A platform for action for the sustainable management of mangroves in the Gulf of Fonseca

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Action 3. Bring Women and Communities into Decisionmaking

Where communities have been unable to participate in decisions about mangrove management, women have been doubly excluded from decisionmaking. Efforts should be made to ensure the full participation of the community in decisions about the design and operation of sustainable management strategies and, in particular, to include women in this process.

Women form the largest single dispossessed population in the world. Few women have titled access to land, or sufficient access to physical and financial capital. In most continents and across most rural subsistence activities women have fewer and less formalized access rights to all environmental goods and services capital (Meinzen-Dick et al. 1997; Agarwal 1994). This has meant that women disproportionately depend upon common property to meet and supplement household requirements for fuel, water, grazing, and shelter. Differential access to and dependence upon these environmental goods and services characterizes women's relationship to common property, and shapes their responsibilities and investment strategies toward the environment.

The findings from the studies in El Salvador and Honduras highlight the importance of women's contributions to the local economy and to the household as fisher-persons, farmers, and fuelwood gatherers. The results also underscore the relative disadvantage that women face entering the labor market, earning wages, and securing the resources necessary to provide for themselves and their families (see table 6). In El Salvador, women earn less than 40 percent of what men earn in fishing activities and less than 70 percent of what men earn in petty trade and micro-enterprise activities (Benítez and Machado 2000). Similarly, in rural Honduras, women earn, on average, half of men's wages (Aburto and Durón 2000). A significant proportion of the households in the mangrove communities are female-headed or maintained by women's income. In El Salvador, more than a quarter of all households are headed by a woman or rely primarily on women's income to meet the needs of all household members. In Honduras almost 20 percent of all households are female-headed or female-maintained. In both El Salvador and Honduras, these households are disproportionately poorer than male-headed and male-maintained households in the same communities.^[13]

To date, mangrove management plans have largely failed to document how women use and manage the resources available to them in the mangroves. Women rely on the fish they catch in the mangrove waters (see table 7). While men fish primarily in the open seas, the majority of women fish in mangrove estuaries and at the shoreline, catching a range of fresh-water and marine fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. Women gather shellfish and crabs in the estuaries, providing essential nutrients and proteins to supplement the family diet of corns and beans. Women are also involved in cleaning and processing the artisanal catch from offshore fisheries. They prepare and dry fish for sale in local and regional markets, as well as clean and pack shrimp to be exported.

Since women's roles in the local fishing industry are less visible, their access rights are more likely to go unrecognized and not to be incorporated into decisions about the management of the resource base. For example, in El Tamarindo, El Salvador, community leaders imposed an informal ban on estuary fishing activities in the early 1990s in response to pressure from the Ministry of Agriculture and the fisheries directorate, CENDEPESCA, who were concerned about the overfishing of juvenile shrimp and other aquatic fauna in the estuary. Women were not brought into the decision-making process as the ban was being discussed. Since women fish primarily in the estuary for subsistence purposes, their access rights were undermined and a vital source of household protein and income was lost or restricted.

A better resolution to the concern about over-fishing in the estuary would have been to identify which of the species were most threatened and to explore different means of reducing pressure on the estuary breeding grounds.^[14] The principal concern is shrimp production and the primary cause of loss of juveniles is from agricultural runoff and from the operation of rustic shrimp ponds. Regulation could have been more effectively directed toward those activities that increase pressure on the ecosystem in a targeted fashion, rather than precluding all subsistence fishing in the estuary. It is important to note that none of the species harvested by women in the estuary listed in table 7 are reported as being endangered.

Clearly, women's interests in the mangroves must be explicitly incorporated into any management plans in order to ensure that policy recommendations for changes in mangrove management are truly inclusive. The failure to include women's representatives in the decision-making process and to take a full account of women's activities in the mangroves will result in policies that marginalize the interests of women and subordinate them to groups with greater voice and power. Furthermore, this exclusion is likely to lead to the criminalization of women's activities without necessarily altering these activities.

» Revise existing laws to ensure that women have a right to hold fee simple title on land. Fee simple titles confer the right to sell or to convey by will or transfer to the tenant's heir a plot of land held by an individual upon the death of that individual. Almost all land in Honduras and El Salvador is held in fee simple title. In 1993, in Honduras, modifications were introduced to the existing agrarian reform code enabling women to hold fee simple land title. Previously, land title under the reform initiative had generally been given to men by allocating land to the head of household under the assumption that this will benefit the entire household. Between 1975, when agrarian reform began in Honduras, and 1993 less than four percent of all beneficiaries under the agrarian reform law were women (Fundación Arias 1998). Similarly in El Salvador, despite three phases of agrarian reform, less than five percent of all beneficiaries were women (IMU 1999; Deere and Leon 1998).

Allowing women to be the beneficiaries of land transferred under the agrarian reform initiatives gives women direct control over land resources. Providing access to land in joint title that recognizes the rights of dual-heads as well as single-heads of households ensures that women also have access to an asset that can be held or transferred and used as collateral to obtain credit. Where women are land-owners, their roles as land-managers will also be recognized. Without this recognition, women will continue to be marginalized; their land rights will be ignored and their gathering activities will be concentrated upon common property and open access resources.

» Build local capacity for resource management. To effectively apply environmental legislation, national governments need to invest in building local capacity for resource management, without dismissing existing institutional and organizational agreements. Women need to be drawn into this process. Governments need to specifically target the following sets of actions:

• Heighten awareness of national environmental legislation, including local governments' responsibilities in managing forestry resources. Information about national legislation should be disseminated to both men and women, using popular education formats, radio, and television.
  
  
•  Promote the organization of community resource management groups, which can work with local and national governments to define regulations, restrictions, and enforcement strategies.
  
  
•  Set gender targets and quotas to ensure that women are actively included in the community representation and their use rights are considered when designing and implementing community level management plans.

» Build and/ or strengthen local capacity to interpret data through practical and user-friendly methods. This process will include developing participatory land quality indicator tools that draw upon the data and findings generated by the multisectoral commissions. The purpose is to enhance local mangrove management practices and ensure the full participation of regional and local governments, community resource management organizations, and local land users. Local stakeholders can be trained and information should be disseminated at the grass roots level to support democratic processes that influence resource management, policy enforcement, and property rights allocation.

» Increase community access to technical assistance programs. Technical assistance programs can be used to introduce appropriate technology, to change behaviors, and alleviate local resource dependency. Appropriate technologies can be used to increase food security, diversify household income, and provide more sustainable methods for resource use.

Technical assistance programs can complement coastal and resource users' knowledge of sustainable practices, incorporating and disseminating indigenous knowledge about alternative and sustainable methods of catching fish, or providing guidance on the use of integrated pest management systems and reducing the reliance on chemical inputs. Such programs should be developed with the communities and respond to their needs and priorities.

All technology transfer programs should consider the gender of the beneficiaries and particularly how gender shapes resource use. Channeling technology directly to women can be extremely worthwhile. It can change their resource dependency, relieve their need for additional household labor, and increase the efficiency of their reproductive and productive tasks. However, where women are to be the beneficiaries of technology transfer, they should be brought actively into that process. Previous endeavors to introduce solar cookers, solar driers, and food storage technologies to enable women to decrease their dependency on fuelwood and household labor and overcome seasonal fluctuations in agricultural produce have failed (Nathan 1997; Cecelski 1984). They have failed largely because women were not encouraged to participate in the problem-identification or solution-generation phase (Gammage, Benítez, and Machado 2000). The result has been, in many cases, the application of a technology that was neither appropriate nor effective; a technology that worsened the production relations and was quickly abandoned (Anderson 1991).

These concerns are not insurmountable and many projects have successfully promoted the adoption of improved fuelwood and charcoal stoves. Projects that are participatory and focus on minimizing time-burdens, alleviating bottlenecks in household production, and accommodating the timing and sequencing of existing household tasks have achieved high rates of adoption and use (Gammage et al. 1999; Dutta 1997). Programs to promote improved fuelwood and fuel-efficient stoves should also be accompanied by efforts to manage the remaining forests effectively, plant fast-growing species that can meet local domestic energy requirements, improve existing charcoal carbonization techniques, and introduce alternatives such as the production of carbonized briquettes.

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[13] Many female-headed and female-maintained households receive dollar remittances from family members living in the United States. Remittances provide much-needed cash income and subsidize consumption expenditures lifting some of these households out of poverty. Despite the widespread receipt of remittances, female-headed and female-maintained households are disproportionately poorer in rural areas of Honduras and El Salvador (Gammage 2000; Aburto and Duron 2000; Gammage 1998).

[14] A variety of measures are available— from permits to seasonal bans.

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