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Water Privatization
"If the wars of this century were fought over oil… The wars of the next century will be fought over water." -- World Bank Vice President, Ismail Serageldin "Water promises to be the 21st century what oil was to the 20th--the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations." --Fortune Magazine, May 2000 Fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce. Coerced by international financial institutions such as the World Bank, governments are being forced to privatize public resources, such as water. Governments must sell their fresh water sources to corporations as a way to raise money to pay off their loans. Such privatization schemes are often pre-conditions for these loans and are used to enhance corporate profits. Once corporations purchase the water, they then sell it for a high price back to the communities to whom the water belonged in the first place. This subversion of democracy and human rights is being resisted by peoples around the world. This is contributing to a worldwide water crisis where 12% of the world's population uses 85% of its fresh water, leaving 1.2 billion people without access to safe drinking water. "Water is essential to life. It is a basic human right. No one should be able to control it or expropriate it for profit. In the current global water crisis, billions of people still lack access to basic water and sanitation services. Everyday, thousands of people die from preventable diseases contracted because they do not have access to clean water." --Council of Canadians, "The Right to Water" Global Justice Ecology Project created a powerpoint called, "Water is the Blue Soul of the Planet" following the March 2006 Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City, which was attended and documented by Global Justice Ecology Project co-Director Orin Langelle. But privatization of water does not have to directly involve a corporation purchasing water directly. Industrial timber plantations and industrial agriculture monopolize and deplete fresh water sources. Toxic herbicides and pesticides sprayed on crops and plantations contaminate surface and ground water. Please support this important work with a secure contribution. View our Water Privatization Powerpoint. From the World Rainforest Movement's Bulletin 128, Water Forests and Climate: Life on Earth found its origin in water. And water continues to sustain all forms of life. This precious natural element has been respected and valued by all cultures except for the present dominant market-based culture which is increasingly converting water into a mere resource to be used and abused. Forests are a key component of the global water cycle. Forest degradation and destruction affects water reservoirs which together influence the earth's climate. In turn, climate change is impacting on forests, water and people. The main drivers of deforestation --transnational corporations-- by appropriating and destroying water and forests are putting at stake our common future on Earth. We intend this month's bulletin serves as a tool to highlight these connections and raise local communities' denounces. Struggles for water and for the climate: everybody's business
In this increasingly privatized world, to talk about water is almost synonymous with talking about its appropriation by some company to turn it into merchandise and source of profit. The seriousness of the situation has been understood by many people and has led to major struggles – sometimes pacific, sometimes violent – to avoid it passing into the hands of transnational corporations.
However, the role of transnational corporations goes far beyond the drinking water business and extends from pollution to the destruction of ecosystems that ensure the functioning of the water cycle.
Water does not become polluted on its own and the origin of its pollution is, in most cases, linked to large transnational corporations that either directly pollute or produce and sell contaminating substances that end up by poisoning the water.
In the first place, oil and mining companies stand out, dumping enormous quantities of contaminating substances in the areas where they settle. Secondly, come the companies that produce and sell toxic substances which have water as their final destination. Of course these are not the only companies involved, but they undoubtedly occupy an outstanding place on the long list of contaminating companies.
A different but equally serious case is that of the companies involved in the construction of major hydroelectric dams that destroy entire ecosystems – both aquatic and forest – affecting the innumerable species – including humans – that depend on them.
Shrimp farming companies are in a similar situation. Not only do they pollute water resources but also destroy mangrove ecosystems that are so important for the defence of coastal systems and related life.
Another case is that of companies involved in pulp production that install enormous fast-growing monoculture tree plantations to supply their factories with raw material. These trees consume – at no expense to the company – vast amounts of water, drying out wetlands, lagoons and water courses. Meanwhile, their enormous factories use water for their industrial processing for free, and return it polluted to the same water course they took it from.
The list is too long to compress it in an article, but it may generally be said that in all this process of destruction of water and of the ecosystems necessary to ensure the functioning of the water cycle, there is always at least one, and in most cases several, transnational corporations that have actually appropriated the resource.
In all cases, those most adversely affected are the local inhabitants, whose lives depend on the ecosystems and on the water resources polluted or degraded by these companies. Among urban inhabitants, the poorest are the most adversely affected as they find themselves obliged to buy bottled water because tap water is polluted. In turn, among the local inhabitants, those most adversely affected are usually women who are differentially hit by the changes on a local level.
On a more macro level, the greatest danger to water is related to climate change. On the one hand because one of its main causes – deforestation – has a negative impact on the water cycle. In fact the destruction of vast areas of forests affects the occurrence of rain and groundwater infiltration. On the other hand because climate change in itself entirely changes the hydrological regime, with the outcome of extreme phenomena such as droughts and floods.
Needless to say, behind the climate change phenomenon it is possible to identify major transnational corporations that are profiting either from deforestation processes or from exploitation and sale of fossil fuels and, more recently from carbon trading which they invented to obtain even greater profits from climate change, converted into a business.
For the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the planet, water cannot be equated to a business and even less can climate change be thus considered. Water contamination and scarcity, as well as, climate change are disasters to be avoided and not goods to be negotiated. Struggles – local, national and international – against the different processes and actors affecting water and the climate are not struggles of "opposition" but of affirmation: for the lives of this generation and future ones.
"The surface of the earth had not appeared. There was only the calm sea and the great expanse of the sky. There was nothing brought together, nothing which could make a noise, nor anything which might move, or tremble, or could make noise in the sky. There was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. … Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Forefathers, existed in the water surrounded by clarity." (Fragments from Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Maya, explaining the origin of the world).
In chemistry water, with the formula H2O, is explained as a substance that comes from the reactionn of hydrogen and oxygen. It has a molecular weight of 18 gr/mol and serves as a basis to measure the density of substances. Heat transforms it from a liquid to a gaseous state and cold changes it from liquid to solid. Water is vapour, cloud, ice, hailstone, snow, liquid, rain, brook, river, sea. It is also an acid, a hydroxide, a salt, and an oxide.
Only a small 2.5% of the total amount of water existing on the planet is fresh and therefore fit for human consumption. For the western and modern urban concept, water is a renewable resource and the growing trend is to consider it as yet another consumer element, a good that can be purchased and sold, appropriated, wasted and polluted.
But for ancient cultures and even for those that have not yet lost all links with nature, water is a sacred element, inspiring myths and legends. In some cases, because it was so hard to obtain and conserve it, it was given an almost divine value. The fluidity of water is birth and in sprouting is eternity (1). For this reason it appears as an element of origin, associated with what is sacred in most religions: in the texts of the Jewish Torah, in the Christian Old Testament, in the Muslim Koran, in the codex of Pre-Colonial religions, in Hindu practices with the River Ganges as their centre, in Egyptian mythology marked by the annual floods of the River Nile, in Greek, Roman and Chinese traditions.
In the present, the Indigenous Peoples at the 3rd World Forum on Water, held in Kyoto, Japan in March 2003, declared that they commit themselves to "... honour and respect water as a sacred being which sustains all life. Our knowledge, laws and traditional ways of life have taught us to be responsible, caring for this sacred gift that connects all life." When water is conceived of as something sacred, it is priceless and its value transcends the human species.
Beyond the belief in the sacredness of water, another line of thought holds access to drinking water as a basic human right. The first United Nations Conference on Water, held in 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina marked the starting point for a world reflection on a global water policy. There, for the first time, the international community agreed that all people have an equal right of access to drinking water in sufficient quantity and quality to cover their needs.
Today, 1,400 million people -1 out of 4 of the planet's inhabitants- lack access to drinking water. Differences and tensions increase unceasingly. While the inhabitants of California, USA have an average consumption of 500 litres per day, in Sudan this figure drops to 19 litres.
In 1992, Agenda XXI of the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, took up this idea once again. In 2000, the Special meeting of the United Nations General Assembly established the goal of reducing by half the number of people who do not have access to drinking water by 2015. The First World Alternative Forum on Water (2), held in Florence (Italy) in 2003, inspired by the Water Manifest (3) and by the reflections of the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre (Brazil), made a proclamation in favour of «another world and local water policy» seeking to ensure «the right to water for all the 8 billion people who will be living on the Planet in 2020 ».
But all these are proclamations have not been upheld for lack of political will on the part those entrusted to enforce them. On the contrary, all over the world pressure is increasing to privatize water services, like many other items and services. The transnational water companies, such as Bechtel, Veolia, Suez, Saur Bouygues, Nestlé, Vivendi Environnement, Danone, RWE, Thames Water, Southern Water, Coca-Cola, Aguas de Barcelona, just to name a few—rely on multilateral funding bodies that impose privatizing recipes on the countries of the South to achieve this.
Appropriation of water and generally its pollution by the industrial sector, also occurs through the – generally unpaid - use and abuse by enterprises such as pulp mills (which require vast amounts of water), mining, shrimp farming. Some of these activities also involve forest deterioration and destruction which in turn also has a direct and negative impact on the water cycle insofar as the forest is one of its key elements.
At the First People's Workshop in Defence of Water held in Mexico in 2005, "some of the modalities of water privatization" were identified (4). Among them:
* Privatization of territories and bioregions. The companies that trade and/or need bulk water for their activities seek the privatization of territories and entire bioregions to guarantee monopoly control over the resource, protected by changes in law.
* Privatization through diverting existing sources. Abundant water is provided to industrial users and agribusinesses through canals that divert whole rivers from their natural courses, and through the construction of infrastructure megaprojects like waterways and dams.
* Privatization by contamination. When major corporate users pollute the resource through use and abuse (for example mining, oil drilling, paper pulp, electricity companies, and agrochemical-intensive industrial monocultures) as a "collateral effect" they in fact appropriate a resource belonging to all and make it impossible for less-privileged sectors to use it.
Nigerian communities affected by oil companies, such as Shell, can testify to this. These companies pollute the waters of the Niger Delta which, according to a European Community study, contains hazardous oil levels both for aquatic and human life.
Industrial oil palm plantations, in addition to altering the water cycle through the deforestation they usually cause, additionally involve the scourge of agrochemicals used for pest, weed or plant disease control. These agrochemicals end up in surface and groundwater. In places where there is abundant rainfall, weed-killers such as glyphosate or paraquat are swept by the rain into streams and rivers, the only source of water for entire communities around the plantations, with the consequent effects on their health.
Finally it is all a question of politics. As appropriately explained by the Swiss ecologist, Rosmarie Bär, "when talking about water you have to talk about politics. Water policy goes hand in hand with soil policy and agricultural policy, with trade and economic policies, with environmental, social and sanitary policies and with equality policy."
Policies currently imposed all over the world are far from taking into account that we are part of a greater system that in turn belongs to other systems and others and others: from atoms to galaxies. What is done in one part of the system has repercussions on the others. As humanity, the urgent and enormous task before us is to reverse this deviation in order to recover the future and, with it, the marvel of life flowing, like water.
(1) "El agua", Comfama, http://www.comfama.com/contenidos/bdd/6358/AGUA.pdf; (2) "Florence Declaration for another Water Policy. Alternative World Water Forum Declaration" (21-22 March,2003), http://paginadigital.org/articulos/2003/2003terc/noticias5/agua25-4.asp; (3) "El manifiesto del agua", Ricardo Petrella, Barcelona, Meeting Icaria Editorial-Intermón Oxfam, 2002 ; (4) "Las caras de la privatización del agua", Silvia Ribeiro, La Jornada, April 2005, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2005/04/30/027a1eco.php Forests and water
The relationship between forests and water has long pre-existed the appearance of humans on the planet. Wherever water comes down from the skies with certain frequency, there is a forest. For scientists, forests are ecosystems hosting much biological diversity, both regarding different species and also regarding genes within the same species. They are places dominated by trees, but nevertheless composed also of plants of different species, sizes, ages and forms of life. We find lianas, creepers, ferns, shrubs, young trees and old trees that could tell us of history one thousand years before Christ. This gives rise to the great biodiversity these ecosystems host, as so many different plants provide food to many different animals.
And wherever there is a forest there is water. To start off with this is due to the fact that water is an essential requisite for plants as the process of photosynthesis needs three things: light, carbon dioxide and water. Additionally, forests develop and evolve in equilibrium with the quantity of water available to them –it is perhaps for this reason that once they have developed, they protect it.
Forests provide various factors that generate conditions to conserve water. Firstly: they lower the temperature by providing shade, preventing water from evaporating and migrating to the sky. Secondly: forests capture the clouds making them pass slower over them, leaving more humidity behind them. Thirdly: they improve the soil by making it more absorbent through the incorporation of organic matter, enabling water to filter through and not runoff over the soil. Fourthly: they make water reach the soil more slowly, trapping it in the tree canopy and letting it fall along the trunk, thus giving the soil more time to absorb it, preventing the water from eroding the soil by falling rapidly.
Indigenous cultures are well aware of the relationship between water and the forest. The Mapuche people, who inhabit southern Chile, find spirits-forces that protect water in the native forest. The Gñen-ko, inhabit a sacred place within the forest, the meno-ko, the site where water is born. The Gñen-ko punish those who enter the meno-ko without asking permission, or those who enter without a valid reason, like for instance to extract medicinal plants to cure a sick person.
Lucinda Pichicona, a Mapuche woman, tells us that: "sometimes, out of need, they have taken plants, trees to sell for firewood, for heating, to make fences, they have taken out and destroyed their small forests. ...and many people have cleared, for example there are institutions that come and (say) that the water must be cleaned, that everything has to be very clean and many Mapuche have cleared the springs where they got their water, clearing and cutting down the trees so the leaves don't fall into the water because previously the leaves fell into the water but they used to push them away and take out the water. Because they were told that the water was dirty the people cut the trees to prevent the leaves from falling in. And what happened, the water dried up. And then they understood that by taking away the plants the water is no longer there and they do not have any Gñen that produce water" (1).
When a forest that had developed in equilibrium with local environmental conditions disappears, this equilibrium is seriously altered. The soils and slopes are exposed to erosion agents, of which water is the strongest. It is precisely what best demonstrates the relationship between these three factors. Without the forest, water and soil almost mutually repel each other in lands where the topography is not flat. However with the presence of the forest a natural web is generated, enabling water and soil to maintain a closer relationship, coming nearer and staying together much longer.
When the native forest is replaced by plantations of foreign trees, the water-soil relationship is destroyed, this is so because the only trees able to establish a balance between them are those developed according to the characteristics that both factors exhibit in a given location.
A Mapuche man from the Lumaco region, explained:" Now there is not much menoko because the forestation companies entered everywhere, they surrounded the community; the water decreased...very specially the menoko, the springs. And now as they have planted pine trees and the pine trees are now growing this water has dried up. And the community is rather sad. It is not like the life we had before" (1).
We know that three-quarters of the planet are cover by water, but for this water to be available to humans there must be sufficient forests to place it at our disposal. If not, we will only see it passing by.
By Alejandra Parra, RADA (Network for Environmental Rights Action - Red de Acción por los Derechos Ambientales), e-mail: sinurgirse@yahoo.es
(1) Excerpt from interviews carried out with Kimche ("people with wisdom") from the Pantano community, Lumaco commune, Province of Malleco, Araucania Region, Chile, for the thesis on "Strategies for restoration of degraded native forest communities in an inter-cultural context." Parra, A. 2004.
In the symbiosis between water and forest referred to in the previous article, another component should also be considered: climate change. Climate is a determining factor of the forest, of its flora and fauna. Climate makes a forest boreal or humid-tropical and consequently its diversity will be of one type or another. In turn, forests have been crucial in the development of the world climate because of their role in trapping carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
This water-forest-climate connection has implications that go beyond local and directly verifiable facts. An Oxford University study (1) throws light on the relationship between rainfall and the atmospheric movement of the Congo Basin and the Amazon Basin, quoting satellite studies that show a natural see-saw oscillation across the whole Atlantic Ocean: floods in the Amazon basin tend to coincide with droughts over the Congo Basin and vice-versa. In turn, the major variations in rain patterns in the Amazon and the Congo have repercussions on the hydrology and climate of other regions.
The study, giving figures and scenarios, provides data on a legacy of apparently forgotten ancient knowledge: that life is inter-dependent so what is done in one part of the world invariably has effects on other parts. For example, deforestation in the Congo Basin – with an approximate rate of destruction of a million and a half hectares of forest per year – has caused decreased rainfall in the United States Great Lake region by approximately 5-15 % and also affects Ukraine and Russia (north of the Black Sea). For its part, the changes in land cover in the major basins in Africa and Asia have effects on the Asian monsoon.
The industrial and extractive activities --including converting forests over to farming, logging, highway construction, oil exploitation and mining-- that sustain the globalized economy based on the brutal assault on nature, continue to advance. But not without consequences.
The delicate balances that have been upset, such as the forest-water-climate connection, make the planet face the threat of Climate Change. We now learn that mass industrialization so voraciously swallowing up nature, has a very poor digestion. Excessive emanation of the so-called "greenhouse effect gases" (carbon dioxide among them), is not related to natural emission mechanisms but to the above-mentioned industrial activities.
According to United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of experts on Climate Change (IPCC) eleven of the last twelve years (1995 – 2006) are among the warmest years in the record of global surface temperature since 1850. Increase in temperature during the twentieth century has probably been the highest in any century over the past thousand years and more extreme phenomena, such as heavy rainfall, dry summer weather and subsequent droughts in some areas, are foreseen.
IPCC forecasts that for the twenty-first century there will be an increase in both the concentrations of carbon dioxide and of the mean temperature of the planet's surface (2). Deforestation is one of the processes responsible for increased greenhouse effect gases – contributing 18% as acknowledged by a former World Bank senior economist, Nicholas Stern, in a report on the impact of climate change and global warming on world economy – and for altering the local, regional and global climate
Climate change will particularly affect tropical forests where precipitation declines, and also mangroves subject to pressure from changes in temperature. In turn, ecosystem resilience (the capacity to recover and adapt) may be vastly exceeded during this century because of an unprecedented combination of climate change, its associated alterations, (for example, floods, droughts, fires, spread of insects, ocean acidification) and other factors such as changes in land use, contamination, fragmentation of natural systems, over-exploitation of resources. This implies, among other things, irreversible effects on biological diversity.
Furthermore, climate change also affects water, not only because its impact on forests has a bearing on the water cycle, but also because of the alterations caused by increased melting of snow and ice. Additionally, higher temperatures can also compromise water quality (for example, due to a proliferation of algae). According to data gathered by IPCC (3), during the twentieth century, a generalized withdrawal of non-polar glaciers took place. This has a two-sided effect: in the long run it implies less water availability and it also implies the entry of a great mass of water into the sea that will directly affect coastal areas. This effect of climate change also generates more climate change as flooding of land, both grasslands and forests causes release of methane gas, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, with negative impacts on global warming and therefore, on climate change.
The impacts of climate change in turn have direct effects on humankind, and not just on the local communities more immediately affected by forest disappearance, shortage or loss of water courses and numerous derivations on their sustenance and health, but also on urban centres.
In the long run, the taps that forgot the origin of water, the sky-scrapers that lost the memory of the role played by forests, the governments that distractedly toy with atmospheric contamination, will also feel the effects.
(1) "Ecosystem services of the Congo Basin forests", Danae S. M. Maniatis, Oxford University, 2007, http://globalcanopy.org/themedia/Ecosystem%20Services%20CB.pdf; (2) Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/climate-changes-2001/synthesis-spm/synthesis-spm-es.pdf; (3) Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm Women speak out about the water taken away from them
Together with the arrival of large-scale monoculture tree plantations is the departure of water. This affects the whole village community, but for women, the effects are particularly differentiated. They tell us about with their own words.
In Brazil the Mata Atlântica - an ecosystem which contained some of the planet's greatest biological diversity - has given way to a uniform and sad landscape of large-scale monoculture eucalyptus plantations. (1) "… it seems as if the climate changed, inside the village. It changed because even the rain… these are the changes that the eucalyptus brought. The rivers used to have a strong current, and now there's just a trickle of water left. How are we going to be able to plant? There are times when you have to be watering the garden all the time, because the soil is dry and cracked. The problem today is that to have healthy food you have to plant and spread manure. …" (Cláudia, Tupinikim and Guaraní Indigenous Women's Commission, Tupinikim village of Pau-Brasil)
"I always tell about what my mother told me: that there used to be lots of hunting, lots of fish. Now the São Domingos river has no more water, and there are no more animals to hunt. Just armadillos and capybaras… The fish are gone forever, too. If you want fish, you have to buy it in the city, because it's all gone. My kids don't even know what it is." (Domingas, Quilombola community of São Domingos)
In the municipality of Aracruz alone, 430 km² of native tropical rainforest were deforested to make way for eucalyptus plantations. Rivers that played an essential part in the lives of indigenous peoples like the Guaxindiba and Sahy and flowed past the village of Pau-Brasil practically disappeared. "It was so wonderful to have the river open to us. We washed clothes, we collected water for drinking, for cooking… You could catch fish, you could scoop them up with a sieve. All those women… there would be so many there together! It was the place to wash clothes. You would finish washing clothes, then take a swim and leave, you know?" (Maridéia, Tupinikim village of Pau- Brasil)
This drama has also affected the region where the Quilombola communities live. "Today the river is polluted. We don't use the water to drink, we don't use the water to bathe, we don't use the water to wash clothes, we don't use it for anything, you know? That means that the difference is a big difference, because we used to have our good river, our river was clean, the water was like glass, you could look into it and see your own shadow, you could see the little fish swimming along the bottom, and today, you can't see anything ..." (Nilza, Indigenous Women's Commission, Tupinikim village of Comboios)
"[...] Our concern was the lack of river water, and now it's much worse. It's just like you said, bathing, washing clothes, having water in the house. … And when there was a river here, the women would grab their bundles of clothes… and it was like a party on the riverbank, all of them washing clothes. It was mostly on Saturdays, and for those who had time, during the week. It was one less chore, because there was all of that water in the river, and everything was easier. [...] When we had to get water from the well, and go down the slope to where the well is today… So this isn't really something men worry about, it's more of a women's concern, and when there's no water in the tanks or there's a problem with the pump, then men aren't going to pick up a pail… there are very few men who will pick up a pail and go down the slope, right? And when there was only a little bit of water, people started changing. But it's really a woman's concern, right? To go down and get water from the well to have water in the house. Until… what I mean is, when there was a river, it was less of a concern, because at least for washing clothes, you had a way to solve the problem. The problems got worse when this whole process started, when the eucalyptus came and started sucking all the water from the river until it reached the point that it's reached today." (Maria Helena, Tupinikim village of Pau-Brasil)
"Our lives have been completely destroyed with the arrival of the shrimp farms. They have even taken our dignity away. We can no longer fish; we can no longer gather cockles because they prevent us from entering the places where we always worked. They have even taken over the water, sometimes they give us a little to cook, but that is when they have some left over." (An inhabitant of Puerto Hondo, in Puna Island, Province of Guayas) (2)
In the Ecuadorian sierra – the Paramos – the planting of pine-trees started in the eighties, promoted by institutions such as the Ecuadorian Populorum Progressio Fund, telling the communities how and where to plant the trees. The negative impacts make themselves felt, particularly among the women, as can been seen from the following testimonials: (3)
"Now we have no water and the rivers are dry, we have no vegetable plot, we don't plant onions or anything. Summer is very hard, the plants, the animals die; the fresh water holes have dried up. The land is no longer fertile, it no longer produces anything." (A woman from Bolivar Simiátug)
"Before we used to use this water to wash with, now we can no longer do so and have to use drinking water." (A woman from Tungurahua)
"For example, we are obliged to prepare food, to bath the children. The sacrifice is to carry water for two or three hours in bottles, that is the way it is done. We women have to give the animals water at mid-day and also in the evening. We have to take the cow looking for water because there is none in the watering hole and the big river is sometimes 40 – 50 minutes away. We women call in the cows. When we prepare food we have to carry the water. There we go, taking the kids. Looking for water we find it where native plants grew or if not we dig deeply with the hoe where there are no pines growing."
"In the pine plantations, all the native plants died off and as nothing will grow everything dried up in there and fires started." (A woman from Guaranda)
The lack of water caused by the pine plantations has also spread to agricultural areas.
"Before we used to plant short cycle crops, blackberries and other types of plants, but we have had to change our crops. We have also had to change our animals, and now we only have guinea-pigs." (A woman from Tungurahua)
"This mainly affects our economy: we no longer produce; now we have to buy everything. Many women have left to work in the city, as maids or seamstresses. Before our grandmothers used to stay at home, the children stayed with the older people." (A woman from Tungurahua)
These women are persevering and flow like the water that has been taken away from them. Their voices must be listened to and validated because they are speaking of truths that have the weight and simplicity of life itself.
(1) Excerpted from "Women and Eucalyptus" – Stories of life and resistance, Gilsa Helena Barcillos and Simone Batista Ferreira (2) Testimonial provided by Marianeli Torres, C-CONDEM, e-mail: marianeli@ccondem.org.ec (3) Testimonials gathered during on-going research entrusted by WRM.
*Translator's note: "Concheras" women cockle-gatherers in Ecuador  |
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