FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT: Experiences from Africa.

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FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT
Experiences from Africa.

• By Monica Opole
• Plant Genetic resources and Seed Policies,
  conservation and use
• 19-11-2010.

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FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT
Experiences from Africa

• Empowering women calls for creating links for
  facilitation between indigenous knowledge systems
  and modern science thus developing the creation
  of inter-linkages of new multi-displinary work
  that enables the creation of tools for a common
  understanding of the multiple values of plants as
  herbals and food.

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FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT
Experiences from Africa.

• Defining the Problem through the gender eye
• Effective sustainable natural resource
  management will not stem from
• the conflicts posed by the written laws, or that
  of the unwritten laws of the land that define
  customarily laws of indigenous communities and
  cultures in managing farmers rights.
• In this complex world, we need new or enabling
  indigenous knowledge know-how, or legal
  structures that are vested ,time-tested methods
  that are applied by indigenous peoples, need to
  be put in place to strengthen, and reinforce
  effective gender management of biodiversity for
  food and medicine.

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FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT
Experiences from Africa.

• The Question
• This presentation seeks to re-view and re-visit
  from a technical scientific angle the role women
  play in science and technology in- linking up
  their inherited technical knowledge with modern
  know-how of science for food, against a
  background of farmers right.
• Some views/responses
• Women's empowerment in Natural resources
  management-particularly PGR for food, stems from
  inherited knowledge passed down along familial
  gender lines and shared-or-transferred by
  marriage relationships. This means that females
  from communities rich in local know-how and seed
  material are considered highly for their
  inherited local know-how for plants for food for
  special occasions such as the Basmati rice in
  East Africa for weddings.
• Such knowledge specific seed function/utility
  maintained intra-species variation of
  biodiversity on-farm, and off-farm.

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FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT
Experiences from Africa.

• For example Gynandropsis gynandra or Spider
  weed has about four known wild edible varieties
  with multiple uses rather than food alone.
  Indigenous women who know of their medicinal
  value to-date only one variety is in the common
  market.

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FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT
Experiences from Africa.
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• Why work this way?
• Women's empowerment in pgr calls for A new
  paradigm and An alternative ways of thinking
  and evaluating indigenous knowledge systems.
  Seeds are components of a knowledge system, and
  are important embodiment of local systems of
  informal seed exchange, and reflect wider social
  indigenous relation to seeds at the same time
  seed is also exponentially increasingly and
  becoming prominent in global trade, industry and
  commerce tool. Seeds often occupy a central place
  in cultural beliefs, practices and rituals
  equally, they are routinely used as a political
  tool.

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Gender, Farmers Rights Community Rights in
seed systems. The case of underutilized food
plants.
If it works it will be adopted by the private
sector!
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Gender, Farmers Rights Community Rights in
seed systems. The case of underutilized food
plants.
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FARMERS RIGHTS AND WOMENS EMPOWERNMENT
Experiences from Africa.

• African indigenous knowledge have no patents as
  we know of them. In the WTO, members have to
  provide patent protection for any inventions in
  any field of technology, excluding indigenous
  technology of developing nations like Africa.
• Members of WTO may exclude plants and animals,
  but if they do, they have to provide protection
  through patents, and effective sui generis
  system or a combination thereof Article 27(3)b
  may be developed
• Other problems rights on harvested material can
  be mis-used, Yet
• Exchange of seed is a cultural right
• Exchange of seed is a Farmers Right
• Therefore, Farmers varieties should be
  protectable-just as indigenous technical
  knowledge.
• Farmers varieties should be protectable also
  just as indigenous products and by-products.
• Citation

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Conclusion

• Farmers rights exist within two sets of
  institutions that elucidate social organization
  as two spheres of authority management
• (i) Management of indigenous communities
  through their traditional time-tested system
  cultural knowledge human resource management.
• (ii) Management of people (indigenous
  communities and others) through a constituency,
  or a formal system of governance.
• Africa and most developing countries recognize
  the existence of these two social organizations
  of a people, but linkages are needed to create
  global understanding.
• In East Africa the process has started in the
  East African Assembly and the Constitution making
  process in Kenya, as enabling opportunities.

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Thank you