Summary Report: "Panel Discussion on Gender, Trade and Sustainable
Development"

by Gigi Francisco

(The panel was put together to present a women's critique of how corporate capital had used "sustainable development" to legitimise a global neo-liberal agenda ? and with it, gender mainstreaming into the highly compromised WSSD text ? as well as propose an alternative agenda informed by environmental, social and gender justice.)

Ewa Charkiwiecz, DAWN Co-Coordinator for Sustainable Livelihoods opened the panel with a feminist interrogation of how global corporate capital is now more rapidly able to move, accumulate and reproduce around the world. An inherent element of this process is not only capital's sustained exploitation of men's and women's labor or of its externalization of environmental costs as already raised by environmentalists. Feminists would also argue that capital extracts profit from its externalization of the costs of social reproduction, to the households and to the national budgets.

The speeding up of profit generation stands as the reason for our increasingly threatened world. The WTO trade rules are aimed at removing all regulations and barriers so that companies can make fast profits. It is also breaking down environmental protection which is seen as a barrier to trade. Social protection is likewise eroded and people are asked to assume care from the market, on their own costs. With an increasingly globalised world, companies compete with each other by moving and accumulating capital faster in such a way that environmental and human reproduction are increasingly jeopardised.

Economic systems extract from the environment in a way that has had a tremendous impact on people's livelihoods and communities. We all know that we live in a world of environmental limits. But added to this, we must realize that we also live in a world of social limits ? care and social reproduction cannot endlessly take the pressures arising from economic insecurity.

The answer is not found in the efficiency model. This will only benefit corporate capital. Nature and reproductive work fit into the profit motive of companies. Why? Because these are not important categories in the language of the market. The market is simply about the exchange of goods and is treated as a closed set of circular activities. Economists and many government technocrats believe that markets are free and neutral but given the invisibility of nature and human reproduction in their equation, we should strongly question the assertion of the "optimal allocation by markets."

A strong critique of the Rio +10 and WSSD Agenda was presented by Naty Bernardino of the International South Group Network who began her presentation by saying that the document now being finalized at the 4th Ministerial Meeting should be entitled Rio Minus 10.

Today, there is widespread poverty and an environmental crisis. Looking back at Rio, one could say that the corporations were the most happy among the lobbyists at that meeting. Why? Because they were able to ride on the Green Agenda without accountabilities by successfully inserting voluntary principles throughout the text. At this 4th Ministerial Meeting, business lobbyists are making sure that the same language is defended, if not strengthened.

Corporations are secure within the framework of the WSSD. It is an overarching framework that says globalization can work for everyone. All there is to do is to repair some of its weaknesses. Sadly, the WSSD continues to lack an analysis of the fundamental inequity in wealth and power relations between states and peoples. Now, too, the world has to confront the unilateralist stature and military expansionism of the richest economy in the world, the United States of America.

Two country presentations came next that demonstrated how the interests of corporations and governments intersect within the neo-liberalist political and economic framework. Both speakers strongly reasserted the need for social justice to become one of the pillars on which sustainable development must stand on.

Brenda Tohiana who was representing DAWN in the Pacific spoke of the recent struggle of the women and men in Bougainville against the combined forces of a powerful corporation Rio Tinto and the government of Papua New Guinea. Rio Tinto through its subsidiary the Bougainville Copper Limited was given a license to operate in 1972 by the government of Papua New Guinea.

Bougainville society is a matrilineal system where the inheritance to land rights is maintained through the woman who is both titleholder and custodian of tribal land. The women are both arbiters and decision makers on issues of land. The granting of the mining lease by the then colonial administration had seriously undermined and eroded the position of power held by the women in the area. There had been no legal requirement for the company or the government to conduct any dialogue with landowners related to the mining activities. Both the government and the corporation based their proceedings on an archaic Australian Law which stipulated that what was beneath the soil belonged to the state even while it was widely known that this law ran contrary to the Bougainville traditional law that claimed ownership of everything both on the land and beneath the soil.

The mine turned out to be an enormous source of income for the government, generating almost two thirds of its revenue at the time. This was an attractive incentive for the government to overlook environmental degradation, The cost to the landowners and villagers was massive. The nearly 12,000 hectares of land and fertile river valleys that was covered by the mining lease to cater for road access and waster disposal, was destroyed by wastes containing high levels of copper concentrates.

In 1988-89 the women landowners organised and mobilised themselves to demand compensation payments for environmental damages and a fair lease price for their land. Ignored by both the company and the government, the landowners struck back with vengeance and blew up the power pylons supplying power to the mine with explosives stolen from the mine's explosive store. This action achieved a track record in shutting down what was at the time the world's biggest open cut copper mine.

That was the beginning of a ten-year guerilla warfare. During this period, the government imposed a six-year blanket blockade on the island, in which 2000 children died (Red Cross estimate) during the first two years of the blockade. More than 15,000 people died during the conflict. The Australian Government through its defense aid package backed the PNG Government by supplying helicopters outfitted with automatic weapons. Bougainvillians have also been suspicious all along that corporate money was being used to sustain the PNG security forces. Where would the government get money so quickly to replace what it had lost from the mine revenue?

The UN was appraised of events in Bougainville as early as 1991 when a delegation to the UN Committee on the Rights of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples that was meeting in Geneva, accused the PNG government of numerous atrocities, including extra judicial executions, disappearances, ill treatment and arbitrary arrests and detention including of women and children (Amnesty International).

A negotiated settlement has been reached by the Bougainvillians for an autonomous government for the island. At the same time landowners had unsuccessfully filed a class action suit against Rio Tinto in San Francisco with the Central District Court of California seeking environmental compensation payments of US$30 million. The PNG government threatened the plaintiffs with retribution and Rio Tinto belatedly offered an out of court settlement of US$12 million which the plaintiffs rejected outright. Sadly the case was dismissed, not for lack of substance or form, but because the US State Department, in an unprecedented move notified the presiding judge "the success of the Bougainville Peace Process represents an important United States policy objective? and continued adjudication of the claims would risk a potentially serious adverse impact on the peace process."

For Bougainvillians, the big question remain: Why should the State Department of the United States take the extraordinary step of frustrating the efforts of victims of human rights abuses to sue in a federal court which has proper legal jurisdiction? How can we now trust governments when they say they stand for the protection of the environment, human rights and rule of law?

The final speaker, Dita Sari of the FNPBI, focused her presentation on how problems faced by Asian women had been aggravated by the recent Asian Financial Crisis (AFC). She reminded the participants that the AFC is but one in a series of crises linked to the long-running debt problem of developing countries. The impact of recent financial crises was more severe and dramatic because it took place within an economic environment that had rapidly de-regulated and privatised through the World Bank and IMF policy prescriptions.

On the production front, the AFC had further eroded the real value of the minimum wage. For the poor in Asia, the minimum wage is nothing but the legalization of poverty. Afraid of discouraging foreign investors, governments systematically depressed the minimum wage.

On the social reproduction front, there was a simultaneous roll-back in social services. In Indonesia, drastic cuts in health and education had meant that women who are the household managers and carers now need to find these services from the market. Moreover, we have been receiving reports of an increase in the incidence of violence against women that are taking place in families and in intimate relations. Maternal mortality, which is very high in Indonesia, remains a major reproductive health issue for women.

There is now increased pressure for women to find employment outside of the home at a time when their labor and time is also pressured by increasing burdens in social reproduction within the household. Since the AFC there had been an increase in women looking for jobs in the sectors of migrant work and informal work. Prostitution has become one big market that sucks in young women.

Clearly, this whole neo-liberalism is creating a crisis for women ? not only in production or in the market, in social production but in their personal lives, as well.

The discussion ended with a set of demands and actions proposed by the speakers. These were as follows:

1. Regulating or "civilising" capital, to include taxing of corporations for environmental and social reproduction costs.
2. Expanding the coverage of the precautionary principle beyond toxics, to cover other social concerns / costs. 
3. Asserting workers' rights to living wages.
4. Protecting local markets and within it, of women's livelihoods. 
5. Challenging national states and demanding for those in power to shift their national priorities and policies. 
6. Intensifying efforts to re-vitalise social movements at the base by linking responses to day-to-day needs of poor women and men ? including identities-related concerns ? with a broader political, economic and social transformation agenda. 
7. Linking national level resistance with ? in order to broaden ? the global people's resistance against corporate-led globalization. 
8. Recognising the legitimacy of disengagement that many disgruntled NGOs and social movements have put forward and examining closely the "insider/outsider" problematic in relation to the crisis of global institutions, such as the UN, that are increasingly consolidated under corporate interests.