A conference on the impacts and women’s responses to the economic and climate crises and war.

Background

The recent years have unfolded multi- faceted, yet interconnected global crises encompassing the economic and ecological spheres. Women have long been facing multiple forms of discrimination, and the current crises further increased their vulnerabilities.

The food crisis in 2008 was an evidence of the deepening crisis that resulted from the corporate interventions by mega agro-chemical transnational corporations (TNCs) in the agriculture sector. Women play critical roles in agriculture and in food production, yet the impacts of the food crisis especially at the household level is borne by women. The 2009 Hunger Map of the United Nations World Food Programme (UN-WFP) shows that almost one billion people regularly suffer from hunger, mostly are women and children.

Profit-driven industrial production has resulted in many irreversible damages to the environment and 2009 bears witness to many climate disasters which are becoming worse than in previous years. The official process to address climate crisis is increasingly being discredited for its disappointing outcome and potentially dangerous direction.

What is clear is the further destruction of the sources of livelihood and the loss of lives among poor communities. Women comprise a disproportionately large share of the poor in countries all over the world. Women, particularly in rural areas in developing countries, are highly dependent on local natural resources for their livelihood because of their gender-assigned responsibility to secure water, food and energy for cooking and heating. The effects of climate change make it harder to secure these resources.

Threatened by the same crises, the global dominant forces have increased their efforts to retain and extend their control over productive resources and markets, leading to a heightened state of war and militarism. In the guise of the US-led “war on terror”, resource wars and massive militarization continuously becomes pervasive from Asia to the Pacific and across the globe. The avaricious intents to gain more access and control over the lands, mines, forests and other sources raw materials and cheap labour have displaced many families and exposed women to worse forms of violence and exploitation.

Apart from the atrocities brought about by wars and heightened militarization this situation has lent itself conveniently to autocratic and military leadership in many states. The hard-won fight for claiming the people’s rights have been quickly eroded by brutal military action against the people and their movements of resistance.


Rationale

With shrinking means of subsistence and material returns from livelihood, women’s displacement has included physical dislocation ranging from rural-to-rural, rural-to-urban and forced migration. This physical dislocation hides within yet many other contours of dispossession, emotional distress, physical and sexual abuse, and violence. There has also been particular erosion of women’s intangible spaces such as the solidarity and community support, leaving the basic survival weave of women’s lives being torn apart under the push of individualistic value systems generated by market-based consumption patterns and policies.

Although women have mostly been at the receiving end of the negative impacts of neoliberal globalization and war, the reality is that women through time have been going through various cycles of coping and adapting to the onslaught of the multiple crises. They have used the largely exploitative spaces opening up for them to find means of survival and support for themselves and their families. They have reached out to embrace new means of livelihood and formed new bonds to evade, as well as to confront patriarchal norms. Ranging from the illusory microfinance-based livelihood mechanisms to migrant domestic labor in urban and international settings; women have used their existing skills to survive in new spaces, at the same time learning new skills despite many being alien and difficult to overcome given the limitations in education available to women.

Women have utilized various mechanisms for taking control over their lives, ranging from simple coping mechanisms – such as finding new spaces for social and economic survival- to true liberation. Some have been carried out as lone individual survival mechanisms, others as community organizations and even more so as political organizations joining hands with other progressive forces. Women’s organized resistance has ranged from peace-building efforts to civil disobedience to joining hands with organized armed resistance. 

All of the above mechanisms need a collective lens to further fuel the struggles and resistances in order to achieve genuine development, more importantly this year as the world commemorates the centenary of the International Working Women’s Day.


‘Women Resisting Crisis and War: a conference on the impacts and women’s responses to the economic and climate crises and war’ will investigate on the following areas of study:

(a)    What are the specific dislocations, i.e. social, physical, emotional, cultural, psychological, confronting women due to economic and ecological disasters?

(b)    What are the specific manifestations of the war on women?

(c) What are the specific survival mechanisms used by women against the crisis and war? Survival mechanisms refer to both personal (technology and skill-based) and organizational (technology, unions, collectives, spontaneous organized action).

(d)    What are the effective forms of resistance?


Objectives

‘Women Resisting Crisis and War: a conference on the impacts and women’s responses to the economic and climate crises and war’ will provide scholarly and activist space:

(a)    for understanding the synergistic impacts of war, climate change and neoliberal policies which have been forced on women;

(b)    to deliberate and learn the various forms of resistances that women’s individual and collective efforts have put forward; and

(c)    to learn and develop new learning and strategies for resisting and overcoming neoliberal and neo-colonial militaristic onslaught.


The Conference commemorates and celebrates the centenary of the International Toiling Women’s Day. It also runs parallel with the focus of the August 2010 Montreal International Women’s Conference; i.e. how to advance a militant international women’s movement in the midst of the worst economic and financial crisis and wars of aggression the world has ever witnessed.


About the Conference

This is a 3-day conference to be held on July 19-21, 2010 in Baguio City, Philippines that will provide space to civil society organizations, including grassroots movements, academia, and other stakeholders.

Although a majority of the expected participants would be women from Asia Pacific region and from other global regions, the conference will also draw in the widest participation from men who recognize the cause for women’s rights and equality and liberation. The conference will have plenary sessions, panel discussions, simultaneous workshops, as well as spaces for creative presentations.

Workshops for Day 1 will focus on the theme: Surviving the Crisis (as the first line of resistance) and will have presentations on surviving climate disasters, hunger, and development aggression.

Workshops for Day 2 will revolve around the impacts and resistance to war and militarism, and will have presentations on: (a) impacts of war and militarism, (b) community resistances to war’s displacement; and (c) popular resistance to war and militarism.

There will be a Speak Out on Day 3, as well as deliberations on a conference declaration.

A Steering Committee has been formed to provide direction and guidance to the Conference. There is also a Program Committee to attend to the practical and logistical requirements of the Conference.

The following organizations are collaborating as conference organizers: Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN), GABRIELA National Alliance of Women’s Organizations in the Philippines, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), and the Asian Rural Women’s Coalition (ARWC). The Karibu Foundation, PLAN International and Innabuyog Alliance of Indigenous Women’s Organizations in the Cordillera Region, Philippines are also among the partners of this conference.

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