Free Trade Policies and Impact on Sustainable Development, Social and Gender

Justice: A Case Study of the EU-India Trade Relations

13-14 November 2009

India Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi

Keynote Address

Free Trade Linkages with Social and Gender Justice

by

Devaki Jain

Member of the Erstwhile South Commission, founded by Dr. Julius Nyerere

Former Director, Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi

for

The Centre of Trade and Development, New Delhi

2

As someone who has been part of WIDE and the national and international feminist

movements, I would like to take your permission to use this opportunity to share my

most recent thoughts with all of you on how we negotiate justice in this rather

unjust world. I do not know anything about the EU-India trade relations, which of course

puts me at a great disadvantage, but I guess in a key note from an elder in the movement,

anything can go…?

My argument is in two parts:

Firstly, that the so-called free trade agreements are not free; trade is tethered in highly

controlled systems to benefit some at the cost of others, and so we should not use the

words ‘free trade’ although the globalization model is based on the free trade theory,

which argues that it maximizes the efficient use of factors of production at the lowest

cost, and so is good economics. Trade and the earning of FDI (Foreign Direct

Investment) have become the engines of GDP growth and the indicators of economic

success.

And secondly, that the time has come for us to shift our work and our advocacy from

looking for gender justice and explaining women’s location (especially exploitation in

the success story of trade), for e.g. as experienced by India and China today, -- and

asking for special considerations within that framework -- towards arguing for

another kind of view of economic progress and prosperity; for a voice to direct the

economies, for shifting from capital-led growth to wage-led growth, and making

decent work -- employment with a decent wage and security of wage – the engine of

growth.

The export of goods and services from Asia have been a source of income for women,

as they are the main suppliers of these goods and services, whether as self-employed

home-based workers or as workers in Special Economic Zones (SEZ). Although this

is only a small segment of the employment scene, the recent downturn in the global

economy has taught us that it is painfully vulnerable at the lower end. Even the last

person – for e.g. the woman waste-picker we see in those grim pictures, covered with

dirt and rummaging through dangerous mounds of waste – has been affected, as

shown by many studies, the most striking of which was done by Women in Informal

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Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) in collaboration with SEWA

(Self-Employed Women’s Association) Bharat, in India.

Picture: Women Waste-pickers in India

Price of Waste received by Waste Collectors in Ahmedabad, India 1

This particular consultation is being held within a few weeks of another very high-

powered summit, the 15th ASEAN Summit on 23-25 October 2009 in Thailand. The

outcome declaration of that summit reflects the direction in which global economic

politics is moving as a result of the global recession of 2008-2009. Apart from

shifting the direction of trade, i.e., exports from the formerly rich countries, there is a

desire to find ways of trading which emancipate the region from the dependence, and

also collectively reorder the power relationships which will come to play at the

climate conference as well as the WTO. India and China, the notable survivors, are

being eyed by international capital, and they are welcoming this development. Latin

America has gone much further and seven Latin American countries have floated their

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own currency, a revolutionary step to find new measures of their own progress and

aspirations. Asia is still to go that way even though it was the first region to think of

an Asian vision and Asian integrated plan.1

But as Asia and Latin America strengthen themselves against North-driven tsunamis

on their economies, are they thinking of the women of the region? Or to put it

differently, are the women of the region engaged in these negotiations? Not as far as I

can see. Therefore, the first task is to engage with those configurations. What do the

organizations of women workers such as SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s

Association) and others in the mode of advocacy for women as workers have to say

about the new arrangements and aspirations? ASEAN aspires to be like the European

Union -- a market for itself and a market that negotiates as a region. What products

and services are women in India most engaged with and for which ones would they

like to ensure not only demand but also greater security?

Further, since women believe in solidarity with other women, how do Indian women

workers ensure that their well-being in this operation does not negatively affect

their sisters? Especially those in South Asia -- as the types of goods and their costs

being traded are similar within this sub-region and therefore competition amongst

them would be hurtful. I will never forget a presentation made by a Thai trade union

leader at an AWID (Association for Women's Rights in Development) conference in

Bangkok a few years ago, who showed how Nike (the sportwear and sports

equipment supplier) marched from one country to another shifting its production

units, driving down wages and negotiations for the protection of workers. Every

single country fell into line, flea eating flea in a race to the bottom.

Therefore, there is a need for laws across the region to protect the workers as a

community: for e.g. a regional minimum wage and a regional approach to the capital

that comes seeking. When I was in South Africa and SADEC (Southern African

Development Community) was looking for a way forward to get the region to be a

1 Asian Relations Conference held from March-April 1947, hosted by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, bringing together many leaders of the independence movements in Asia and was the

first attempt to assert Asian unity.

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region, I had suggested that they draw up a plan with optimization of employment as

the goal of the model -- a regional employment plan which investors and

governments could follow such that there was a consolidation of power as well as

cooperation, to avoid the situation in the Nike example cited.

At another time, when the Prime Minister of our country was attending the Non-

Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Cuba, and the Ministry of External Affairs had

included me in a small committee to draft our position, I had suggested that the

NAM set up its own CEDAW-type of legislation especially to protect South-South

women migrants who often face grave bodily harm apart from other forms of

distress. I had pointed out that the major portion of foreign exchange in countries

like Sri Lanka and the Philippines comes from women who emigrate as workers and

yet their lives were not seen as precious by the States.

Economic summits would at best invite Indra Nooyi or Sonia Chanda Kochar, or

perhaps a woman from the media or even Bollywood -- but not a feminist economist

or a woman leader of workers; no leading woman farmers or health activist who see

the connection between, say, women’s wage and the health of her family, as has been

pointed out by a recent study of women on the National Rural Employment Guarantee

(NREG) sites.2

So far we have been shouting and screaming to point out that the growth is riding on

women’s backs and that their needs need to be met in terms of wages, protection and

security of work, but it has made no difference to the minds of the policy-makers.

However one important shift in India has been towards understanding that it is

employment that holds up the sky, so there has been a whole package of stimulus

for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and industries where exports have really

had a shock due to the downturn. The government has instituted new policies for

the labour-intensive trade sector (textiles, gems, jewelry, handicrafts, leather,

footwear and other such industries) for which exports have been contracting for

nearly nine months because the market for Indian goods in developed countries

2 Khera, R. and Nayak, N. “Women Workers and Perceptions of the National Rural Employment

Guarantee Act” Economic & Political Weekly, OCTOBER 24, 2009 Vol. XLIV No. 43. Page 53

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declined significantly, starting October 2008. The new foreign trade policy, therefore,

gives special attention to labour-intensive sectors through measures such as tax

exemption and cheaper credit rates.

I also give the example of the Committee of Feminist Economists (CFE) who were

consulted by the National Planning Commission during the preparation of the

Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2007-2012) – which was a first in the history of the

Commission. The CFE argued the fact that women were India’s growth agents: they

were a strong presence in the economic sectors like agriculture, infrastructure and

informal productive sectors and much of the GDP came from their labour but was not

recognized in the public domain of the State. One of the changes that was a result of

the CFE’s influence was that the chapter conventionally titled ‘Women and

Development’ was renamed ‘Women’s Agency and Child Rights’, enabling the shift

from a ‘social development’ perspective to one of agency and rights.

As a specific example of the impact of the CFE in terms of the economic

contributions of women in the Plan, see part of the ‘Agriculture’ chapter of the

Eleventh Plan in the box below:

Eleventh Plan: Agriculture

Para 1.14: “For growth to be at all inclusive, the agricultural strategy must focus on the 85% of

farmers who are small and marginal, increasingly female, and who find it difficult to access inputs, credit, and extension or to market their output… credit has grown at unprecedented rates

(30% per annum) to other sectors but not to small and marginal land holders and women who lack

collateral security… One way forward to encourage marginal farmers and women to form groups

for purposes of farming would be to shift at least some of the current subsidies to be available

only to groups of such farmers rather than to individuals.”

Para 1.115: “Small and marginal farmers often lack access to major agricultural services, such as

credit, extension, insurance, and markets. This is especially true of women farmers since there is pervasive male bias in provision of such services.”

Para 1.148: Gender equity: With the share of female workforce in agriculture increasing, and

increased incidence of female-headed households, there is an urgent need to ensure women’s

rights to land and infrastructure support:

• Women’s names should be recorded as cultivators in revenue records on family farms where

women operate the land having ownership in the name of male members.

• The gender bias in institutions for information, credit, inputs, marketing should be corrected by

gender-sensitizing the existing infrastructure providers.

• Women’s co-operatives and other forms of group effort should be promoted for the

dissemination of agricultural technology, other inputs, and for marketing of produce.

• Wherever possible a group approach for investment and production among small scale women

farmers, be it on purchased or leased land, should be promoted. Women farmers are typically

unable to access inputs, information, and market produce on an individual basis. A group

approach would empower them.

Para 1.61: “Comprehensive measures aimed at financial inclusion in terms of innovative products and services to increase access to institutional credit are urgently required. Issues such as credit

flow to tenant farmers, oral lessees and women cultivators, complex documentation processes,

high transaction costs, inadequate and ineffective risk mitigation arrangements, poor extension

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So to end, what I am trying to argue for is that we need to move along now in our

advocacy ways from gendering, which was most useful in the previous decades up to

around 2000, to reconstructing macro-economic policies including regional and global

economic arrangements, as a lobby not only for women but for economic justice in an

economic democracy.

A recent initiative to which I am a party is the one taken by a group called the

Casablanca Group.3 This group is now preparing a paper drawn out of sixteen essays

by well-known feminist economists from all over the world to put forth a

consideration of what macro-economic policy should be all about. We hope to have a

paper to be presented at the fifty-fourth Commission on the Status of Women in 2010

in collaboration with the UNDP gender team.

We hope that other networks like those present here will find the paper worthwhile

and respond to what I am arguing for, namely attention to the reasoning behind

macro-economic policy as a form of gendering, drawing on women’s knowledge both

of theory and of practice.

3 See website http://www.casablanca-dream.net/ and enclosed flyer for more details