RIO FOR PEOPLE: Strengthening People’s Capacity for Genuine Sustainable Development

Hanoi, Vietnam

Despite calls for renewed political commitment to the principles and goals of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to address the unequal and unsustainable character of dominant development patterns, Rio+20 is inclined to reinforcing the same neoliberal framework that was the very cause of the multiple crises of today. The Green Economy, premised on the commodification of nature and ecosystem services, allows for business as usual and very well suits the interests of the corporate sector.

*Speech delivered by Ms. Cynthia Caridad Abdon Tellez of Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants (APMM) during the APRN Women's Book Launch  in Hong Kong

Women are in crisis. Women are victims of war and violence. But women – us – also resist.

Women migrant workers are no strangers to the impacts of the ongoing and intensifying global crisis. Women migrants feel it both in the country of their employment and their country of origin.

In the country of employment, the labor rights of women migrants are continuously eroded. Wages are either slashed or frozen, working conditions are not improved, days-off are denied and abuses are remain rampant. Social exclusion is the rule and laws and policies are made to keep women migrants in the gutter and be second- or third-class citizens.

Although  women are  mostly at  the  receiving  end  of the negative  impacts  of  neoliberal globalization  and  war, the  reality is that they also  go through various cycles of coping   with,  adapting  to, and  resisting the onslaught of the multiple crises.

There has also been particular erosion of women’s intangible spaces  such  as  the   solidarity  and  community  support, leaving the basic survival weave of women’s lives torn apart by  the  push  of individualistic  value  systems generated by  market-based consumption patterns and policies. 

In many Asian societies, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is generally understood as being no more than corporate-run community development projects to compensate for social and economic injustices. Most of such projects, like constructing schools and health care centres, have been effectively hegemonic, providing strong legitimacy and extensive license to corporations to sustain the exploitation of the human and natural resources in many countries. A further implication of CSR is that it makes people think that it is the company’s obligation to meet people’s rights to a better education system, clean water, health care, etc., instead of the State or government. At the same time, this has allowed the State to escape from its obligations towards society.