Brinjal entered the Indian food chain four thousand years ago, India being the home to its 2500 varieties. Brinjal is the second highest consumed vegetable in the country after potato and is cultivated over 5.50 lakh hectares, providing livelihood to over 15 lakh farmers and 50 lakh vendors, mainly women. With the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee giving its sanction to BT Brinjal, the way is being paved for GM food crops as staple diet of the people, thereby threatening India's food sovereignty.
What is food sovereignty? According to the World Food Summit+5 in 2002, food sovereignty is about the rights of the people, communities, and nations to decide their own agricultural, labor, land, fishing, food policies. It goes beyond a food security agenda since it addresses the rights of the people not only in accessing food but also in determining how to use their own natural resources to ensure sustainable food security. Where do women's rights figure in the issue of food security and why? The large majority of poor women in south asia in particular play a key role in agriculture, the main source of livelihood. Women form 40% of agricultural workforce, with this percentage rising. To date, 53% of all male workers, 75% of all female workers and 85% of all rural female workers are in agriculture.
Crop diversity is therefore a gendered domain. It highlights the following:
(a) women's roles in agriculture for which they have specific skills and use different practices- processing, selection, storage, preservation of food grains. They have ethno botanical knowledge and skills.
(b) women's choices of crops point to the multiple roles they perform- as farmers, household cooking, keepers of cooking traditions, seed keepers, medicinal plant and health care givers.
(c) Women have the most stakes in crop diversity as they see its link with food security for their households. “We mix and sow” -is an often heard statement.
The introduction of new crop-cash crop- varieties lead to changes in roles and practices that have a specific and adverse impact on rural women. What is at stake here is control and power. Rural women are most vulnerable since they are denied, within their households and outside, ownership and control of resources, such as land, limiting their opportunities to have a say in changes in cropping practices, the modes of crop use, etc. So, maintaining biodiversity is linked with a range of women's rights including the rights of women from marginalized communities.
In the past few decades, the reproduction of seeds has moved out of the hands of farmers, women in particular, into the spheres of formal science, experimental plots of institutes, gene banks, commercial seed suppliers, bureaucratic procedures of seed certification. Women's seed and biodiversity knowledge is not recognized, documented or integrated into agricultural research. Efforts need to be made to ensure that such knowledge of women remains in the public domain and is backed up by a strong intellectual property rights regime that protects their rights and prevents monopolistic trade practices so that there concerted efforts to ward off the threats posed by commercial seeds in the name of technological control, economic efficiency, rational management.
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