Missing the wood for the trees
The Hindu
Skewed policy: Women tribals know the forests best. Photo: K.R. Deepak
Women continue to be invisible to planners, despite their high levels
of contribution to the national economy, says a UN Women paper on women
and forests
Some of the present policies in forest management are detrimental to the poor, particularly women, states a
UN
Women paper by NC Saxena, member National Advisory Council, even as he
suggests changes that could ameliorate their condition.
Despite
economic growth, gender inequalities in “critical human development
indicators such as life expectancy, health and employment have remained
stagnant or increased.”
More than 90 per cent of women continue to struggle in the informal or unorganised sector with no legislative safeguards.
Women
have remained the neglected step children of development, says NC
Saxena, in the report. “Women continue to be invisible to planners,
despite their high levels of contribution to the national economy.
Development has concerned itself with producing surplus for the market
economy, and women, involved in the subsistence rather than the cash
sector of the economy, were not able to attract serious attention from
the planners,” he says. The interest of women was considered subsumed
within the family. In almost all schemes for the rural poor the family
approach was adopted under the assumption that benefits to the head of
the family, who is assumed to be a male, will percolate down to women
and children.
Almost 80 per cent of rural women
still derive their livelihoods from land and water based activities.
Enough empirical evidence has proved that conservation of forests must
go hand in hand with economic development because any economic
development that destroys these resources will create more poverty,
unemployment and diseases and thus cannot be called even economic
development. It may just be transfer of resources from the poor to the
rich. This is because the poor and especially women depend on nature for
their daily survival. For them the Gross Nature Product is more
important than the Gross National Product, according to the report.
Environmentally destructive economic development will impoverish the
poor even further and destroy their livelihood resource base. Therefore
the environmental concern in the developing world must go ‘beyond pretty
trees and tigers’ and must link it with peoples’ lives and well being.
In
addition to firewood, poor women collect minor forest products (MFPs)
or non-timber forest produce (NTFP), such as fodder and grasses, raw
materials like bamboo, cane and Bhabbar grass for artisan based
activities, leaves, gums, waxes, dyes and resins and many forms of food,
including nuts and honey.
While men do more
laborious work like cutting timber, women concentrate on NTFP
collection, fodder and fuel wood. Consequently, men and women have a
difference in knowledge about forest resources. Tribal women in India
use almost 300 forest species for medicinal purposes.
Much
of the misery of women and forest dwellers is due to deforestation and
commercial plantations which have removed the resource on which their
livelihoods have been based. Primarily due to the policies followed in
the forestry sector in the first 40 years after independence that
discouraged use of forests by the people, and encouraged its
exploitation for industry resulted in deteriorating peoples’ access to
forests for meeting their basic subsistence needs.
According
to NC Saxena, three sets of factors were responsible for this. First,
development until the mid-Eighties was associated in the minds of
planners with creating surplus from rural areas and its utilisation for
value addition through industry. Hence, output from forest lands was
heavily subsidised to be used as raw material for industries. Second,
women, tribals and other forest dwellers, with little voice or means to
communicate, were remote from decision-making and politically their
interests were not articulated. Third, foresters were trained to raise
trees for timber. Other intermediate and non-wood products were not
valued, as indicated by their usual description as ‘minor products’
leading to adoption of technologies that discouraged their production.
The
combination of these forces led to perpetuation of a timber and revenue
oriented policy that harmed both the environment and the people, but
was argued to be meeting the goals of the nation-state. Policy decisions
during 1950-90, which have supported industrial plantations on forest
lands, have not been able to stop the degradation of India’s natural
forests. Forests were over-exploited on account of government
concessions to forest industries in the zeal for industrialisation,
which had made forest raw material available to industries at much below
the cost of regeneration, in fact almost free. As such, there was not
much incentive for industries to invest in regeneration. The
unsustainable exploitation of forest raw material dried up the sources
of supply much sooner than expected by the forest industries themselves,
and pushed the frontiers of exploitation into ever more remote areas.
So
far the entire thrust of forestry has been towards growing timber,
which results in the removal of all the material which could serve
gathering needs. This calls for a modification of the existing
silvicultural practices, not so much to achieve high forest as to
restore to the forests as admixture in which a sensible balanced level
of vegetation would be available to meet the gathering needs.
Timber
is a product of the dead tree, whereas NTFPs come from living trees
allowing the stem to perform its various environmental functions.
Moreover, gathering is more labour intensive than mechanised
clear-felling. Local people living in the forests possess the necessary
knowledge and skills for sustainable harvesting. Finally, NTFPs generate
recurrent and seasonal as opposed to one-time incomes, making its
extraction more attractive to the poor. Thus if access to NTFPs can be
assured, standing trees can generate more income and employment than the
same areas cleared for timber, whilst also maintaining the land’s
natural biodiversity, says the report.
From the
women’s point of view, crown-based trees are important for usufruct, but
forests still remain largely stem-based. The traditional Indian way of
looking at trees has, however, been different. As opposed to trees for
timber, Indian villagers for centuries have depended on trees for
livelihoods. There has been little felling. Instead, trees have been
valued for the intermediate products they provide. To the extent that
trees provided subsistence goods with little market value, and trees
were abundant, questions of share or ownership did not arise much. Trees
were valued for the diversity of their products and the many ways in
which they helped to sustain and secure the livelihoods of the people.
In
addition to deforestation and preference for mono-cultures in place of
mixed forests, forest dwellers’ and women’s access to NTFPs has also
been constrained by the regulatory framework, diversion of NTFPs and
forests to industries and nationalisation of NTFPs.
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