Women and Health

Corporate agriculture and hazardous technologies has brought negative impacts on women’s health and made women vulnerable to the vagaries of unemployment, low wages as well as loss of land and productive resources. A litany of such problems are already emerging in PAN AP’s coordinated research in three countries on the impact of Agrochemical TNCs on women that is being conducted and finalised in 2005. In such situations of exploitation, increasing poverty and unemployment, low wages and low income, women suffer the most. Communities particularly in the rural areas and women themselves often prioritise male members of the family, children and old parents for access to food, health care, productive resources, and even housing, leaving women to be the “last and the least”. These are contributing factors to increasing women’s malnutrition, ill-health and the increasing feminisation of poverty.

Furthermore the impact of agrochemicals pose higher risks to women’s health as women’s physiology is different and potentially exposing women’s unborn children. Pesticides are known to cross the placental barrier and have the potential to poison the unborn child and contaminate breast milk.

Through genetic engineering (GE), women lose the control of seeds traditionally under her control. Because of women’s subordinate positions in the community, women’s health impacts remain invisible and unaddressed and her loss of control over seeds also remains invisible. PAN AP’s strategies are to continue the monitoring and to do impact research on corporate agriculture and to strategise, collaborate and work with partner groups to tackle and confront the agrochemical TNCs and the policies promoting corporate agriculture.