Ann Isla: Abstract
Sustainable development and Poverty Creation
My paper takes up a case study connecting two crises, the debt crisis
and the ecological crisis. It assesses the implementation of sustainable
development and women in development in Costa Rica's rain forest, through
Canada/Costa Rica debt-for-nature investment. Debt-for-nature policy designers
forbid governments to receive debt titles directly -- debt titles must
be donated to Non-government Organizations (NGOs). In the Canada/Costa
Rica case, funds were channeled to the National Institute for Biodiversity
(INBio) of Costa Rica and the World Wildlife Fund-Canada (WWF-C).
Half of funds went to INBio which has reduced nature to fragments; devalued
local communities as ecological authority and plundered their means of
livelihood; devalued local community knowledge in order to appropriate
it; received large social investments for private gains; promoted re-colonization.
The other half went to the WWF-C which has developed a unique land management
and planning project in Arenal Conservation Area (ACA) -- Tilaran: The
Arenal Project. This project has redefined biodiversity as natural capital
establishing market prices for forests, biological diversity and water;
broken the community relationship with nature by enclosing community land
and making community members intruders and criminals; and entrenched community
members in the world market as workers in micro-enterprises.
The WWF-C also organizes micro-enterprises all over Costa Rica. In the
Arenal Conservation Area, the WWF-C in collaboration with ANDAR de Costa
Rica (a Costa Rican NGO that uses Dutch funds) organized the Abanico Medicinal
Plant and Organic Agriculture micro-enterprise as part of a women in development
program whose aim is gender equity. As biodiversity and women's non-wage
labour comprise the support system that local communities rely upon for
survival, micro-enterprise for women’s equality has become a war on subsistence.
Thus the unstated aim of expanding industrialization and restructuring
capital accumulation worldwide underlies the stated concern for environmental
conservation and women's equality.
Biographical Information
Ana Isla is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Sociology,
at Brock University, Canada. Her current research specialty and interests
are in: political economy, political ecology, The Commons, enclosure in
the 21th century, global issues, social justice, racism, economic development,
sustainable development, debt crisis, debt-for-nature swaps, poverty issues,
feminism, eco-feminism, women in development, Third World women, women’s
micro- enterprises, community organizing, the subsistence perspective,
the Gift economy, indigenous knowledge - the medicinal plant common knowledge,
biodiversity/biopiracy, eco-tourism, environmental NGOs.
|
|
