Our proposal
Women Mother Earth Alliance
"The opposite of poverty is not wealth, but justice."
João Batista Libânio, Jesuit priest
Background
In May 2019, Pope Francis called on young people around the world to build a new global economic agenda. Assuming the economy as a matter of collective concern, the Pope wanted to mobilize economists in a broad sense, not in a corporate and disciplinary sense, but to include all those among researchers, activists and businessmen/entrepreneurs who were willing to bring together different knowledge and practices to promote "a different economy, one that makes life and does not kill, that includes and does not exclude, that humanizes and does not dehumanize, that cares for creation and does not despoil it"(1).
More than 2,000 young people from around the world responded to this call for global solidarity and commitment to the fight against inequality. Divided into 12 thematic villages(2), they began to discuss together the characteristics of current production systems and to explore various areas of intervention to make them more sustainable in economic, social and territorial terms. Topics such as economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection were widely discussed during the dialogues organized in preparation for the meeting to be held at the end of March 2020.
Unfortunately, the spread of the pandemic around the world prevented the young people from physically meeting and led the organizers to postpone the event to a new date. Frustration over the postponement of the presidential event did not affect the spirit and commitment of the young people who worked collectively to answer the Pope's call. In fact, they did more. This postponement gave them more time and allowed them to turn what was to be a three-day debate into a long process of discussion, sharing of experiences, skills and knowledge. It helped them to consolidate relationships among themselves and among young economists from around the world. Finally, it gave them the opportunity to build a network of professionals, ready and willing to act for change.
During these months, the young people organized numerous webinars with experts, university professors of high scientific level, to discuss together and exchange views on the most topical issues. Among them, those organized by the Agriculture and Justice Village, one of the most active. The young people in this group listened to Paolo Groppo (ex-FAO), Fritjof Capra (University of Berkley), Maura Latini (Director General of Coop Italia) and Carlo Petrini (Slow Food Italia). From their dialogue with these experts, they agreed on the urgency of restoring social recognition to farmers, especially small farmers in the countries of the Global South, as food producers and custodians of the landscape and of diverse ecosystem services of regulation, provisioning and culture.
The young people in this group then worked intensively on the elaboration of territorial development micro-projects to reduce, at least locally, in some of the most backward areas, the effects of territorial and social disparities.
Among the many projects developed, as a synthesis of the aspirations for change emerging from Brazil and Latin America, one of them, in particular, deserves attention: the Women Mother Earth Alliance.
Brazil has become a point of reference in this construction, not only because it is the second largest delegation, the first outside Europe, but above all because of the social structure built around the initiative, renamed the Economy of Francesco and Clare (in honor of St. Clare, to recall how the feminine dimension is structural in rethinking the future of the world). More than others, the Brazilian youth have been able to build a critical thinking that also embraces the "feminine dimension of the economy" and a network that, under this extended name, has attracted young people from other peoples and other South American countries.
Women Mother Earth Alliance
Developed within the Agriculture and Justice Village, the Women Mother Earth Alliance constitutes an important agenda to promote the recognition of women's access rights (use, management and inheritance) to land, defend their rights to genetic resources (3 ) and build just relationships around the production, trade and consumption of healthy food.
This path is divided into two main levels: (i) strengthening the global agenda to defend the right to land, sovereignty over genetic resources and overcoming inequalities that limit the full development of women's capabilities; and (ii) building local alliances for food production and marketing.
The global and the local are, therefore, complementary modalities that should concretize and, at the same time, broaden the horizon of action of this Alliance that wants to offer concrete answers to the demand for Land, Roof and Work (4) for rural women, in the forests and lake and maritime areas of Brazil and the world.
A global agenda
Gender inequality is one of the greatest obstacles to sustainable development, economic growth and poverty reduction. Sustainable Development Goal No. 5 "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls" defined by the UN aims to promote gender equality and women's empowerment, in school, work, family. Therefore, it wants to give greater visibility to women and encourage their participation in political decision-making at local and national levels, as well as to eliminate all forms of violence against them and economic disparities. It also aims to eliminate all practices harmful to their health and to recognize and improve unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the family and at the national level. Finally, it wants to undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control of land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws.
The Women Mother Earth Alliance project is therefore configured as an intervention that can help achieve this objective, with particular attention to the empowerment of women and their access to land ownership, as well as to the recognition of their essential economic and social role in the life of local farming communities. It is also one of the interventions that can stimulate debate at the international level and the action of many global institutions.
The Women Mother Earth Alliance intends to include the different voices coming from the grassroots of the Francesco and Clare Economy to facilitate the articulation of this set of international meetings and forums. It intends to solicit interventions from Pope Francis, youth and social organizations on women's land rights and proposals for changes in legislation and public policies to effectively promote women's rights and capacities in sustainable rural development.
Local initiatives
This international agenda is accompanied by a set of local actions related to food production, processing, marketing, consumption and disposal. Many of them are already underway and sound like the announcement of the construction of a new agrifood system. They are based on the fundamental premise of shortening marketing circuits through networked actors and sustainable and solidarity-based solutions already existing in the territories, integrated, augmented and pushed towards new solutions based on the economy of Francisco and Clara.
In the Brazilian case, four of them deserve to be highlighted:
- The first corresponds to the network that connects healthy food production and consumption groups and aims to involve social currencies and other social technologies focused on the development of rural and urban communities. We seek to support and encourage forms of consumption, production and marketing that are consolidated and suitable for communities.
- The second initiative focuses on promoting food supply in urban suburbs. To this end, it promotes agroecological actions in the periphery and the structuring of alternative markets and marketing points for fresh, healthy and fairly priced food, following the example of the experiences of the Colectivo de Consumo Urbano Rural - Solidaridad Biológica (CRU - SOLO) and the Mutirão do Bem Viver, which operates in 16 Brazilian states.
- The Josué de Castro Network for Food and Nutritional Security is the third initiative of reference. It was created with the participation of young people from the Agriculture and Justice Village to strengthen and articulate discussions and public policies on food security and sovereignty between academia, civil society and the governments of Brazilian states and municipalities.
- Finally, the Education for a Sustainable Life campaign echoes and enhances training in already established learning spaces, such as rural schools, church communities, neighborhood councils, universities, collectives and popular movements that, in some way, are already moving towards new economies. The so-called Casas de Francesco and Clara strengthen and enhance these initiatives, as they emerge as spaces for the promotion of self-management and formative processes. In this way, they echo and give meaning to the principles, values and attitudes of the Economy of Francesco and Clare as a global youth movement. Articulated with the Women Mother Earth Alliance, they intend to host various initiatives aimed at combating hunger and food insecurity, through the knowledge of the integral use of food, production for self-consumption in the countryside and in the cities, and the diversification of food diets. The houses of Francesco and Clara are born as spaces of formation, places of life where new economies are born, planned and implemented.
There are many fronts of action of young people committed to the promotion of the Economy of Francesco and Clare; this involvement is reflected in the various initiatives that make up the alliance. The Pope's call has given birth to a powerful network of people with dreams, hopes and projects committed to socio-environmental justice and good living. Recognizing that people are part of a path of continuity, which is consolidated to the extent that it is embraced by those who embrace it, is part of the mission to revive the economy.
Why this special attention to women?
Women are primarily responsible for promoting food sovereignty. It is they who do most of the work of protecting local seeds, cultivating vegetable gardens and medicinal plants, and managing small animals. Despite this, rural women and their children are among the social segments most affected by hunger (5).
In cities, too, women face double or triple work shifts, combining work, home and family care and schooling, and are also more vulnerable to food insecurity. Especially in the global South, the number of single-parent families headed by women has grown, and a good number of them live on the outskirts of large cities, in places located in so-called "food deserts", that is, in places where access to natural or minimally processed food is scarce or non-existent.
According to the IBGE's Summary of Social Indicators (SIS) 2019 (6), women have more difficulty entering and staying active, have lower incomes and are more prone to informality than men. In terms of care, women dedicate about 21.3 hours per week to care and household tasks, compared to 10.9 hours for men.
This daily work, the basis for the production and social reproduction of families and society in general, is invisible because it is not monetized. In other words, women's activities are not recognized as work. This is one of the reasons for the higher incidence of poverty among women, especially among women of color. According to SIS/IBGE's own data for 2018, the percentage of black or mulatto women in families with poverty incidence (7) was 33.5%, while 15.6% of white men were in this condition.
In the case of rural women, it happens that the space of vegetable gardens, productive yards and management of small animals is generally understood as an extension of the domestic space. Consequently, even the work of women engaged in these agricultural activities is not perceived and counted as such by their families and by rural communities in general (Jalil, 2009).
Another relevant aspect refers to the way of producing food and preserving life, socio-biodiversity and genetic resources. Historically excluded from the productivist agricultural modernization process that took place in the country in the 1970s, the so-called green revolution (8), women have become the main guardians of local seeds and traditional production techniques that coexist in harmony with the environment.
The contribution of rural women, therefore, goes beyond the promotion of food sovereignty and also extends to water and energy sovereignty, and in particular to the conservation of the territories' genetic resources.
Therefore, although they produce food and health and effectively contribute to environmental conservation, the role of women is relegated and silenced socially, economically and politically. The violence of women's silence coexists with other forms of violence that strike them every day.
Barriers to access to land and to the factors of production and marketing are among the main reasons for the subordinate position of women in our societies. In several countries of the global South, access to land is a right formally denied to women. In countries where women can legally own land, ownership is systematically hampered by traditions, customs and production practices.
Problems range from difficulties in obtaining credit for land production and purchase; discrimination against young women in inheritance; cadastres and public land access policies that often ignore women as owners in the case of land reform and other interventions to support land purchase. Regarding credit, it should be noted that globally it is estimated that women receive only 1% of total agricultural loans (Fraser, 2009). This is a vicious circle, as land titles are often required as collateral to obtain credit, a factor that excludes most women.
In the case of Brazil, data from the 2017 IBGE agricultural census showed that women represent only 18.7% of rural producers. Despite having registered a significant increase compared to the 12.6% represented in the previous Census of 2006, they manage only 947,000 of the more than 5 million farms in the country.
Another aspect of inequality is manifested in relation to the amount of land controlled by women (in Brazil): approximately 30 million hectares, equivalent to 8.5% of the total area of agricultural properties in the country. The data also confirm that the larger the size of the farms, the lower the participation of women and vice versa. But women are twice as many as men on farms of less than 1 hectare.
This patriarchal reality also affects the conditions of rural succession. Much is said about the difficulties of keeping rural youth in the countryside. Young women face even greater difficulties than men, due to a series of prejudices on the part of parents and siblings, which extend to the whole of society. Suffice it to recall that only 1.3% of all rural producers are men under 25 years of age, while women of the same age group correspond to 0.3% of producers. In general, their properties also suffer from less access to water and agricultural machinery. In this regard, it should be noted that women drive only 14.7% of the farms with vehicles; 5.7% with tools and machinery; 5.6% with tractors.
One last aspect to highlight is the presence of women in the cooperatives. Due to the double or triple workday, women have less time to dedicate to community and political activities. The prejudice and violence they face in decision-making spaces, such as the boards of associations and cooperatives, add to the lack of time and contribute to the fact that only 5.3% of Brazilian rural women producers are linked to some form of cooperative in rural areas.
The great Alliance for the life of women and the planet
The Women Mother Earth Alliance is a way to guarantee food sovereignty and overcome the inequalities that have historically afflicted the lives of women, especially women in the countryside, forests and lakes and maritime spaces. This because it indicates a viable path to guarantee women's sovereignty over food and genetic resources by promoting access to land and building fair relationships around food production, trade and consumption.
The strength and will of the young people of the Economy of Francesco and Clare and many others who will join them lies in the questioning of the current system and the ability to idealize and articulate global and local efforts to reverse the historical and structural inequalities that affect women's lives and impact all inhabitants of the Common Home.
Under the leadership of Pope Francis, responding to his call, this enormous challenge has great potential. It will undoubtedly need to be strengthened by a wide range of national and international forces, governments and civil society organizations to turn this dream into reality: implementing policies and legislation and promoting local practices that focus on rural women, promoting sustainable agriculture food systems and the food sovereignty of territories and countries.
The two social encyclicals of the Magisterium of Francis remind us that, on the road to making a just, democratic and participatory care economy, we must count on the support of these agents of transformation. The commitments established with the actors of the global peripheries began in 2014, when representatives of the World People's Movements (including the movements for the new economies) met with Francis and agreed on an agenda committed to the consolidation of the pillars: Land, Roof. and Work (9).
The Women Mother Earth Alliance seeks to strengthen these commitments, a few years down the road, at a time that today seems ripe for further consolidation.
Authors
Andrei Thomaz Oss-Emer, Master in Philosophy from the Federal University of Pelotas, teacher at the School of São Francisco de Assis, SCALIFRA-ZN educational network.
Lea Vidigal, Law graduate from the University of Sao Paulo, Master's and Doctorate in Economic Law from the University of Sao Paulo.
Lilian de Pelegrini Elias, Bachelor's Degree in Economics from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Master's Degree and PhD in Economic Development from the State University of Campinas.
Luiza Dulci, BA in Economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, MA in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and PhD student in Social Sciences, Development and Agriculture at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.
Valentina Cattivelli, PhD in Economics and Management of Agricultural Systems from Universita 'Cattolica Piacenza-Milan, researcher in social agriculture and urban horticulture. Coordinator of the Village Agriculture and Justice (Francesco's Economy).
Elisabetta Basile DPhil (University of Oxford), former Professor of Development Economics, Faculty of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome, senior member of the Agriculture and Justice Village (Francesco's Economics). Latest published book Building Development Studies in the New Millennium, Palgrave / Macmillan, Basingstoke (co-edited with Isa Baud, 2019).
Paolo Groppo, Officer (R), FAO Land Regimes Service, member of the Senior Village Agriculture and Justice Team (Francesco Economics). Last published book: The agrarian and ecogenetic crisis explained to non-specialists (Meltemi, 2020).
References
Food policies. Food deserts. South Dakota. Available at this link: https://alimentandopoliticas.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Desertos-Alimentares.pdf
Fraser, Arabela. Using agriculture for development. Oxfam research report. London: Oxfam International, 2009. Available at this link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242098882_Harnessing_Agriculture_for_Development
Jalil, Laetícia Medeiros. Women and food sovereignty: the struggle for the transformation of rural Brazil. 2009. 197p. Dissertation (Master in Social Sciences). Institute of Social and Human Sciences. Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.
Summary of social indicators. An analysis of the living conditions of the Brazilian population: 2019. IBGE - Coordination of demographic and social indicators. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2019.
Available at this link: https://bibuxelles.ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/livros/liv101678.pdf
Notes
(1) http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/letters/2019/documents/papa-francesco_20190501_giovani-imprese.html
(2) Between March and November 2020, the 2,000 young economists worked in 12 different thematic villages. Deliberately provocative, the village titles spark interest and stimulate "thinking outside the box." In fact, they are based on the juxtaposition of two terms that in the current sense of economic language take on opposite meanings, but appear complementary in Francesco's Economics perspective: Management & Gift; Finance & Humanities; Work & Care; Agriculture & Justice; Energy & Poverty; Business & Peace; Women for the Economy; CO2 of Inequalities; Vocation & Profit; Business in Transition; Life & Lifestyle; and Policy & Happiness.
(3) As required by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
(4) https://www.vaticannews.va/pt/vaticano/news/2020-10/argentina-terra-teto-trabalho-papa-francisco-fratelli-tutti.html
(5) According to FAO data (FAO, 1996), in many African countries women account for 70% of field work; they are responsible for providing 90% of the domestic water supply and 60-80% of the production of food consumed and sold by the family. Women's work is equivalent to 100% of food processing, 80% of food storage and transport activities and 90% of soil preparation prior to planting. These figures demonstrate the crucial role that African women play in small-scale agricultural production and in sustaining the livelihoods of their families (Vivas, 2020).
(6) https://www.ibge.gov.br/estatisticas/sociais/saude/9221-sintese-de-indicadores-sociais.html
(7) Household income per capita less than USD 5.50 PPP per day.
(8) http://dspace.unive.it/bitstream/handle/10579/13874/847781-1224078.pdf?sequence=2
(9) http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141028_incontro-morld-movimenti-popolari.html
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