Women unite to save the planet - and their rights

Scan page 6

MIAMI, Fla.—Two global issues for the 199.0s—the environment and full equality for women-converged here on Nov. 9-12 in a massive gathering of women from 83 different nations. Fifteen hundred women attended.

Bella Abzug, the welcoming speaker for the first World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet, said the congress was organized because "women have been almost invisible in policy-making on environment and development issues. That's why women, who are more than 50 percent of the world's population, must participate and be heard-when decisions are made that affect all our lives and the health of Mother Earth."

The congress was organized by The Women's Environment and Development Organization and spearheaded by Abzug, the former New York congresswoman. One of its main goals was to gain equal representation for women's viewpoints at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which will be held in Brazil next June.

The June 1-12 UN conference will draw heads of state from 159 nations, making it the largest summit ever held. A parallel People's Congress of thousands of citizen activists will occur simultaneously in Brazil, underscoring rank-and-file activist distrust of the summit's general environmental agenda.

A tribunal At the Miami congress, experienced women, who have been leading mass grassroots environmental campaigns from the Philippines to Kenya, or researching environmental problems and questions such as population growth, biogenetics, and ecological degradation presented reports of their activities.

The congress was organized in the form of a tribunal. Judges from Guyana, Kenya, Australia, Sweden, and India took testimony from witnesses from every region of the world, who documented evidence of their battles against economic and ecological devastation.

The participants also acted as jurors, taking testimony from the tribunal's morning sessions, along with their own experiences, to a series of workshops, where they developed recommendations and action proposals for a healthy planet. These proposals were then incorporated into an action agenda, which was presented to Maurice Strong, leader of the UN conference, on the final day of the five-day conference.

There were 230 women from Africa, nearly 200 from Latin America, and sizable delegations from Asia, the Middle East, and the South Pacific. The conference committee was criticized from the floor by Native-American women who had not been included as either judges or witnesses.

The fact that many of the sessions and workshops dealt with economic and development issues and were chaired by Third World women put the conference agenda on a collision course with Bush's proposed New World Order.

For example, Leonor Briones, president of the mass Philippine Freedom from Debt Coalition, pointed out the relationship between the environmental degradation in neocolonial areas and the foreign debt. She called for the cancellation of the debt.

The most radical speeches received standing ovations. Speaker after speaker attacked the "private enterprise system" and spoke of the need for a new collectivist economic model, which would include no less than 40 percent and no more than 60 percent female leadership to solve environmental problems.

The Action Agenda The congress came out with a comprehensive economic and political agenda for action, which states in part: "We come together to speak ... for the millions of women who experience the violence of poverty, environmental degradation and exploitation of their work and bodies due to capital before human need and ecological well-being. ... In a world in which nature and women are systematically exploited by a so-called 'free-market' ideology, there can be no environmental security."

On the debt and trade, the program acknowledged the disastrous social, environmental, and economic consequences of international lending practices and current terms of trade between industrialized and non-industrialized nations. It called for immediate debt forgiveness and the cancellation of commercial debt for the Third World debtor nations.

It called for the recognition of women's access to food and land tenure as a basic human right. And it demanded restrictions on and regulation of research and development in biotechnology and the commodification of "free gifts of nature," such as the patenting of life forms and genetic resources.

On militarism and the environment, the program calls for an immediate 50 percent reduction in military spending, the dismantling of all nuclear weapons, and the creation of civilian review commissions made up of 50 percent women, which would open to public scrutiny all military activities, expenditures, and research. It demanded that all national armies be converted into environmental protection corps to monitor and repair damaged ecosystems:

It called for science and technology to be placed at the service of the many rather than for the profit of the few. The Action Agenda called for boycotts of industries and products that are harmful to the environment and health, and funding for safe alternative energy sources.

On population control, women's rights, and health, the conference condemned the suggestion that women's fertility rates are the cause of environmental degradation and squarely blamed economic systems which exploit ana misuse nature ana people and industrial pollution and military technology. It rejected top-down, demographically driven population policies and programs that disrespect the human rights of women.

At the same time, it recognized the right to reproductive health and choice as a basic human right and noted that 500 million couples wish to plan their families and have no access to the means to do so. It condemned any attempt to deprive women of their right to reproductive freedom, and demanded women-centered, women-managed, comprehensive reproductive healthcare and family planning-including the right to legal, voluntary contraception and The most obvious failure of the congress was its lack of a call for internationally coordinated environmental actions, and many women expressed their frustration with this fact in the workshop sessions. But in spite of the conference frameworkwhich focused on the UNCED summit in Brazil-considerable networking went on among the 1500 participants, and many women were able to plan coordinated future activities.