nature. This model impacts especially in the lives of women. We want to build a new model, based not in exploitation but instead, on the well-being of the majority, on a harmonic relationship between humanity and nature and among human beings.

But that requires changing the rules that prevail in the society today, based on profit and domination. That's why women, even being in difficult situations and being the main victims of this unjust model, continue its collective organizing, developing networks of solidarity to tackle climate change and oppression, denouncing our situation in a patriarchal and capitalist model . Women led New Orleans’ rebuilding  after Hurricane Katrina; Via Campesina women in their actions against eucalyptus plantations draw attention to the role of multinationals in environmental destruction.

In these days, when the whole world looks to climate chaos, we occupy the streets in Cancun and around the world to say we do not accept the false diagnostics and the false solutions - such as carbon markets, biofuels, REDD and REDD + + mechanisms and geoengineering - proposed by the market and their agents in governments and multilateral financial institutions. We do not accept "solutions" that only generate more business and do not change the production and consumption model.

We do not accept the privatization of land, water, seas and marshlands, biodiversity and seeds. We do not accept "solutions" based on the overexploitation of nature and women's work. We affirm that the environment is a common good; it is not an inexhaustible resource to be used for profit by companies and States.

We denounce the agriculture that sustains this model of environmental privatisation and commercialisation, founded on the monoculture production of crops on vast stretches of land, extensive use of fertilisers and poisons and the use of heavy machinery.

We demand a profound shift in agricultural practices towards to a sustainable model of production used by indigenous and rural farming peoples, as well as other practices that contribute to food sovereignty. Several studies show that the peasants and indigenous peoples can reduce the current global emissions by between 50% and 75%, through recuperating soil organic matter; reorientating the industrialized and energy-intensive world food system; reversing the concentration of industrial livestock production; expanding local markets and availability of fresh food and halting deforestation.

We struggle for a world where the sustainability of human life is at the center of economic and political organization. We struggle for a responsible people's relationship with nature, where food and energy sovereignty are ensured. Our struggle is for a society without oppression, in which men and women are responsible for the production and reproduction of life. We struggle for a world where men and women can live with dignity and where women’s freedom and autonomy are always present!

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