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4. The Impact of Globalization on Women Peasants and Traders in Nigeria's Delta Region (1986-2002)
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4 The Impact of Globalization on Women Peasants and Traders in Nigeria’s Delta Region (1986 – 2002) Iwebunor Okwechime Introduction This study is an attempt to demonstrate how the dynamics of globalization have heightened the contradictions generated by the oil industry over the last 47 years in the oil-rich Niger Delta, and the impact of these on female peasants and traders between 1986 and 2002. In the Niger Delta women are the backbone of the communities and they also constitute over 50 per cent of the population. Although most of them have limited education, they are generally enterprising. Not surprisingly, the women folk play a significant role in the communities in the Niger Delta through farming, fishing and trading in agricultural and other goods. However, each of these is becoming increasingly difficult, given the effects of globalization on the oil industry, to which the Niger Delta communities have played host over the last four-odd decades. Globalization places an especially heavy burden on female peasants and traders in the Niger Delta. The globalization of the oil industry has led to, among other things, the intensification of oil exploration and the further integration of the region into the market-driven global capitalist system. The consequence of this is well reflected in the increased environmental and social degradation, as well as wide-spread economic disempowerment among the female peasants and traders of the Niger Delta oil communities. Due to increased oil exploitation activities by the oil companies, huge tracts of arable land were annexed for oil industryrelated activities, such as pipelines, flow stations, access roads and campsites for oil workers, among others. Furthermore, increased oil exploitation and production activities heightened the environmental devastation of land, water and air which Global Exchanges and Gender Perspectives in Africa 72 were polluted by spills, blow outs, seepages and gas flares. All this resulted in diminished productivity, thereby threatening the viability of the local economy in which women play a vital role. “Since farms are failing, palm trees are not bearing fruit, and fish are depleted”, said Grace Ekanem, a women’s group leader, “women are not only unable to feed their families, but cannot earn money to send their children to school or to afford medical treatment” (cited in Esparza and Wilson, 1999:10). It was against this background that the women mobilized themselves against the forces of globalization – the oil companies and the Nigerian state – demanding, among other things, community development and the provision of economic empowerment programmes, as well as employment for their children and an end to environmental degradation. Through their demonstrations, protests and sit-outs, the women have drawn the attention of the Nigerian state and human rights organizations to their plight. They have also largely succeeded in making the oil companies sign a series of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with them. At this point several questions are pertinent. How did poor, mostly illiterate, peasant women and traders unite and mobilize themselves against the forces of global capitalism? How did they overcome or transcend the constraints imposed by the patriarchal nature of their society? And what are the factors responsible for the relative success of these women-led protests over those of their male counterparts? These and other questions will be investigated in this study. The context of the issues that provide the background for our investigation or our framework of analysis is based on a political ecology perspective. It recognizes, at a contextual and an analytical level, how state policies, interstate relations and global capitalism impinge on issues such as access to, ownership of and control over nature (natural resources such as crude oil, forests and water). In the specific case of the Niger Delta, this approach brings into clear relief the destructive impact of corporate globalization on the economic livelihoods of unwaged rural women. Also, within this framework, we are able to understand how the rural people of the oil belt, especially the women folk, bear the brunt of external policy constraints that originate from an institutional domain that they have no control over and little knowledge of (Redclift and Sage 1994). The year 1986 is remarkable, not only for the purposes of our analysis, but for the Nigerian state as well. It was the very year the military government of Nigeria under the former dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida, officially adopted the Bretton Woods Institutions’ imposed Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), despite the overwhelming groundswell of public opinion against the adoption of the programme. 1986 is also a landmark...