Liepollo Pheko

The South’s unfavourable trade terms alone give rise to disquiet, and these are compounded by the preponderance that the multilateral trade regime places on economic activity at the expense of poverty eradication and socio development advancement.

Africa has been engaged in economic global activity since the slave trade exacerbated by the scramble for Africa in the 19th century. The ongoing trade relations are part of an ongoing campaign of the North to retain access to and power over African resources and autonomy, and it remains critical to locate these issues within a geo-political framework.

Women, being the principal end users of services, experience the effects of social disinvestment more immediately and acutely than men. Race, class and income delineations mean that African women, particularly in rural and peri-urban areas in Africa, are the most affected by these policy choices. Poverty, lack and material deprivation are both immediate and long-term manifestations of these policy choices and unevenly distributed resources.

The study of human development should move us beyond the blanket investigation of households to also examine the conditions of individual members. Vulnerability is increased due to gender inequalities, resulting in limited access to productive inputs, such as micro credit, control over land and property, power over income and expenditure and a gender-biased labour market.

Even though labour may be an abundant asset among unemployed or low/no income communities, women’s control over the realisation of that labour for profit and gain is often frustrated by deficit power relations between themselves and their husbands [or fathers]. These relations may manifest through physical, emotional and verbal abuse. While gender inequalities breed intergenerational poverty of families, communities - and sometimes entire nations – have an impact on growth performance with consequences on poverty reduction and social amelioration strategies.

One of the challenges of addressing poverty is definition. A groundswel states that true development lies beyond growth and efficiency. They state that it is in fact a function of enabling dignified lives. However, there remains a measure of reluctance to concede that the prevailing trade regimes need to be radically reconfigured from using market criteria and their social impact indicators to examining social relations, such as gender and race, which inform the context of policymaking.

The World Bank Poverty Report of 1990 defines poverty as “the inability to attain a minimal standard of living”. This definition hinges on three aspects: A measurement of the standard of living; a clear concept of a minimal standard of living; and encapsulating the severity of poverty in a single index.

However, poverty surpasses concrete living conditions and material circumstances to encompass access to processes, to tools and instruments that effect meaningful transformation. Poverty is an interlocking, multidimensional social phenomenon. Poverty can be defined as pain.

The question posed by feminist economists is whether the link between trade liberalisation and women’s employment can actually lift income levels of poor women, thus leveraging greater choices and empowerment. Trade reform tends to benefit medium and large producers. Women, who are often custodians of an entire nation’s food security are marginalised from accruing any benefits available, such as micro credit, technological advancement or business marketing training required to access new markets.

Given that even economies which produce increased employment for women, create tension and competition among women as well as between women and men, job losses in the informal sector are most likely to affect women. This is mainly due to the concentration of poor women in low skill [and low paid], labour intensive industries, largely informal and unregulated.

It is a great irony that the increase IN women’s employment is occurring when workers’ rights are generally diminishing as a result of labour market deregulation, intensified by government imperatives to remain competitive in a globalised world.

For trade policy to contribute to such an endeavour, it must be a key cornerstone in a broad-based, development-centred approach that creates mechanisms to stop the haemorrhage of funds from poor to rich people and poor to rich countries via interest, dividends, debt services and unfavourable terms of trade liberalisations, but must also focus on the eradication of poverty and the economic and social empowerment of women.

Such attempts are not automatically supported, however, and in fact may be contravened or contradicted by conventional growth-oriented trade liberalisation strategies that emphasise capital and profit accumulation, structural adjustment and perpetuation of external debt.

More deliberate and strategic state and policy interventions are critical across the continent to ensure the living conditions of women will be concretely, qualitatively and quantitatively enhanced.

(END/IPS/2009)