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MOSAIC: The new potato
Women and environment WOMEN are at the front line against the battle with environmental degradation. Their health depends on the health of the land, forests, air and water around them. As those in closest contact with the land and the natural world they are usually the first to suffer from its degradation. Deforestation increases the amount of time women must spend in seeking both fuel and water: when the trees are felled water sources also dry up. In Gujarat, India, women now have to devote four or five hours a day to collecting fuel wood, whereas not long ago they only had to go out to get it every four or five days. Every day in South Africa alone, the country’s women walk the equivalent of going to the moon and back 16 times over to fetch water for their families. Both tasks cripple the health of the women who have to carry the heavy loads. The water is often unsafe, killing more than three million people a year, mostly children. And pollution from the fuel wood and other biomass — which 2.5 billion people have to use because they lack modern forms of energy — disproportionately kills women and children, who spend most time in the home. Women, who tend to carry more fat, are also more vulnerable to the toxic chemicals that build up in it, and so are their unborn babies. In countries as different as the United States and Sudan, increased neonatal deaths have been found among the children of women farmers exposed to pesticides. High levels of dioxins and other hazardous chemicals have been found in breast milk in a wide variety of countries, while women exposed to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) around North America’s Great Lakes have given birth to children with delayed motor development and dramatically lower intelligence. Yet women are often also at the forefront of the fight to conserve health and the environment. They have led the Chipko movement against the felling of forests in northern India and similarly are campaigning against chemical-intensive agriculture across the subcontinent. The soil in women’s plots in Ghana has been found to retain its fertility longer than the soil in men’s ones, while half of all the United Kingdom’s organic farmers are female, ten times the proportion in the country’s agriculture as a whole. — Samina Iqbal Cat Stevens denied entry FORMER pop singer Cat Stevens now known as Yusuf Islam, was denied entry to the United States and his flight from London was diverted to Maine, after his name turned up on a watch list, a US transportation security official said. United Flight 919 enroute to Washington was diverted to Bangor where Islam was questioned and detained by federal authorities who put him on a return flight. US Customs and border protection authorities discovered that the name matched a federal watch list by checking passenger information transmitted by the airline after the flight departed from London. The Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the event reported that Islam, whose name is listed as “Usef Islam,” is on several government watch lists, including the no-fly list. | ||
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