Foreword: there is no globally accepted definition or boundaries among the different trends into which the international feminist movement is divided. In this post, I will follow the line drawn by the Italian encyclopedia Treccani, which focuses on the demand for women's economic, civil and political rights; in a more general sense, the set of theories that criticize the traditional condition of women and propose new relations between the sexes in the private sphere and a different social position in the public sphere.
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For someone like me who has been involved in "agrarian development" for more than 35 years, the emergence of this sensitivity is something that has accompanied me throughout my years of work. The starting point was quite random, as was my approach to the subject (which goes back to my first trip to Sandinista Nicaragua in 1983). From there, a local involvement with a small group organized by the CISL trade union of Vicenza and then, once I finished my studies at the Faculty of Agriculture of Padua and the parallel work at Coldiretti in Vicenza (where for the first time I heard about initiatives aimed at the female world of agriculture, in this case, wives and mothers of farmers' heads of households), I went to Paris (INAP-G) to do a Diploma of Advanced Agronomy (the equivalent of a Master's degree), which was followed, in parallel, by a 3-year job at the OECD Development Centre and a doctorate, also at INAP-G, under the direction of Marcel Mazoyer, my professor, friend and mentor for life.
It was through a fellow sociologist from the British Caribbean, Winnie Weeks-Vagliani, whom I met at the Centre, that I first heard of the theme "Women in Development" (WID). It was the end of 1986 and until then, whether in Italy, Nicaragua or France, the theme of agriculture and "development" was resolutely male.
The moment when I realized that something was wrong in the world of "progressives" who were involved in agricultural development was when I went to attend a seminar in Montpellier on the theme of peasant agriculture in Africa. I was there to contact a local professor and propose him to participate in my thesis jury, and as one of my professors from Paris, Marc Dufumier, was among the presenters, I decided to stop and listen. After his presentation, always very energetic, presenting the daily efforts of peasants to survive, mindful of the discussions and initial readings that Winnie had suggested to me, I asked for the floor to suggest that Marc complete the sentence by recalling how most of the subsistence agricultural work was done by peasant women!
It was something basic, which today would be so obvious that it didn't need to be said, but it was a different time. Marc's response was, to say the least, cruel. Instead of addressing me, he turned to the audience and said, "Do you know why Paolo is asking me this? You must know that he is Italian, and therefore women...". I felt sorry for poor Mark, with whom I had no further contact. From that day on, I began to reflect on everything I had learned with them in Paris, and I realized that they really didn't see the other half of the sky. Women were not involved in the big topic of comparative agriculture and agrarian development, as the Chair was called.
I joined the FAO (regional office in Chile) soon after and gradually realized that the lack of interest in the topic of women/gender was not a peculiarity of the French (or of my previous Italian professors). No one was interested in discovering this world: the FAO was composed of technicians with great expertise in their specific fields of work, but none of them saw the actors and actresses behind it. A colleague, close to retirement, under whom I was placed in guardianship (as an "associate expert") during the first months, was in charge of the household economy (economìa del hogar), since this was the place of women.
It took years to find stimuli, people to talk to and the ability, which came slowly, to rethink things already done in a new light. It was years of intense work, many projects all over the world, a lot of reading, but the topic always remained peripheral. Even at the FAO in Rome, I had the impression that the issue of "women/gender" was considered as a cherry on top of the cake, and not as a fundamental ingredient. All projects had to include a sub-chapter on the theme: the concrete translation was the number of women participating in the meetings and some final photos. The project document was then validated by a civil servant, even less interested than the writer.
It was in the 2000s that, together with colleagues from the "Terra" project, we tried for the first time to explore this theme in Mozambique. The initial focus was on the defense of the customary rights of local communities, which involved a methodological effort to identify and delimit the territories they claimed, in order to have a cartographic basis on which to base political and legislative claims.
The observation that men and women used different parts of the communal territory led us to propose working with specific and separate groups to proceed with the identification of these portions of territory, their meaning and their use. It was obvious that it was necessary to create women's groups only to allow them to express themselves, because in the presence of husbands, brothers or other male family members, they would not have dared. The experience was very successful, so much so that the method was later included in the implementing regulations of the new land law that we had been instrumental in having drafted and approved.
However, the usefulness was not limited to this first step, which was fundamental but not sufficient. Within the community territories, there was the same discriminatory logic that governed Mozambican society as a whole. Based on the principles enshrined in the Constitution, which declare the equality of women and men, and on the long experience of working with local communities and the organizations that support them, we proposed to deepen this theme (equal rights) in the communities where we had worked and where we had some credibility. The objective was simple and, at the same time, ambitious. To make the "traditional" authorities understand that in the same way that we had helped them defend their rights to the land against a predatory state, we had to do the same within the communities to defend the weakest, namely the women, especially the allochthonous widows who, once their husbands had been lost (very often because of AIDS), were chased away so that their husbands' families could regain control of the land.
Years of work, because the power relationships were rooted in a religious and cultural domination that did not allow women any place outside the private sphere. We managed to accomplish something, and we are still proud of it today. But this experience also allowed us to realize that the resistance to be overcome was not only that of the conservative front in power, which was accompanied by religious leaders (Catholics, Muslims, animists...), but that it was also very present in the front of the "progressive" intellectuals and many peasant grassroots organizations.
The common point was always the same, namely to consider the theme of agrarian development from a technical and agronomic point of view, without worrying too much about who was behind it. Only a few colleagues from the francophone school tried to push this dimension (participatory, community or "terroir"), but even in this case, the attention was completely captured by the male actors.
The reasons, when I think about it today, could be due to the fact that those who dealt with these issues were very often graduates and/or specialists in universities like mine (Faculty of Agriculture), where the curriculum, as a result of political-ideological visions of a few decades before, was based on technological modernization to increase production and productivity. I don't think there was a real desire to deny the role of women, it just wasn't seen and, even if it was, they didn't feel it necessary to better understand the internal power dynamics before sending the same messages. That's how they (we) had grown up in our universities, and that's what they were asking us to do.
In my case, I think it was an innate curiosity as well as a personal interpretation of the famous phrase that Mazoyer used to repeat at the beginning of every course, that "you have to know what you're playing at" when you decide to go to work on the topic of agricultural development. No one is waiting for us, so before we enter someone else's house, we must knock on the door and ask permission. This simple exercise had turned into a desire to understand who lived in those houses we were going to knock on. Reinforced first by Winnie's initial teachings, and by contact with some FAO colleagues, we slowly began to explore how gender could enter into our thinking about land.
In recent years, the feminist movement (or perhaps it would be more correct to speak of movements in the plural) has made progress and, thanks to their push, some achievements have been possible even in countries with a strong religious dominance like mine. It is thanks to them, and to the support of some politicians of socialist-libertarian matrix, that the divorce law (1970), the family law reform (1975) and the abortion legislation were approved. But if in some countries society as a whole was evolving towards more equality, in the sectors of agriculture or development, all that had been achieved was this addendum to the projects being formulated, without going further.
Even the new actors on the international scene, such as La Via Campesina, which appeared in 1993, showed no interest in the issue, to the point that all the coordinators elected at the initial conference were men, and this lasted for several years (as Desmarais reminds us in 2007, "in most countries, peasant organizations are dominated by men"). Then, slowly, they had to make room for the issue because of internal pressure from women dissatisfied with the official line. Thus, some tentative steps were taken, but as Park et alii (2015) recently remind us, instead of thoroughly revisiting the assumptions of discrimination, they aligned themselves with the line that the problems of male and female farmers are the same. In this way, "the food sovereignty discourse's emphasis on the convergence of interests of groups living off the land means that class and other divisions among the rural poor can be ignored or minimized."
For its part, within the FAO, the theme of women in development slowly morphed into that of "gender" (with the laudable intention of making male colleagues understand that the issue was of close concern to them). Nevertheless, the cultural resistance was, and remained, very strong, partly because of the technical background of FAO staff who, as I mentioned above, were trained in technical universities where a whole range of key development issues, such as gender but also historical-comparative issues, were not mentioned at all. The other element was the weakness of the Gender Division's staff, who, apart from carrying out a few studies of a normative nature, had no concrete proposals or even strong arguments to change the minds of those responsible for land projects.
In spite of these obstacles, in the framework of the reflection that I had launched since 2001 on the theme of territorial development, we managed to open a specific space to discuss the gender dimension. The publications and the various presentations made to colleagues at headquarters or in the decentralized offices did not, however, succeed in breaking through the wall of disinterest in the subject.
I must admit that even on a personal level it was not easy for me to find a suitable path, because I had no one to lean on. The clearest proof of this was when we organized the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Brazil in 2006. I had managed to organize a side event on land access and gender issues, but no colleagues from the responsible division, starting with the Director, participated in the conference. At that time, the ongoing experience in Mozambique and the parallel experience in Angola, as well as other smaller projects in other African countries, reinforced our choice to focus on the centrality of actors and not techniques when talking about development (whether agrarian or, as we called it, territorial).
The logic of the group I had formed around the theme of territorial development led us to consider "territories" as historical products of human interactions with each other and with the environment that surrounds them, in short, spaces of permanent negotiation between the different actors who live or depend to some extent on these resources. Focusing on the actors meant clearly realizing the different roles and powers they had, beyond the obvious generic categorizations between landowners and landless peasants. The Pandora's box of power dynamics (in the public and private spheres) was beginning to open, and it would require serious and sustained attention from all of FAO's technical divisions.
But there were too many new things being introduced at once to expect rapid digestion within FAO and subsequent promotion as a recommended approach. On the one hand, we were challenging the role of the technical expert (in practice the conceptual basis of FAO colleagues), promoting a new and different figure, that of the facilitator of dialogue and negotiation. On the other hand, the emphasis on power dynamics (and the obvious need for FAO to side with the weakest, to help them empower themselves so that they can negotiate their interests and rights on a more solid basis) was in total contradiction with what our Anglo-Saxon service chief was pursuing with the support of the big Western donors (and, unbelievably, of La Via Campesina itself), i.e. a soft, voluntarist approach, which did not touch this structural problem at all (the Voluntary Guidelines, known by the English acronym VGGT, came out of it).
Hoping to open an additional and more specific reflection on the power asymmetries within the private sphere, where women were confined, meant demanding too much. And since I could not join any international social movement defending these issues, we had to content ourselves with insisting on women's rights to land and little else. We tried, once again, to make the question clear to some colleagues in the gender division: we did not want to add a gender analysis to the territorial diagnosis, but to start from the desire to rebalance these relationships in order to build a basis of trust and credibility to face the growing problem of conflicts related to natural resources.
In addition to internal obstacles and the lack of interest of the main peasants' movements, we were aware that there was a structural difficulty in addressing these issues in societies steeped in a macho and patriarchal culture, where even religions are instruments of gender oppression. We did not pretend to work miracles, but to make as many of our colleagues as possible aware of the centrality of the problem and to see what the viable paths might be.
We didn't get very far, and in the meantime, the time had come for me to officially leave FAO, as the diatribes with the Director General (probably the most openly macho man FAO has ever had, the Brazilian Graziano) had reached a breaking point.
More recently, having the time to devote to reading and reflection, I have been able to better analyze both my trajectory and my thinking on the subject.
The starting point was and remains the same: we cannot talk about "development," whatever we mean by that word, by excluding half the world. The second element, borrowed from our philosophy of negotiated and concerted territorial development: since men and women are, we are, different, the only method that can lead us to a common objective is the same one we proposed for the theme of territorial development: dialogue, negotiation and concertation. This forces us to have empathy for the other, to travel to different cultures and ways of seeing, not to make them ours, but to understand their logic and reasoning, so that it becomes possible to talk to each other (to know each other) and to find a common path.
A third obvious element follows: these diversities (of gender) also hide others, of class, of race, etc. That is, there is a multiplication of factors that make the exclusion (marginalization) of women even more complicated to deal with. Since we don't know them in detail, and we don't know what elements to exploit to bring about change, we need to study.
What we do know: to simplify, I would say that we have at least three major issues in the "agrarian" world concerning the question of "gender" that do not find much space in the current debate: the (individual) rights of indigenous women, the rights of women in rural communities (agro-pastoral, agro-forestry...), and the question of the internal dynamics of the smallholder farm family. We have dimensions that concern the public sphere, generally dominated by men, where the relationship between the individual and the institution is expressed (so we are in the world of policies, laws and customs) followed by the private sphere of the family nucleus (not only reproduction and care, but also everything related to the productive part of the garden and the raising of small animals).
The current debate seems to focus on how to value the female contribution of the private sphere so that it is measured alongside what is produced in the public sphere. I think we should have the ambition to go further, that is, to question the very existence of this separation: on the one hand to bring the public dimension into the private dimension, and on the other hand to equalize norms and behaviors within the private sphere between the two sexes.
This implies going beyond the usual debates on the limits of women's access to land (last example the webinar organized by the Land Portal on March 24). First: this is not a "women's" issue, but a gender (i.e., men's and women's) issue. Second, if you don't try to change the structural elements of society, changing policies or laws will not change behavior. So, we have to be ambitious, but at least that way we will have a clear and progressive horizon to work towards.
The problem is that it is difficult to find interlocutors to talk about it, I mean organizations and movements committed to "agrarian" development, since they have been structured, over the years, from an implicitly patriarchal culture, which is not easy to realize and from which it is even more difficult to break free. I see it and measure it on myself, and the many years it took me to realize it and start thinking systemically as Mazoyer taught us.
On my own small scale, I am trying to advance these thoughts with some colleagues and friends who have also been working on these issues for years, as well as with an association I am a member of and with which we would like to organize a forum on land struggles.
The objective of this long post was therefore twofold, on the one hand to present my journey and on the other hand to look for people interested in sharing it. As I do not believe in individual solutions, and that only collective struggle will give some results, we must first find a way to make the leaders of the peasant and indigenous movements think, so that they are freed from their ideological conditioning and stripped of their power, in order to rebuild truly egalitarian peasant organizations and movements. Without these intermediary forces, the voices in the wilderness of experts alone, through articles, books, conferences, will never be enough. The same goes for the UN agencies where hope is not dead, I am thinking of course of the FAO, even there with the aim of finding new ways to face the challenges that can no longer be postponed.
Articles cited:
Clara Mi Young Park, Ben White & Julia (2015) We are not all the same: taking gender seriously in food sovereignty discourse, Third World Quarterly, 36:3, 584-599
Desmarais, AA. (2007) La Vía Campesina. La globalización y el poder del campesinado. Madrid. Editorial Popular.
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