part six: conclusion – privatization
and the poor
excluding the poor
Of all the negative environmental and
social impacts of privatization, the most
profound one is the marginalization of poor
consumers. When the delivery of public
services, like water provision and
environmental care, is put in the hands of
the private sector, the consequence is
usually a shift to more profit-oriented
policies.
Poor consumers are of no interest to
profit-oriented industries. For that
reason, water companies tend to prioritize
water delivery to rich urban
neighbourhoods, and ignore the often more
desperate needs for safe drinking water in
remote rural communities and other poor
sectors of society.
The poorest also lose out when the
production side of an environmental market
is put in hands of the private sector.
While it is generally recognized, through
success-stories like the Green Belt
Movement, that small-scale communities are
the most efficient producers of
biologically diverse reforestation and
landscape restoration projects, it is also
acknowledged that they are losing out in
the rapidly developing market of carbon
sequestration projects. The complicated and
expensive procedures to access the funding
available under the Clean Development
Mechanism and other Kyoto Protocol
mechanisms make it virtually impossible for
small-scale initiatives to be funded. The
handful of well known examples like the
Costa Rican environmental services scheme
and the Scolel Té project in Mexico, have
all been the result of intense involvement
of the public sector, in the form of
generous donor support and government
control.
Landless farmers arguably form the most
influential rural sector as far as the
maintenance of forest cover and other
biological resources are concerned, as they
are often forced to produce in the most
remote and thus most natural rural areas.
Yet, as they have no legally recognized
land title, there is no opportunity for
them to receive any reward for their
conservation efforts through environmental
services schemes like carbon trade, the
sale of genetic resources or financial
compensation for watershed management. On
the contrary, these schemes tend to
marginalize them even further as they
provide preferential support through
incentives that can be claimed by
large-scale producers of these services,
such as monoculture tree plantation
companies and large, foreign conservation
organizations. It is not accidental that
the first large carbon sequestration
project in Brazil favoured a high
monoculture tree plantation company like
Plantar, rather than the millions of
landless farmers who have been, de facto,
managing and restoring millions of hectares
of precious Brazilian ecosystems.
women, the main victims of
privatization
Women form the overwhelming majority of
the world's monetary poor. They also form
the greater part of the world's landless
farmers. As women tend to spend a very
significant amount of their time on
activities such as household tasks,
childcare and maintaining vegetable
gardens, the economic value of which is not
recognized, they are further marginalized
when the monetary economy starts to
dominate sectors that are crucial for their
livelihoods. This is precisely what happens
when basic needs like water and
biodiversity are privatized. Women become
the main victims when water provision is
put into private hands as they have less
money to pay for drinking water and are
thus not an interesting target group for
profit-oriented water companies. This
creates ever worsening circumstances as it
is women who are primarily responsible for
water provision in many households. Water
that used to be free, and that used to be
fresh.
Paying a high price for water hits women
particularly hard as it puts another burden
on their already relatively small income.
Moreover, it makes them even more dependent
upon their husbands or partners who tend to
be the main earners of cash income in the
family. In most societies men are still
free from household and childcare tasks,
which means that they can dedicate all
their time to remunerated work. Even in
agriculture, where, in addition to
maintaining the family vegetable gardens,
fruit trees and other sources of essential
nutrients for household consumption, women
are often also involved in the production
of cash crops, they rarely have control
over the monetary income generated by the
sale of such crops.
Large-scale tree plantations, favored by
carbon trade schemes also marginalize
women. In many societies women are
responsible for gathering fuelwood, but
they seldom have the money to pay for it.
When energy provision is taken over by the
commercial carbon market, whether through
large-scale tree plantations or other
commercial energy services, women again
risk marginalization, becoming yet more
dependent on their husbands' income.
In addition, large-scale plantations are
clearly not forests, because the former do
not provide any of the non-timber forest
products provided by the latter, such as
food, fuel, material for handicrafts,
resources used for housing, household items
and medicines. They also deplete the water
resources they depend on. In
forest-dependent communities it is
precisely these non-timber products that
are essential for household survival and it
is the women who are responsible for their
collection. The spread of large-scale tree
plantations, therefore, often has the
effect of increasing the burden on women’s
time and energy, as they are forced to
spend more hours and cover greater
distances in order to obtain nontimber
products without which the household cannot
survive.
The privatization of traditional
knowledge and genetic resources (such as
medicinal plants) through biopiracy also
has an impact on women. While women are
often the main caretakers of traditional
knowledge and medicinal plants in the
community, providing these essential health
care services free to their families and
other community members, biopiracy tends to
be men's business. It is the men who
normally hold the formal decision-making
power in the community, and the land
titles. Thus, if a pharmaceutical company
that wants to buy traditional knowledge and
medicine approaches a community, it is
normally the men who decide whether to sell
that knowledge, and receive the monetary
reward. Moreover, the subsequent patents
applied on these traditional medicines can
make it impossible for women to use their
own knowledge, even if the health of their
own children is at stake.
Women also form the majority of the
world's landless. Even when a family does
have formal title to a piece of land, the
holder of the title deed is generally the
man, leaving the woman excluded from the
carbon sinks and water abatement schemes
that are currently being developed by
neo-liberal think-tanks. However, the Green
Belt Movement was not accidentally a
women's movement: it is women who have been
the leading force behind the conservation
of forests, woods, wetlands and other
precious ecosystems that provide them with
the non-monetary resources they need to
take care of their families. This varies
from basic needs like drinking water,
edible plants, honey, traditional medicine,
fuelwood and fodder, to ornaments like
flowers for cultural festivities.
Of course, increasing the monetary power
of women by engaging them in the formal
economy, through increased employment
opportunities, will make the impact of the
privatization of basic services less harsh.
This is the recipe that the IFIs prescribe.
Yet, do we really want to fully privatize
child and parental care, the care for
households and homegardens, cultural events
and the many other informal activities that
take up women's time? The main problem with
the "efficiency" approach that advocates
incorporating women into the waged labour
market is that it ignores women’s other
socially assigned responsibilities and by
default regards women’s time as infinitely
elastic.
Nature's value to us cannot be valued in
monetary terms. This is recognized by many,
and included in the formal policy
recommendations in the Convention on
Biodiversity. Yet, there is still too
little awareness that this also means that
nature will be disadvantaged in a monetary
economy. Privatizing nature means more than
marginalizing the monetary poor. It means
marginalizing our values.
