The Diverse Women for Diversity

The Diverse Women for Diversity (DWD), an international network of women, emerged as a Southern response to the threats to cultural and biological diversity posed by globalisation. Founded in 1997, following the Conference on Plant Genetic Resources in Leipzig in June 1996, the movement today has a presence in all continents. The moment aims at building and concentrating women’s energies to articulate and provide alternatives based on equality, justice, sustainability and peace.

For thousands of years, women have produced their food and guaranteed food security for their children and communities. Even today, the primary work of maintaining household food security through local food production, processing and distribution is done by women.

The patriarchal mindset not merely devalues women’s role in food security, it also destroys biological and cultural diversity through the concepts of monoculture and corporate monopolies on life and knowledge embodied in Intellectual Property regimes and technologies that tamper with life itself such as genetic engineering. Globalisation of the market puts trade above sustainability and profits above life. The commodification of all resources and relationships that ensure sustainability and peace has led to a global increase in hunger and starvation, in violence. and terrorism.

Women of different regions have organised as Diverse Women to provide an alternative voice and vision to the dominant paradigm of commercialization and corporatisation of Food Security and the privatization of natural resources.

Mahila Anna Swaraj is Navdanya’s programme for women’s food sovereignty. It is based on celebrating and rejuvenating women’s knowledge and skills in biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture and food production and in artisanal organic food processing.

Traditionally, women have been the keepers and breeders of seed, as well as the food producers and processors. Mahila Anna Swaraj reclaims women’s seed sovereignty and seed knowledge by creating Community Seed Banks. It also reclaims food sovereignty, and in so doing empowers women economically and gives society healthy, safe, tasty and nutritious food. Navdanya promotes kitchen gardens both in schools and in the framework of the women’s food sovereignty program.

At the international level, Mahila Anna Swaraj is organized as Diverse Women for Diversity. Diverse Women for Diversity echoes women’s voices from the local and grassroots level to global fora and international negotiations. Its focus is biodiversity, food and water. It seeks to strengthen women’s grassroots movements and provide women with a common international platform.

“Food security for all is not possible within a global market system based on the dogma of free trade, permanent growth, comparative advantage, competition and profit maximization. On the other hand, food security can be achieved if people within their local and regional economies feel responsible, both as producers and as consumers for the ecological conditions of food production, distribution and consumption, and for the preservation of cultural and biological diversity where self-sufficiency is the main goal.

Our food security is too vital an issue to be left in the hands of a few transnational corporations with their profit motives, or up to national governments that increasingly lose control over food security decisions, or to a few, mostly male national delegates at UN conferences, who take decisions affecting all our lives.

Food security must remain in women’s hands everywhere! And men must share the necessary work, be it paid or unpaid. We have a right to know what we eat! No to Novel Food and No to Patents on Life. We will resist those who force us to produce and consume in ways that destroy nature and ourselves.”