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The Committee gathered
nearly fifty women leaders from around the world. The main issues addressed were
the struggle for equal opportunity, antiunion policies, femicide, and the
negative aspects of the spread of agrofuels.
Last April 15,
the International Women’s Committee of the IUF established its
priorities and adopted its agenda for the coming year’s activities. An
unprecedented number of resolutions directed at the IUF’s Executive Committee
attest to the high level and involvement achieved at the meeting.
As we had already announced here, Neuza Barbosa de Lima, of Brazil’s
National Confederation of Food Workers (CNTA) and secretary of the
Women’s Committee of Força Sindical of Brazil, denounced the
Spanish transnational corporation
Calvo
and its policy of antiunion discrimination applied in its La Unión plant
in El Salvador. In that respect, she highlighted the solidarity actions
that are being carried out in Brazil and the letter that her union
confederation sent to the company’s executive directors in that country.
In other
matters, the IUF’s Latin American Regional Office, Rel-UITA,
presented a report on the issue of violence against women in Guatemala
and
the recent passing of a Law that establishes that femicide and other forms of
violence against women are crimes. In that sense, the Committee decided to
express its recognition to the Congress of Guatemala for approving this
legal instrument that will entail a qualitative leap in the fight against gender
violence.
In Guatemala,
femicide is gruesomely
expressed in the 3,900 women that have been murdered since the year 2000,
and the country has one
of the world’s highest rates of gender-based crimes, with some 600 cases each
year.
In addition, delegates from around the world addressed the IUF’s
Executive Committee to express their concern at and rejection of the trend
that is displacing food crops and replacing them with crops intended for
agrofuel production, as is happening in the banana-growing region of Urabá,
Colombia, with African oil palm. “Besides increasing poverty, food
scarcity and the concentration of land ownership, agrofuel production
will eliminate millions of jobs, and it is emerging as a direct and deadly
attack on family-based agriculture, where women play an important and key role,”
the Committee emphasized.
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