development

I am giving a presentation at 12 in Seminar Room C today in Gender Relations Centre Seminar Series. The title of the seminar is: ‘On the Question of a Right to Mine: Women, Gender and Work in Coal Mining in India’. I am sure it will be of interest to some RMAPpers.

The seminar illuminates the ‘difference/equality’ question in the area of women’s work, and explores a grey area in feminist theory – that of women’s specificity as workers in their biologically based attributes and ’sameness’ in terms of their demands for gender equity.

See details of this Workshop to be held at the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, on 11-12th August, 2008
http://www.cseindia.org/programme/industry/mining/joint_workshop.htm

A conference was recently held in the University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA, on large ‘mega’ engineering projects and their social impacts. For details, abstract and list of participants see http://www.uky.edu/AS/Geography/EngineeringEarth/

Gender is indeed a multi-layered complex reality, and feminist scholars have been digging through these layers, to ‘unearth’ women’s contributions in various aspects of life. When gender confronts mining, many articulations of everyday life assume different - even metaphorical - significance. To get a glimpse of the complexities lying at the intersection of gender and mining, read the recently published article in Feminist Review (download here: period-leave-feminist-review.pdf).

For anyone still following the rice seed debate I found this article the other day on formal and informal seed systems.

Almekinders, C. J. M., N. P. Louwaars, et al. (1994). “Local Seed Systems and Their Importance For an Improved Seed Supply in Developing Countries.” Euphytica 78: 207-216.

Variety use and development, seed production and storage by farmers under local conditions, and seed exchange mechanisms are presented as the three principal components of a dynamic system that forms the most important seed source of food crops for small farmers in developing countries. The information on this topic is based on a literature review and a case study. Analysis of strengths and weaknesses of local seed systems leads to the conclusion that local seed systems and the formal system are complementary. Integrated approaches in breeding, and seed production and distribution show to have promising potential for improving seed supply for small farmers.

The authors claim that for most staple crops the share of the formal seed system in the total seed system rarely exceeds 10 percent.

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