Food Fish


Chapter 1


GLOBAL GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK Chapter 4: Water Forest Box 2.5.1: Women’s protests against seabed mining


Perhaps women’s most prominent role in regard to seabed mining and other environmentally damaging extractive processes has been that of organized protest. Globally women have led efforts to prevent seabed mining. For example, the Vanuatu National Council of Women has insisted on the need to protect the seabed as an inherent foundation of wealth. At the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) women led a campaign to end experimental seabed mining (Hunter and Taylor 2013). In a remote island of Papua New Guinea a woman led efforts which succeeded in the gathering of 24,000 signatures to present to the government protesting experimental seabed mining (Jameson 2013).


Energy


by people on the rigs and patrols guarding the rigs often extort money from them (Campos-Serrano 2013). As fish become increasingly scarce, fishermen from local villages migrate to other villages where they catch fish and sell it to local women there, leaving their wives with no fish and no immediate source of alternative income (King 2010).


While extractive industries such as near-shore oil production create jobs, these jobs mostly go to men. In northeast Scotland between 2006 and 2013 there was a 19% increase in the number of women working on offshore rigs, yet only 3.7% of total workers were women (Saner 2013). Women who work on rigs are usually involved in catering and in health and safety (Saner 2013). When women obtain extraction industry related jobs in coastal areas, these jobs tend to be menial so that the women are part of the lower paid workforce (Adusah-Karikari 2015).


Women feel distinctive effects from extractive


industries, particularly when the industry involves large numbers of transient non-local male labourers in small coastal communities (Scott et al. 2013). As these communities grow up around extractive industries, criminal networks are also likely to grow. For example, in Equatorial Guinea a dramatic increase in trafficking of women and children for domestic and sexual exploitation was associated with these industries (US Department of State 2011).


“What we put in”: contaminants and pollutants


136


Oil spills: Assessments of damage from oil spills usually focus on destruction caused to fisheries and to the livelihoods of men in the fishing industry; downstream impacts such as loss of fish processing jobs and ancillary businesses (often women’s domains) that depend on robust fisheries are seldom counted as “fishing” impacts and are seldom compensated if


oil companies are compelled to pay for losses (Olujide 2006). In addition to fishery and livelihood issues, oil spills have highly gendered health implications. Following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, women were particularly subject to high levels of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, as were Native Americans of both sexes (Palinkas et al. 1993).


Plastics: Plastic materials are now considered the most persistent and problematic type of marine debris, with widespread effects on marine ecology. Between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes of plastic debris per year enters the ocean, of which approximately 83% originates in only 20 countries with China, Indonesia and the Philippines topping the list of marine plastic polluters (Jambeck et al. 2015). The impacts of plastic debris include entanglement of birds, turtles and marine mammals, as well as marine animals’ ingestion of plastic fragments, resulting in blocking of the digestive system. The fact that plastics persist for very long periods and are largely insoluble has significant implications for human health (Roy et al. 2011).


Because of spatial differences in fishing by women and men, there may be significant gender differences in their experience, knowledge and impacts of marine plastics pollution. The build-up of plastic debris in coastal zones is severe and different in character from open-sea plastic pollution, with different impacts on women’s near-shore fishing than on open-ocean fishing by men. Loss of economic activities, damage to well-being, and mental health aspects of the impacts of degraded environments are all gender-differentiated and likely to be more intense for women in near-shore fisheries than for men in fisheries located offshore. However, virtually no research or data exist on such differences.


Plastic debris in oceans fragments into increasingly smaller particles without chemically degrading (Engler 2012). These newly formed microplastic particles (or secondary microplastics) are easily ingested and


Chapter 2


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