Review: Deforestation, women and forestry

Anoja Wickramasinghe Deforestation, Women and Forestry: the case of Sri Lanka International Books (distributed by Jon Carpenter Publishing), £10.95. Reviewed by CLARE HILLYARD MELIA.

<*> Anoja Wickramasinghe's Deforestation, Women and Forestry is a densely argued and comprehensively researched analysis of the complex interaction between women, their use of forest resources, and mismanagement inflicted upon them by misguided development policies.

Forest resources are disappearing with increasing speed across the globe. Some commentators have estimated that all the world's tropical forests will be gone by the year 2000. We are losing not only the physical resources--plants, animals and insects--but an irretrievable treasure trove of local knowledge, preserved mainly by women, as to which species are edible, which medicinal, which fast or slow burning and so on.

A historical overview of Sri Lanka forestry practice, and the trend towards cash crop plantations, is followed by an in-depth study of two typical villages. Increasing formalisation of land ownership, usually through the male line, has done much to worsen the economic situation for women. Forests provide the vital three F's for women -- food, fuel and fodder. However, women's contribution to forestry is concealed behind their domestic tasks as their forestry-related activities are directly related to home maintenance activities. Because men are far more likely to be acting within the cash economy, their involvement with forests is almost exclusively in the production of saleable timber, and for a long time, forests as an economic resource have been the focus of grandiose development plans. Current policies are focused primarily on forest plantations, conservation and timber production. The paradigm from which they operate is overwhelmingly technological, and their aim has been to fulfil the requirements of the state rather than individual communities. Market-oriented compartmentalised crop production systems have been formed on land once used by those communities, creating an opposition between the forestry establishment and the people.

The informal work of women that is essential to household survival goes unrecognised. For example, deforestation has meant that the time and energy spent gathering firewood has increased enormously. Not only do women have to walk further to find less, but they carry heavy weights for long distances (up to 35kg for 10km), damaging their health. The need to conserve firewood then affects the family diet, decreasing variety and nutritional content, with a further deleterious effect on health. This is just one of a range of tasks made more difficult by encroaching deforestation.

Increasingly women are having to perform additional paid work outside the home, working on tobacco or tea plantations. The plantations operate in direct competition with the women for fuel-wood, for the curing of tobacco, for example. Men are responsible for getting industrial fuel-wood, while domestic fuel-wood gathering is left to women.

In this situation, women's home gardens, practically the only area in which they retain autonomy, take on increasing importance and women are reacting to changing circumstances by increasing the diversity of plants and trees they grow themselves. This technique of "agroforestry" is increasingly seen by development "experts" as the way forward.

However, as the legal owners of the land, men can choose to sell the trees as a cash crop, and men are taken as the focal point for receiving subsidies and services. Wickramasinghe concludes with a call for the implementation of new development policies--as intervention programmes aimed specifically at women would be resented by men and create difficulties at a village level, the aim must be to include women's needs and knowledge within a holistic strategy.