Bias against women’s biodiversity knowledge needs to go

In a nut shell, a rather dismissive view of a repository of knowledge that has a bearing on our everyday life. The Convention that serves as the guide to the conservation of biological diversity (CBD) recognises the pivotal role women play by highlighting the same in its preamble. However, many scholars contend that the reference in the actual text is rather weak and limited only to ensuring continued access of women to natural resources, thereby viewing women only as users of biological diversity. 

It is also argued that while the CBD highlights the vital role that women play in the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and affirms the need for the full participation of women at all levels of policy-making and implementation for biodiversity conservation, the decisions of the CBD are yet to include any specific guidance as to how to foster women’s involvement and active participation. There is much evidence globally, of women having failed to make the transition from users to policy makers. 

For instance, it is well known that ethnobotanical or the traditional knowledge about plants is gendered, and it varies with the environment and the local social conditions. Women and men in most societies have access to different spaces and environments, giving them distinctive gender specific knowledge about the local biodiversity. To elaborate, in some of agrarian landscapes of Tamil Nadu, women may have a more thorough understanding of the space around their homes, fields and the neighbourhood in general, the men are more familiar with the terrains that are further away. 

Women are known to establish gardens close to the house where they grow special foods that are preferred by their family such as traditional varieties of vegetables, herbs, and spices, thus maintaining a level of biodiversity that has disappeared from large scale cultivations. In common parlance, the reference is indeed to the curry leaf plant in our garden, or the bed of amaranth greens that the women of our families painstakingly nurture. 

These gardens also provide flowers for ceremonial purposes, plants material for making drinks (simple word: your favorite lemonade), dyes, clothing, and baskets, and medicinal herbs, fodder, and fuel. Home gardens are usually the preserve of women and have only recently been recognized as important centres for plant genetic conservation. Researchers have even labelled such gardens as an important genetic backstop and along with fallow land, the source of more medicinal plants than are forests. In addition to gendered spatial knowledge, the differences are also related to divisions of labour. 

Conservation programmes that overlook the fundamentals of women’s knowledge, despite the best of intentions are counter- productive for they not only reiterate the historical negation of the specialised knowledge base, but also serve to strengthen the notion of women as only the users of biodiversity.