this is a fantastic book.
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The Promise of Land
In 1994, Bina Agarwal, a professor at the University of New Delhi, wrote the seminal book on gender and land rights - A Field of One's Own. Last week, the US State Department released a rather distorted version of Agarwal's conclusions. In a release entitled "Women's Lack of Property Rights Linked to Abuse, Experts Say", the State department has reduced the complex web of social and material burdens on women to one simple solution, and one simple right - the right to private property.
Of course, it is an indictment of our planet that women control pitifully little of it - one factoid based, as far as I've been able to find out, on data that's now over 20 years old, is this: women grow more than half the food in the Global South, but own less than 1% of the land there.
But rights to property are one set of rights among many - such as rights to healthcare, to education, to employment. And in Promised Land, a book I've just finished editing, Sofia Monsalve has put the case for women's rights to land in a far broader context.
She asks whether women's rights to land are "The Trojan Horse of Neoliberalism", pointing out that women's rights to land have often been the stealth-mechanism to privatise land. Ownership is, after all, only one way in which society regulates the control of land. It's possible to control something without being entitled to sell it (and possible, in fewer cases admittedly, to own something without being able to control it).
In Latin America the contradictions of women’s rights to land and property constituted as individual rights have been called into question primarily by indigenous peoples. Deere and León record an Ecuadorian indigenous woman who, in the early 1990s, said: “[T]he whole issue of gender and rights to land is irrelevant, since indigenous peoples have not put forward the individual demand to land; it has always been collective from the community’s perspective”
(Deere and León 2002, 305).
You can read her thoughtful weaving through these issues
here (and visit Food First to read the rest of the book, free).
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Ch.2. Farmers | gender | land | landless | via campesina
Posted on 13 December, 2006 - 09:06
Submitted by Research Paper (not verified) on 10 March, 2009 - 10:01.
I've elided two separate strands of argument here - when the State Department calls for womens' rights to land, they're very clear that they're referring to individual rights. But there are other ways that rights can be made operative, such as through collective rights.
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Submitted by Anonymous on 3 January, 2007 - 14:47.
Thanks for this, Raj. Why are women's rights to land necessarily or commonsensically conceptualized as individual women's rights to sell individual parcels of property? Deere and Leon, and even more Agarwal, suggest that women's rights to land would mean the rights of the social majority, who are women and girls, to collective access, use, and enjoyment, permanently and securely. Another form of control is possible? No?
See ya, Dan
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Submitted by Raj on 31 January, 2007 - 08:20.
You're dead right about rights Dan. I've elided two separate strands of argument here - when the State Department calls for womens' rights to land, they're very clear that they're referring to individual rights. But there are other ways that rights can be made operative, such as through collective rights.
Traditional legal systems often have collective rights to land embedded within them. Trouble is that these systems are almost without exception even more oppressive than straightforward constitutional legal systems, in which individual property is prized above all else. This tightrope is one that was discussed, but not resolved, at the World Social Forum's discussions on women and land here
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Submitted by http://www.homeloanlawyer.com/ (not verified) on 13 March, 2009 - 20:03.
But, as the Independent Evaluation Group delicately puts it, "in most reforming countries, the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew.
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Submitted by HID KITS (not verified) on 11 March, 2009 - 07:28.
eere and Leon, and even more Agarwal, suggest that women's rights to land would mean the rights of the social majority, who are women and girls, to collective access, use, and enjoyment, permanently and securely.
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Submitted by online games (not verified) on 11 March, 2009 - 07:24.
Hello raj,myself santie. Thanks for quality and quantity content.
will be back with many questions.
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