Latin American Women Ready for Rio+10

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO - IPS/Tierramérica - Women from around the world are anxious to play a leading role at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Rio+10), next September in Johannesburg, South Africa, where women's groups from Latin America plan to shine the spotlight on the importance of social justice.

In addition to consolidating the achievements made by the United Nations-sponsored conferences over the past decade, the women's organisations aim to promote a strategy for what they say is 'true social and environmental development'.

At preparatory meetings held in each of the world's regions, delegates drew up the Women's Action Agenda for a Healthy Planet 2002 for the Agenda 21, a review and update of the programme defined 10 years ago at the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro.

At that time, 2,500 measures approved by leaders of 179 countries were collected in what is known as Agenda 21, a global commitment to ensure the quality of life on Earth - and which made women's participation in the world debate on environmental problems one of the top priorities.

Over the course of the decade, world conferences were held on Human Rights, Population, Women, Social Development, Human Settlements, Food Security, Education and Racism, producing countless recommendations, many of which focused on the role of women in society and the need for effective solutions to overcome gender inequalities.

But activists and UN officials alike agree that the overall balance has generally been negative, and proves that countries are not complying with the commitments they made at the international forums: 15 million children under five die each year as a result of contaminated water supplies, half the global population lacks basic sanitation services, and 20 percent do not have access to potable water.

What is needed is to 'give some order to the numerous recommendations, agendas and institutions that have been created in a disjointed way during the last decade of intensive worldwide debate,' said Thais Corral, vice-president of the Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO).

The Women's Action Agenda incorporates the results of global summits and experiences accumulated since 1992 and gives them "a more strategic sense of action," explained Corral, who also coordinated the consultative process for the drafting of the document.

The Earth Summit's Agenda 21 was 'an effective instrument to articulate local and global actions, diverse movements and strategies from different sectors, expressing and integrating diversity,' she said.

The new agenda 'reinforces the presence of women as part of the citizenry, of a movement that has its own views and proposals,' and whose participation in determining the fate of the planet is 'a matter of justice,' says Uruguayan Lilián Celiberti, coordinator of the national follow-up commission for the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women.

'The sustainability of human life is only possible with justice and social, gender and racial equality,' according to Celiberti.

The main obstacle in drawing up the agenda, she said, is the 'dissociation between the objectives of the environmental policies and the development strategies that countries have adopted,' in which ecological problems are treated as technical, not political matters.

Furthermore, the 'asymmetry of power between states and social sectors limits citizen control over environmental, economic and social policies,' stated Celiberti.

The women's perspective in the formulation and execution of these policies is indispensable, and this becomes increasingly evident when environmental deterioration affects health, observed WEDO activist Corral.

Nearly 80 percent of the women's groups and international networks involved in efforts on behalf of the environment have links to the health question, she said.

And global indicators show an increase in women's participation in the labour market, in schooling and in human rights activism, stated Corral.

Hundreds participants representing Latin American non-governmental organisations (NGOs), public agencies, private associations and community groups are at the WSF fine-tuning their contribution to the Rio+10 debate.

The final draft of the Women's Action Agenda will be drawn up during the international preparatory conference in New York, Mar 25-Apr 5, to be presented at the Johannesburg Summit in September.