Rural Women to Seek Government
Assistance and Denounce CAFTA
By Robert Goodier
Tico Times Staff
rgoodier@ticotimes.net

Hundreds of women from backwater villages in some of Costa Rica 's most remote, single-phone and dirt-road regions will gather in San José 's Plaza de la Democracia tomorrow to call for economic assistance and take a stand against the Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA). Many will have traveled by foot and bus for over 12 hours to make the case for further government aid in their communities.

Orfa Condega, from the village Las Nubes near the Nicaraguan border, is one of those leading them as the secretary of the board of directors of the Campesina Women organization that has roped in 45 rural women's groups around the nation. Organizers expect about 650 women to fill the plaza and present their positions on CAFTA, food security and biological heritage.

Their complaints encompass public services that are more readily provided in more densely populated areas. In Las Nubes, for example, Condega said, there is one public pay phone that the village of about 30 families has to share.

“When it's out of service, we have to walk five hours to another village to use the phone,” she said.

Like most in the village, she has no car and rides one of her family's three horses. To go long distances, like to Los Chiles, the nearest town and commercial hub of the region, she has to pay ¢15,000 ($30) for a taxi because there are no buses.

The doctor comes once per month and charges ¢13,000 ($26) per consultation, but many villagers can't afford to pay. They farm small plots of rice and beans for sustenance and a little profit, or work on nearby orange or ñame (a tuber) plantations for as little as ¢2,000 ($4) per day or less.

Condega said some women in the groups she represents have had to be evacuated to hospitals after exposure to agricultural chemicals used on pineapple plantations near their villages and others suffer respiratory problems from the chemicals used on big farm plots.

The women will ask the Legislative Assembly to improve telephone, electricity, medical and road-building services in their communities. To guarantee better nutrition and more income, they are seeking a law that would give rural women access to communal plots of land on which they would raise the crops they want for sustenance and sale.

“Sixty-five percent of women do not have any access to land, not even through their husbands or families; 30 percent have access through their husbands, and five percent have land in their names,” she said.

“It gives the women control over how the land is used.”

They will present the Assembly with their CAFTA stance – opposed on the grounds that they will not be able to compete with transnational corporations that might have easier access to their land and water.

They will present their cases from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. for information, see the Web site www.vocesnuestras.org.