Page 4 RAIN November/December 1985 I SCATTERED Mushrooming Nuclear Free Zone Movement In 1982, there were but three nuclear free zones in the United States. This summer Jersey City, New Jersey, became the 100th city in this nation to join the NFZ club. Four of these also ban the investment of municipal funds in businesses that hold nuclear weapons contracts. There are 125 more NFZ campaigns in progress, including two legally binding ones against the navy in Key West and New York City. Beyond the local level, there are two statewide NFZ initiatives pending, in Oregon and Massachusetts. On a global scale, 1982's 250 NFZs have multiplied to today's 2700, including five NFZ treaties, the most recent of which declared the entire South Pacific, the birthplace of America's hydrogen bomb, to be nuclear free once again. (Source: The New Abolitionist, September/October 1985.) New Coke Badfor Old Economy The ongoing arguments over which Coca Cola formula is better are basically matters of—pardon the pun—taste. However, in Madagascar, the arguments have a bottom- line impact. That nation's leading export is vanilla, which is part of Old Coke's formula. Sales of vanilla to Coca Cola amounted to 30 percent of the world market, so the new vanilla-less Coke, plus falling prices for this favorite of flavors, were a cause of major concern in Madagascar. But, the return of "old" Coke may herald a vanilla-scented economic recovery there. (Source: Seeds, October 1985.) AIDS Research Posing Dilemmas In this country. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is headline news, and is receiving ever-increasing medical research funding. Generally, treatment of other health problems has not suffered due to the attention or money given AIDS. In places such as Africa, though, money for any new medical crisis must often be re-allocated out of existing funds, and AIDS research could cause a drop in the resources available for ongoing public health problems such as malaria and other tropical diseases, which claim many lives each year. This is the concern of the Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr. Halfdan Mahler, who feels that the organisation's health goals for the continent by the year 2000 might not be met if AIDS receives funding based on its notoriety rather than on its real impact on the populace. Accurate information on the spread of AIDS in Aftica has been hampered by slow information gathering. Another WHO official stressed that the biggest threat to health care improvement on that continent remains the world economic situation, followed by natural disasters and civil wars. (Source: All Africa Press Service Bulletin, September 30, 1985.) Women's Work andAgricultural Research Priorities A recent study of agricultural research in Africa provides some interesting evidence of a male bias in that field. There are two assumptions basic to almost all agricultural research done in the developing world: that cash crops are more important than locally consumed food crops, and that the roles of women are unimportant in the planning, development, and implementation of research. The cash crop emphasis is a colonial legacy, continued today in the guise of export-intensive development policies. As a result of this, the best land and the preferred laborers (men) still are devoted to these projects, and the bulk of research efforts benefit them. The net result is that food crops for local use, and the women who traditionally provide the labor to produce them, have been marginalized in access to land, technology, information, and credit. For example, agricultural researchers do little work on mass production of improved equipment for tasks done largely by women and largely by hand, such as weeding, pre-storage food processing, or transport of food from the fields. Overlooking these areas inhibits national development, as in Tanzania, where expansion of the maize crop was stymied by the unavailability of labor to weed the extra land available. Other research aimed at local food crop improvements has sometimes been ineffective because the wrong people were taught. In the Gambia, rice irrigation techniques failed to succeed even after they had been shown to the men three times. The women who actually tend the rice crops were never instructed. In Nigeria, "appropriate technology"’ oil presses proved inappropriately scaled to the bodies of the women that worked them in the villages, leading to unanticipated declines in production. Even in cash crop work, women's roles have been undervalued. They perform significant amounts of the work, and now are family income earners on a widespread basis in Africa. But, women are having difficulty building on these modest gains. Loans for farmland improvement and new equipment, or memberships in agricultural organizations, are dependent on the collateral value of land. Since the land that women work is less productive than that used for cash crops, its cash value is lower. There are remedies available to correct the male biases in Third World agricultural research. Moving field research stations closer to the villages where people live and work is one. Agricultural research staff need to know who really performs what village and household duties, and where, when, how, and why they do so. Also, they need to be able to analyze social, economic, and cultural information, as well as scientific data. Additionally, any research that results in less time spent by village women on household chores would also increase the time available for them to devote to agriculture, and to better care of their children, both of which would improve the overall quality of village life and tend to increase productivity. More specific steps include: recruiting more women into agricultural training institutes (currently only about 20
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