‘Soon we will have to eat rocks’ �Women, Extractives, and the Struggle �for Real Alternatives�

• 2011 - financial results for the Top 40 hit new heights:
• Revenues increased 26% to over $700 billion
• Net profit up 21% to $133 billion
• Returned 156% more to shareholders than in 2010
• At the same time, market capitalisation fell by 25% and mining company share prices were hit hard
• Mining and Metals deals in Africa in 2010 amounted to 8% of global total

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• Year-on-year growth in FDI to mining in almost all countries regionally – downturns in SA, Mauritiana and Guinea
• Drivers of growth – raw materials demands of emerging economies; growing global energy demands; emergence of new green and mining technologies; capital consolidation etc.
• Overall context – weak regulatory frameworks and tax regimes; insecure rights under communal land tenure regimes; corruption; cronyism etc.

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Climate Crisis!

The world is speeding towards a four to five degree global temperature rise in the next few decades

What was needed from COP 17? 50 per cent cut in northern emissions by 2020 to keep the temperature rise below 1.5 degrees; substantial climate debt payments; radically transformed economy, transport system and energy generation process

What did we get from the latest Durban Deal? None of the above! A deal to strike another deal in 2015, deferring real action to 2020

Africa* has experienced a temperature increase of 0.7 degrees during the 20th century. The IPCC forecasts Africa’s “crop net revenues could fall by as much as 90 per cent by 2100”.

Rural women carry the burden

• Rural women in Southern Africa carry the triple burden of race, class and geographic marginalisation; climate change represents the fourth burden.
• 3.1 billion people, or 55 per cent of the total global population, live in rural areas. Of these, 1.5 billion live on less than US$1.25 per day.
• Women constitute the majority of the rural poor: they own less than 2 per cent of all land, and receive only 5 per cent of extension services worldwide. More than two-thirds of the world’s unpaid work is done by women, the equivalent of $11 trillion (approximately half of the world’s GDP).
• The prevailing division of labour across most of Southern Africa means that women carry the burden of climate change impacts�

Conceptualising exploitations and impacts�

At point of extraction/ production

The point at which minerals/natural resources are extracted and processed using tools of production and (for our purposes) women’s labour power, which is remunerated either through wage labour or through some cash or in kind return on labour investment. This broad category encompasses extraction/processing through different modes of production: large industrial-scale and capital intensive mining, and petty commodity production (through semi-feudal or feudal small scale, artisanal and informal mining).

Social reproduction node/s

Those activities at both the household and the state levels that maintain “the labour force through provision of basic needs and through broader processes of social reproduction.” (Klak and Lawson). Neo-liberal policies withdraw state support for basic social services, forcing the provisioning of these informally or within the context of the hhold. Embraces biological reproduction of the species (child birth and rearing) and the reproduction of the labour force (alongside other institutions such as the education system, wider family). Its meaning is wider than domestic labour.

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• Women artisanal, small-scale miners – sustain millions of people in poorer countries. What is the role of women? How do women organise themselves? Are there greater benefits as compared with industrial mining? Is this an ‘alternative’?
• Women working underground experience multiple exploitations: as workers (poor pay, danger, exploitative working conditions), as women workers, and as women working in a very atypical production role (sexual harassment, pressure from communities). Women workers and transactional sex.

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• Impacts on women as primary producers and processors of food (land grabs, male migration, state neglect of land reform and support to small scale producers etc.)
• Increase in unpaid care work of women and children: ill mineworkers and absent state (sending and receiving areas), polluted water supplies, deforestation, interrupted and absent education and health care services (forced removals) etc.
• Women and transactional sex/prostitution in mining impacted communities – link to HIV/Aids, STDs, ability to control own bodies etc.

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Social reproduction node/s

At point of extraction/ production

At point of extraction/ production

Social reproduction node/s

• Women and community decision-making, control and benefit: land rights typically not recognised, generally not able to lead and make decisions, carry limited power and authority at community and hhld level etc.

• Social reproduction and production are not separated, but deeply intertwined:
• Labour is a produced input to production but is produced through the process of social reproduction (production).
• Savings that capitalists make in the area of social reproduction lead to higher profits (distribution)
• The process of social reproduction implies a radical conflict between profit and the living standards of the whole labouring population (political level)

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Some basic conclusions

• Emergent theme is CRISIS! Climate crisis, crisis of social reproduction, crisis of unemployment/eroded livelihoods...
• What lies at the centre of the crisis? Extractivism creates immediate crisis at the local level
• But part of a larger system, which fuels this type of primitive extractivism – competition, limitless growth, rampant consumption, profit without limits...
• System separates humans from nature, creates domination of nature, nature as a commodity to be traded and profited from
• System is deeply dehumanising – humans are reduced into consumers and the means of production
• Has particular sex/gendered and racialised dimensions - it is the bodies and lives of black women in the South that are predominantly exploited and destroyed.

The beginning of hope

• The means of production, nature and the planet is regenerated by reproductive workers (women, small scale farmers, indigenes) on a daily basis – their work helps maintain the conditions for our continued existence
• These reproductive workers labour at the point where nature and humanity meet – they offer us an alternative economics and an alternative knowledge that promotes ecological sustainability
• It is the contradiction between profits and social reproduction that underlie many social struggles, and in which lies the solution to these multiple crises: the possibility of a just eco sustainable existence – our only hope for planetary and human survival

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How are women organising currently?

• Women and Mining (WIM) network with chapters in at least 11 countries globally – SA, Tanzania, Zambia in region
• WIM is sponsored by Anglo American
• Its objective is twofold: �• To celebrate successes to constructively publicise the issue of women in mining �• To promote the professional development of women working in the mining sector
• Have seen reference to other similar associations (international and national) of women workers/ investors/miners

How are women organising currently?

• The ‘other’ network – International Women and Mining Network (RIMM)
• Has members engaged in workers’ struggles, indigenous communities and civil society groups from 28 countries – they campaign against mining related exploitation
• Have been organising since 1997; 3 international conferences
• International Secretariat in India; regional chapters include an office in Nigeria
• Some organising through trade unions
• Other smaller local and national efforts which need to mapped out, including potentials in RWA commitment to pick up on extractives question regionally

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The IANRA emergent women and mining programme

• One year scoping phase of work to inform development of long-term regional programme of work, organising and activism
• Starting in Southern Africa – focus at most on four countries to start with: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Malawi or Mozambique
• Four objectives for one year:
• Build and deepen knowledge of and begin to theorise the impacts of industrial scale mining on poor rural women (literature survey and analysis, participatory case studies, some focused research, silicosis and unpaid care work legal action);
• Strengthen organisation of rural women through participatory research, exchanges and platform-building, and build the capacity of service organisations to support their struggles;
• A programme framework for a 3-5 year regional programme of work on women and mining
• Increased awareness of the impacts of mining on women, and their vision of change, amongst organisations working on extractives, key government officials, and some segments of the wider public.