development dialogue 1992:1-2 Women, Ecology and Health Rebuilding Connections Editorial Note 1 Women, Ecology and Health: An Introduction Vandana Shiva 3 After the Forest: AIDS as Ecological Collapse in Thailand Ann Danaiya Usher 13 Killing Legally with Toxic Waste: Women and the Environment in the United States Penny Newman 50 Environmental Degradation and Subversion of Health Mira Shiva 71 Using Technology, Choosing Sex: The Campaign Against Sex Determination and the Question of Choice FASDSP Group 91 Legal Rights ... and Wrongs: Internationalising Bhopal Indira Jaising and C. Sathyamala 103 ’Green Earth, Women’s Power, Human Liberation’: Women in Peasant Movements in India Gail Omvedt 116116 Filipino Peasant Women in Defence of Life Loreta B. Ayupan and Teresita G. Oliveros 131 Ethnic Confl ict in Sri Lanka: Its Ecological and Political ConsequencesRita Sebastian 141 The Seed and the Earth: Biotechnology and the Colonisation of Regeneration Vandana Shiva 151 Publications received 169 Editors: The opinions expressed in the journal are those of Svcn Hamrell the authors and do not necessarily reflect the Olle Nordbcrg views of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. Advisory Editorial Committee: It is regretted that the publication of this issue of Ahmed Ben Salah Development Dialogue has been delayed. The c/o IFDA, 4. place du Marché bulk of the material was sent to the printer in the 1260 Nyon, Switzerland autumn of 1992 but a few papers, needing further revision, could only be finalised in January 1993. Just Faaland Chr. Michelsen Institute The material in this issue of Development Fantoft, Norway Dialogue is simultaneously published as a book. Minding Our Lives: Women in the South & North Joseph Ki-Zcrbo Reconnect Ecology and Health, by Kali for B.P. 606 Women, who holds the copyright on this material. Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso All enquiries regarding the right to reprint or reproduce material from this collection should be Marc Nerfin directed to Kali for Women, A36 Gulmohar Park, 4. place du Marché New Delhi 110049, India. Copyright for USA and 1260 Nyon, Switzerland Canada is with New Society Publishers, 4527 Springfield Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19143, Göran Ohlin publishers of the North American edition of the Bråvallagatan 14 book. 113 36 Stockholm. Sweden © Kali for Women Juan Somavia Apt 26 B, 117 East 57th Street New York, NY 10021, USA Editorial Office: The Dag Hammarskjöld Centre Övre Slottsgatan 2 S-753 10 Uppsala, Sweden Fax: +46-18-12 20 72 ISSN 0345-2328 Telex: 76234 DHCENT S Printers: Subscribers are kindly requested to inform the Dag Motala Grafiska AB Hammarskjöld Centre of any changes of address Motala, Sweden or subscription cancellations. Editorial Note The seminar on 'Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections', which has provided the basis for the material presented in this issue of Development Dialogue, was held in Bangalore in southern India from July 17 to 22, 1991. It was jointly organised by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, Dehra Dun, India, and moderated by the Director of the latter foundation, Vandana Shiva. It brought together 25 participants from seven South Asian and Southeast Asian countries and one participant from the United States. Both foundations are grateful to the participants for their valuable contributions to the seminar dis- cussions and to the authors for the pains they have taken in thoroughly revising and updating their papers. The basic idea behind the organisation of the Bangalore seminar was the convic- tion that, twenty years after 'the Environment' was placed on the international agenda, the time was ripe to take stock, from a women's perspective, of two decades of development in the environmental field. Furthermore, an important factor was the growing recognition that across the world women are rebuilding connections with nature and renewing the insight that what people do to nature directly affects them, too; that there is, in fact, no insular divide between the environment and their own bodies and health. The themes of the seminar were not new to the two foundations who organised it. They are at the very core of the Indian foundation and they are of central im- portance to the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation even though its scope of ac- tivities is broader and includes more specific political, economic and legal issues. Thus, among the more than one hundred seminars that the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation has organised—or co-organised with institutions and organisations in the Third World—quite a number have dealt with related problems, albeit not in the integrated and challenging way that the Bangalore seminar did. An important earlier contribution to this process was the 1982 seminar on 'Another Development with Women' organised by the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) in cooperation with the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation under the direction of Marie-Angélique Savane. This seminar highlighted the decisive and important role that the women of the world can and, indeed, must play in initiating and implementing alternative development strategies in the interest of global survival. The ma- terial from this seminar was published in Development Dialogue in English (1982:1-2) and in French in a special issue (1985). A number of seminars have fo- cused on health; examples of this are the Uppsala seminars on 'Another Devel- opment in Health' (1977) and on 'Another Development in Pharmaceuticals' (1985) and the Bogève-Geneva seminar on Another Development and the New Biotechnologies' (1988), all published in Development Dialogue. 2 Editorial Note The philosophical foundation of these seminars was laid down in the 1975 Dag Hammarskjöld Report, What Now: Another Development, which elaborated an alternative development model, need-oriented, self-reliant, endogenous, en- vironmentally sound and based on structural transformations—principles that have guided the activities of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation ever since and that are also reflected in the conception of the Bangalore seminar. Just as the seminar was the result of the combined efforts of the two organising foundations, this issue of Development Dialogue is the result of a joint undertak- ing by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the Indian publishing house Kali for Women, which is India's first, and only, feminist publishing house, specialis- ing in general and academic works on and primarily by women and featuring books on history, health, environment and ecology, development, sociology, an- thropology, oral history, biography and autobiography as well as general fiction and non-fiction. The collaboration with Kali for Women, who will publish the material in this issue in book form, was initiated at the Bangalore seminar itself and has since encompassed all aspects of the work, i.e. the selection of the ma- terial, revision, updating, editing, proof-reading, and production. An important consideration for this collaboration was the desire, shared by both the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and Kali for Women, that the outcome of the seminar discussions be made available to as wide a readership as possible in the connected areas of development, gender and ecology, as well as among ac- tivists and non-governmental organisations working on these issues in the North and South. The collaboration itself between the two organisations, one in the North, the other in the South, one with a focus on development, the other on gender, highlighted yet another conviction held by both: the view that indigen- ous publishing is a crucially important part of intellectual and cultural develop- ment and international cooperation; it is hoped that this joint publishing effort will inspire similar undertakings by other organisations in this and other fields of endeavour. Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation Kali for Women Participants in the seminar on 'Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections': Nasreen Ahmad (Bangladesh), Rosie M. Ahsan (Bangladesh), Farida Akhter (Bangladesh). Anita Anand (India), Loreta Ayupan (The Philippines), Kamla Bhasin (India), Praful Bidwai (India), Gabriele Dietrich (India), Evelyn Hong (Malaysia). Indira Jaising (India), Pupul Jayakar (India), Anne Kerepia (Papua New Guinea), Ritu Menon (India), Penny Newman (USA), Teresita Oliveros (The Philippines), Gail Om- vedt (India), Purabi Pandey (India), Vanaja Ramprasad (India), S.T.S. Reddy (India), C. Sathyamala (India), Rita Sebastian (Sri Lanka), Chayanika Shah (India), Mira Shiva (India), Vandana Shiva (India), Ann Danaiya Usher (Thailand). Secretariat: Sandhya Augustus, Shabbir Ali, Sven Hamrell. Olle Nordberg, Gerd Ryman-Ericson. Introduction Women, Ecology and Health: Rebuilding Connections It is now twenty years since the 'environment' was put on the agenda of in- ternational concern with the Stockholm Environment Conference in 1972. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio dc Janeiro in June 1992 marked the culmination of these two decades of environmentalism, enabling us to take stock of trends. to build on the most promising and lasting ones. The global concern for planetary survival has moved from issue to issue in the last two decades. From desertification it shifted to acid rain, and the current preoccupation is the pollution of the atmospheric commons, svmptomatised by the greenhouse effect and ozone depletion. The official environmental response has largely been one of offering technological and managerial