Dionne Jackson Miller

International trade agreements are affecting women throughout the world, especially those in developing countries, but the true extent of their impacts is not known because there is a lack of hard data, said representatives of the International Gender and Trade Network at yesterday's seminar on Global Trade and Its Effects on Women.

The delegates, representing the Network's chapters on each continent, issued an urgent appeal to collect information on women and trade because, they said, it is difficult to counter the statements about the benefits of free trade for women because of a scarcity of data.

The Network, led by women from the South, aims to analyse key trade issues and the linkages between trade, debt, poverty and development from a gender perspective.

'We're struggling with a lack of data, certainly at the regional level. The reality is that a lot of policy makers don't actually know what they're negotiating in the trade agreements,' said Alexander Spieldoch, from the Network's secretariat in Washington.

'They sign away their governments and their people without having more knowledge about the actual agreements themselves.'

According to Alma Espino, an economist from Uruguay, women and men tend to have different occupations, and have different spaces in society, which means that trade policies will affect them in different ways.

'The most different impacts are in the labour markets. Women are normally in professions like nursing, teaching, and when you speak about discrimination, it's related to the different salaries women and men receive for the same types of jobs…we can assume that the effect of trade policies will also be different,' she says.

Espino, who belongs to the Network's Latin American chapter, says some of the research conducted indicates that women have benefited from job creation as a result of globalisation. However, she notes that there are questions about the quality of those jobs, and whether other traditional occupations were destroyed in the process.

She also pointed out that while some highly educated women have been able to take advantage of increased opportunities in the services sector, women with lower levels of education have experienced economic regression.

Miosotis Rivas Peña, of the Economic Research Centre for the Caribbean, said another factor affecting the availability of data is the fact that many women tend to work in the informal sector, which is not adequately captured in many studies.

Peña, who is also a member of the Network's Caribbean chapter, says that with the Caribbean involved in multiple negotiations like the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Cotonou agreement, information and statistics are imperative to facilitate analysis of the effects of these agreements. That information, she says, is necessary to lobby governments effectively.

Meanwhile, Mohau Pheko, of the International Gender and Trade Network's African Chapter, stressed the need to carefully analyse the agreements themselves.

'It must be quite clear that the WTO (World Trade Organisation) is a place of power, it is about who has the power to make decisions about trade. We're not just talking about trade, we're talking about the ability of the more powerful to impose rules that let the multinationals make profits,' she said.

According to Pheko, the trade agreements have to be analysed bearing in mind that the WTO is far from being a dispassionate, objective organisation.

'In Africa, it is women who are the backbone of agriculture. When you juxtapose them to farmers in the United States and Europe, and put them in the marketplace, and say they must compete for trade, what is dispassionate about that agreement?' she wondered.

She says that the operations of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the WTO must be examined in their entirety, to be aware of how those organisations work together.

'The IMF tells us, you're not good at farming, stop farming and buy from us. In buying from the outside without producing, you have to borrow funds, and suddenly you're in a cycle of debt. The WTO Agreement on Agriculture opens up the space for multinational corporations to sell food to our countries, and this has implications for food security on our continent,' she says.

Although the international trade agreements are complex, they are not mysterious, Pheko points out, noting that they must be carefully studied if the lobbying efforts against them are to be successful.