The Talaandig soil painters

This story was first published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Feb. 23, 2008

THE WORD BALUGTO in Talaandig means rainbow but ironically even after Marcelino Necosia had renamed himself Balugto in an effort to affirm his tribal roots, his oeuvre’s palette didn’t get a dash of the ephemeral sky-bridge’s varied hues.
Instead Balugto’s colors are a monochrome of earth tones—rich browns to fiery oranges to dark reds.

Balugto, 22, is one of the six resident painters here who belong to the Talaandig tribe and whose works are exhibited at the Museo de Oro, the repository of Mindanao folklore at the Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro until July this year.

Instead of expensive synthetic paints, all the six visual artists use earth pigments, the soil which is readily available, free material right under their feet in the tribal community of Songco on the foothills of Mt. Kitanglad, about 50 kilometers away from Malaybalay City.

Dubbed “Yuta,” meaning “land, ground, soil” in Binisaya as well as Talaandig, the exhibit features large works of, literally, soil on canvas, by Balugto as well as Rodelio “Waway” Saway Sr., Junathan “Sultan” Cruz, Soliman Poonon, Marlon “Tambuloy” Necosia and Raul Bendit.

The exhibit is a landmark of sorts for both the Talaandig as well as the Museo.
For the first time painters of indigenous descent are working together for several months to produce works based on the mythologies of their forbears. Thus the visual narratives are actually a new form of storytelling.

Among the Talaandig, stories are passed on as oral tradition either as chants and songs or as gestures of dance.

The painters say this is their way of giving back to their community, preserving and developing their culture.

For the Museo, it is the first time that illustrations of folk traditions are done by indigenous people themselves.

Before this, the institution, founded in the 1970s, showed folk life of Mindanao’s tribes with visual interpretations done by Nonoy Estarte, its resident artist, who now curates this show.

“Yuta” thus is the fruition of decades-old nurturing of craft among this generation of Talaandig artisans and crafters.
The five look up to Saway, 39, as their mentor. They even grant him the title Master Jedi, after the character of a sage in the epic film trilogy, “Star Wars.” They also acknowledge lessons and advice the learned from lowlander artists like Errol Balcos and Tating Soliva.

It has been 10 years since Saway’s first painting of an earthen jar using Songco’s clayey soil was among those in a survey exhibit of artworks by Mindanaoan visual artists.

It was Estarte, who led the art festival’s host, Cagayan de Oro Art Guild then, who pushed for the inclusion of Saway’s work.
Since then, Saway had painted, using soil as medium, and relayed the love-for-this-earth-based art among the young in workshops right in Songco.

“I saw the arts as a viable path in which these youngsters can go back to the ancient good ways of the tribe,” said Waway. “Otherwise, they would have all drowned in vices when they dropped out of school,” he said.

Waway and company gather soils from different parts of their village as well as in other parts of Mindanao, from Camiguin, Iligan and Davao. These soil pigments are filtered and sifted and then mixed with transparent glue.

The painters use the common paintbrush to apply the soil-glue blend on canvas. On the suggestion of Kublai, a painter from Davao, they apply acrylic emulsion on their work to give it a certain luster that earth colors lack.
Despite using the same material prepared in the same process, each has developed his own signature style and palettes.

“We don’t share styles. Instead we influence each other’s concepts and ideas,” says Sultan, whose works feature land like sinuous human bodies, with trees growing from abundant hair.

“We agree on the ideas and comment on each other’s work. Yet we still allow each one to do something for himself alone, what satisfies his individual cravings,” said Waway.

Waway’s work are abstracted human figures in a tableau framing the narrative of the seven altars, the last step towards the immortality of the folk leaders. Soliman’s works highlight the adventures of Agyu and Bataay whose powers include flying on air astride a shield and a winnowing basket.

Balugto’s and Bendit’s works may yet herald the subtle shift of attitude towards women as tribal heroes in a still largely patriarchal community as well as a breaking away from gender stereotypes. In their frames, women are recast from mere passive faces and figures to be ogled into heroes of survival and power.

Balugto’s “Bai Ginamayong dawsa lenep” (Bai Ginamayong during the big flood) illustrates the travails of Bai Ginamayong, a folk hero, as she clings for dear life on a drum during a great flood while Bendit’s shows “Anac,” another folk character in Ulaging, the creation myth, playing the “pulala,” the long nose bamboo flute, floating on a leaf.

“It is how I imagined our tribe’s version of ‘rapture’, floating away, and since I don’t know how to visualize rapture, I use the leaf as the seat on which Anac takes flight,” says Bendit, appraising his own work’s coarse spontaneity. According to Bendit, like the Christian version, rapture is a state in which a human being goes to heaven without dying, a form of immortality.

In Bendit’s work, Anac is said to have thrown her flute back to earth and it became a species of bamboo good for making musical instruments.

When asked why both had chosen to portray strong women as heroes, Bendit quickly replies: “Because we are disgrasyados.”

Disgrasyados, what? Bendit explained it is a play on the term, disgrasyada, and we somehow get the drift.

Literally, disgrasyada means “the victim of an accident,” a term coined from the Spanish to mean a woman who begets a child out of wedlock.

“Our woman left us,” confess Balugto and Bendit, forsaken young lovers and fathers, on their faces the looks between a grin and a grimace.

The use of earth pigments is not unique. In several parts of the world, it is part of a global emergence of organic arts created from non-toxic, organic materials.

And, of course, thousands-years-old stick figures on cave walls in Mexico and France dated even before the Australian Aborigines chew and blow ocher on rocks, for instance, show that human beings first use soil to tell their stories in the shadows cast probably by camp fire.

Note the Inquirer version further cited a description of the Talaandig that was taken from an article by Maurice Malanes. Malanes also had an article on the Talaandig in the Inquirer. And Vic Saway, a Talaandig leader, described his own people in the National Commission on Culture and the Arts.

RP gov't not yet off the hook in UN racism case

GENEVA, Switzerland – Even as it had responded in February this year to charges of state racism against an indigenous community in Mindanao, the Philippine government is not yet off the hook.

The racism case will again be discussed during the 73rd session of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (UN CERD) here, from July 28 to August 15 this year.

In a letter to Erlinda Basilio of the Philippine Permanent Mission here, UN CERD told the Philippine government that it was gravely concerned "about recent information suggesting that the situation in Mt. Canatuan, Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte is not an isolated case but indicative of many similar cases happening to indigenous communities in the country."

Lumad shadow report
Meanwhile, a national network of indigenous groups, which met in June, said recently that some 40 people’s organizations are drafting together an alternative report on the government’s crimes against indigenous peoples or the Lumad, particularly those who are against ming and other extractive industries.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had referred to mining as the country’s sunshine industry that is projected to bring in foreign investments worth at least US$9 to 10.4 billion by 2010. In her recent State of the Nation address, however, she mentioned that she said that "mining industries should ensure that host communities benefit substantially from their investments, and with no environmental damage from operations."

The Philippine government as state party to the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) was first directed August last year by the CERD to respond to a complaint detailing a pattern of racial discrimination against the Subanens in Mt. Canatuan in Barangay Tabayo, Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte.

The complaint was filed under the CERD’s urgent action procedure by Timuay (leader) Jose "Boy" Anoy in behalf of seven groups, including that of Gukom Sog Pito Kobogolalan Sog Pito Kadulongan (Gukom of the Seven Traditional Councils of the Seven Rivers).

Other concerns
In its recent communiqué, CERD chair Fatimatah Binta Victoire Dah further reminded the Philippine government that "free, prior and informed consent of indigenous communities is required for any development projects on ancestral lands as provided for in the state party's (the Philippines') 1997 Indigenous Peoples Act."

Victoire Dah also asked the Philippine government to clarify further on points raised by the Subanen, including:
•giving a mining concession to a mining company without free, prior and informed consent from the indigenous community;
•continued recognition of a bogus Council of Elders despite the community's repudiation of this council; and
•government actions to protect the community from violence, harassment and attacks by military and paramilitary forces

Overdue reports
The Philippine government was reminded to submit five overdue biannual reports, from 1998 onwards, on its implementation of the ICERD. The Philippines is among the ICERD’s 173 state parties that ratified the treaty in 1967.

The Philippine government’s earlier defense was discussed at the 72nd Session of the CERD last February, under its urgent action procedures. The government report denied massive human rights violations against the Subanen. Instead the government report submitted by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), pointed at "internal strife and division" among the Subanen as the cause behind the lumad’s woes.

Last year, the CERD considered the complaint filed by the Subanen, the indigenous peoples of Zamboanga peninsula. Since the 1990s, the Subanen had been resisting big-scale open-pit gold mining right on their ancestral domain in Mt. Canatuan, Barangay Tabaco, Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte.

Human rights violations
The Subanen sought relief from the CERD under its urgent action procedures. In their complaint, the Subanen and their support groups detailed "a persistent pattern of acts of hatred and violence and discrimination tantamount to discrimination" against the Subanen race.

They submitted Mining a Sacred Mountain, a comprehensive human rights assessment report by an international team of anthropologists, which detailed violations of human rights.

According to the anthropologists, their months-long study indicated that the government has violated the lumad’s right to self-determination, right to security of the person, right to adequate housing, education and just wages for work as their sacred mountain became the site of a gold mining development by TVI Resource Development, a subsidiary of TVI Pacific, a Canadian mining company.

The TVIRD has recently announced its plan to to continue its mining expansion in the Zamboanga Peninsula for gold, silver and sulphide as it sought for a $40-million loan from BNP Paribas.

Timuay Anoy said that “government agencies, including the military and police, were accomplices in violating the right of the indigenous peoples to self-determination.”

Last resort
The CERD urgent procedures respond to problems requiring immediate attention to prevent or limit the scale or number of violations or serious violations to the Convention.

"A criterion for initiating an urgent procedure could include, for example, the presence of a serious massive or persistent pattern of racial discrimination," explained Azherwina Mosqueda, paralegal of the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC), one of the signatories of the case against the Philippine government.

The LRC is one of the support groups of the Subanen, one of the country's indigenous peoples, numbering about 330,000, and mostly inhabiting the Zamboanga peninsula.

In presenting the indigenous people’s complaint before the CERD, Anoy offered suggestions on what can be done to remedy their ordeal as a people. Among Anoy's recommendations are for the CERD to adopt some measures, including urging the Philippine government immediately to resolve the problems in Mt. Canatuan.

Mosqueda explained that bringing the Subanen case to an international forum like the CERD is the people's last recourse.

"The Subanen have pursued every avenue within the law since 1987 to gain government recognition of the rights to their ancestral domain. But even as they were given an ancestral domain title, still mining was permitted to proceed on their very lands, without prior consent, resulting in the violation of their human rights to land and resources, to culture and self-determination," Mosqueda said.

The CERD is one of the seven treaty-based bodies created under the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. It is composed of an 18-member panel of independent experts monitoring the implementation of the ICERD by state party signatories.

Indigenous peoples from other parts of the world are also facing the onslaught of development aggression and government inaction and had presented their cases before the CERD under the early warning measures and urgent action procedures against their own governments. Aside from the Subanen, other indigenous peoples whose cases were considered by CERD at its 71st session last year are: the Maya people of Belize, Mapuches of Chile and the Mapuxi, Wapichana of Brazil.

At the fringes of climate change's 'Ground Zero': zemijahns hit global potholed hi-way

(news report)
COTONOU, BENIN – "We are exposed to the heat of the sun over our heads, our eyes hurt in the smog and so we have to wear dark glasses,” says Sebastien Djossa, a moto-taxi conducteur plying the routes between Cadjehoun Highway and the Dantokpa Central Market here.

“At night, we are very tired, our bones ache. We have to pray everyday we will meet no accident," he adds.

Djossa, a Roman Catholic, like some 24 per cent of the population, speaks in conversant English, a skill that is rare in this former French colony.

Djossa also mentioned having experienced muscle pains, bouts of coughing and flu; for others, particularly who had been on the job for long years, even tuberculosis.

"Driving a moto-taxi cannot be my job forever. It can only be a transition job something I need to do while waiting for a better job," he says.

As jeepneys are to Manila so are "zemijahns" or "moto-taxis" to Cotonou.

Zemijahns or moto-taxis are two-wheeled Asian-made (mostly Chinese but some are Korean, Japanese and Indian) motorcycles which serve as the common people's conveyances in this tiny West African country just slightly bigger than Luzon island.

Coined into the local Fon language and into the Beninese variety of French, the "r" in the word "motor" is gone silent. "Zemi" in the Fon language means "get there fast".

Like its unemployment rate, there is no readily available figure of the total number of motorcycles nor of its drivers plying the Cotonou routes but Beninese estimates say it could run in thousands.

A back-riding commuter by moto-taxi pays between 100 to 250 Communaute Financiere Africaine or, for short, CFA (pronounced "sey-fah") francs (about PhP10 to PhP25) for every route.

A West African regional currency drawn from the Central Bank of West African States and also used by Togo, Burkina Faso and Mali, one CFA franc is equivalent to about ten Philippine centavos.

‘Ground Zero’
Jan Engeland, UN Secretary-General's special adviser on conflict, while on a visit in this area last month, called this part of Western Africa, as climate change's ‘Ground Zero’, where the worst impact of climate change will be felt by the world's poorest peoples, especially women and children.

Moreover, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)that evaluates the risk of climate change caused by human activity, also said in its 4th report last year that the West African Sahel and Central Africa will experience some of the highest temperature increases anywhere in the world over the next few decades.

The carbon dioxide emissions from moto-taxis in Cotonou account for 95 percent of air pollution in this major Beninese port city, according to a joint report on climate change impacts on Benin published recently by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and GTZ, the German Development Foundation.

But even as the Beninese in Cotonou would suffer these toxic fumes daily, they have negligible carbon footprints. The Human Development Report (UNDP-HDR) 2007/2008 says that "with 0.1 per cent of the world's population, Benin (pop. 8 million) accounts for 0.0% of global emissions - an average of 0.3 ton of CO2 per person."

The UNDP-HDR further says that "these emission levels are below those of Sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast, the Philippines (pop. 90 million), with 1.30 per cent of the world's population,accounts for 0.3 per cent of the global emissions -- an average of 1 ton of CO2 per person."

Princes of the roads
The zemijahns' chief rider here is called the conducteur, French word for 'driver', a linguistic legacy of cultural ties with France, which colonized most of the territory in the 1800s till 1959.

But like the Filipino jeepney drivers, most moto-taxi conducteurs feel like they are princes of the roads, and most often throw caution to the wind.

Yet despite their audacity in driving at speeds of 50 to 75 kph through the hot, dusty and thick city traffic, they barely eke out a living and are always exposed to dangers and health problems.

A drop-out from a mechanical engineering course on his junior year, Djossa, 32, was forced to drive a moto-taxi by the lack of jobs even for college students or graduates.

"Many of us are professionals. I know someone who is an accountant who drives a moto-taxi and one who studies to become a computer analyst. But there are few jobs in Benin now," Djossa explains. "This is not shameful criminal work. This is better than starving."

No helmets
No zemijanh conducteur nor its paying commuter ever wears a helmet, not only because their costs are prohibitive, about 15,000 CFA francs (about PhP1,500), a price that could mean a week's earnings but also because government does not encourage them to wear protective helmets despite the high number of road accidents involving motorcycles.

Conducteurs however wear a bright yellow cotton jacket with a serial number over a right front pocket to distinguish them from private citizens riding their own vehicles.

"We pay rent to the moto owner at 2,000 francs CFA (about P200 in Philippine peso) and earn about 400 to 500 for ourselves. Sometimes we don't earn enough in a day and can't pay the rent," Djossa added.

According to him, it helps that the local government had suspended its taxes for zemijahns and their conducteurs this year. The city also provides free medical services to conducteurs and their families, a move that is still part of its welfare-conscious socialist past.

"We used to pay a monthly tax of 6,000 CFA francs (around PhP600) but that is erased now," Djossa said. The federation of moto-taxis won the tax-free concession after having supported politicians who won in the local elections last year.

'Contraband as high art'
It further helps that gasoline and crude oil are peddled on the roadsides. Two decades since the New York Times wrote about "the high art of contraband" in once-Marxist Benin, then tail-spinning into deep crisis, and yet still the smuggling oil thrives here and, ironically, even more blatantly in free market, democratic Benin.

Just when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972, a paratrooper named Mathieu Kerekou declared a Marxist-Leninist communist state after a successful coup, the fifth after the country gained independence from France in 1960.

In 1990, about four years after the Philippine EDSA Revolt, after 17 years of state-managed economy and due to economic woes and people's unrest, Benin's national leadership abandoned communism in favor of capitalism's free market and democracy. Two years ago, it elected as president Thomas Yayi Boni, an economist and former president of the Western African Development Bank.

Gasoline by the bottles
Stalls of glass jars and bottles all filled to the brim with gasoline, crude oil or diesel fuel is the most ubiquitous sight along Cotonou's roads all the way to the capital city of Porto-Novo in the East and Grand Popo to the West as well as deep into central Zou department (province) up North.

Stall owners have been very wary of 'yovos' (meaning, 'whites' but the word is now used to mean strangers of any color other than ebony) and were difficult to interview but a source said that most get supplies from a network of suppliers.


The oil, smuggled in from nearby Nigeria and acknowledged of poor quality, serves the hundreds, if not thousands, of motorcycles daily fuel needs. For several urban poor families, keeping a stall of purloined gasoline is the only lifeline to survival.

About 30,000 Beninese are former workers in Nigeria’s oil fields before Nigeria tightened its borders in the 90s and some of them must have maintained Nigerian links. Legal gasoline dealers like Sonacop and Oryx could only cry foul but are helpless over these diminutive competitors

"Selling on the streets is against the law but no one is arrested. No one imposes the law enforces because the government understands us," ventures to explain Antoine Makpenon, another zemijahn conducteur.

"There is also no big jail enough for all," he adds, his a wide toothy grin in his dusty face. Only 24, Antoine has been driving since he was 21, using a rented Yamaha 50, the kind that used to be trendy in the Philippines way back in the late 60s.

Shock of high food prices
Juliette Koudenoukpo Biaou, the country's environmental minister, says that the government is aware of the illicit trade of gasoline on the streets and highways of Cotonou and of the dangers these pose on public health and safety.

But Koudenoukpo Biaou stressed that the local government is in charge with law enforcement. Most probably the authorities hands are tied as the political support of conducteurs' unions during the elections was vital to the success of politicians in the last elections.

"We prefer to buy from the small stalls because we can buy but pay later . Besides the regular stations like Oryx and Sonacop, a liter of petrol costs 600 francs CFA while the stalls sell them at only 300 francs CFA, even less," says Makpenon.

One thing that Djossa, Makpenon and other conducteurs all complain about is the high cost of food. The usual roadside meal of rice and fish in spicy sauce or cornmeal balls and fried fish with garlic dip was only 500 CFA francs a month ago. Now, simple meals can cost 1,500 CFA francs.

Benin, a Western African country slightly bigger than the size of Luzon at 110,000 square kilometers as compared to Luzon's more than 109,000 square kilometers, is considered among the most vulnerable nations to the impact of climate change. Already ranked 163rd among 177 countries in the UNDP’s Human Development Index 2007-2008, it is also considered among the world's 40 poorest and least developed countries.

In its fourth assessment report issued last year, the IPCC has projected that the urban poor in the Gulf of Guinea region, like these moto-taxi conducteurs, will most likely feel the effects of climate change not as only through freak weather conditions but also through spiralling food prices.

Loans and subsidies
In Cotonou, the country's largest city and financial center, the populace complain of rapid rise of food prices in the past few weeks.

This even as the government has provided subsidies, particularly for imported rice from Thailand that is retailed at 1,375 CFA francs (PhP13.75) per kilo.

But Hamsah Fatay, 52, a roadside motorcycle vendor, says business is brisk despite the economic downturn. He gets his supply of motorcycles from a Chinese wholesaler based in Nigeria and he sells them at 300,000 to 600,000 CFA francs, mostly by installments, payable within a year.

In June this year, President Yayi Boni has drawn a loan from the International Monetary Fund's special discounted facility for countries with low incomes. Like Haiti and Mali, Benin is using the funds to provide subsidies to agriculture and to hedge off the prices of prime commodities.

But the middle-class, who are beginning to feel the pinch in the past few weeks. are still worried about long-term impacts of the food crisis. “The government can only help enough. It cannot continue to borrow money and subsidize forever. But the poor might not be able to understand the limits of government’s capacity to help the poor sector,” says moto-taxi commuter Florence Worju, an accountant at the Nigerian International School.

Djossa was surprised to learn about the loan and said, "That's good. I hope the money goes into adult education, too," adding that, "It could mean I can fulfill my dream of going back to school and learn better English soon and get a certificate."

Then this prince of the road said something extremely familiar way back in the Philippines: "Then, I will get a visa out of here and find a better job somewhere in the world where English is spoken. There is no future for me here."

Mariona Vivar of the Paris-based Alternative Channel wrote a similar article in Spanish in her AC blog.

(Thanks to MEDIA 21, UNDP, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Mindanao Gold Star Daily and the Global Pinoy Magazine)

At climate change's 'Ground Zero': Women most vulnerable but vital resource

(news report)

(UPDATED)COUTONOU, BENIN – Here at the fringes of climate change's "Ground Zero", no mourning bell tolls for the women who are most vulnerable to climate change's impacts, and rightly so, since they can be a key to survival even in a more inhospitable, warming globe.

Monique Ouassa, a sociology of art professor at the University of Abomey-Calavi says here this week that her recent study of agricultural Beninese northern tribes show how development planners must understand indigenous worldviews as they look into local adaptation strategies for climate change. "This way, women's potentials for adaptation and survival can be harnessed," she added.

According to a recent study of the IUCN, the Conservation Union, "women in indigenous communities are more vulnerable to climate change impacts because of their disportionate involvement in reproductive work, their insecure property rights and access to resources and their reduced mobility as they care for children and the elderly."

Meanwhile, Benin's environment agency admitted recently that little has been done to harness womenfolk's potentials in adapting to the effects of the quickly changing temperature of an already "feverish earth", half a year since the Bali Plan of Action at the Climate Conference in Indonesia last December 2007.
Ouassa issued the findings of her study "like the sound of African morning bells": not as a mourning toll but as a wake-up call.

African morning bells, known as djin djin, have been popularized worldwide by an eponymous title of an album of world music by Angelique Kidjo in 2007. Kidjo won a Grammy award for the album this year.

Ouassa, 34, had set out on a four-year study of the worldviews of the agricultural bush-burning tribes in the departments (equivalent to provinces in the Philippines) of Atakiri and Alibori in northern Benin, along the borders of Mali and Niger,about 400 kilometers from this port city of Cotonou.

"I sought to understand the indigenous cosmogony, their worldview so we will know why, for instance, they keep on burning trees and grasslands and why they have no tradition of planting trees and instead are contributing to desertification," explained Ouassa.

The West African country of Benin, slightly bigger than the size of Luzon island, has lost virtually all its primary forest cover and desertification is taking over its northern territories..
The upper north of Benin is on the edge of the sub-Saharan Sahel region and shares the same climate and terrain.

Jan Engeland, UN Secretary-General's special adviser on conflict, while on a visit in this area last month, called this part of Western Africa , as climate change's “Ground Zero”, where the worst impact of climate change will be felt by the world's poorest peoples, especially women and children.

Moreover,, climate scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which evaluates the risk of climate change caused by human activity, has also projected that the West African Sahel and Central Africa will experience some of the highest temperature increases anywhere in the world over the next few decades.


In its regional report on adaptation and vulnerability in the Gulf of Guinea, the IPCC also noted that the region's high maternal mortality rate but low female literacy rate indicate low status, making women more vulnerable to climate change’s impacts. The IPPC further noted that these low rates also show that the educational and health infrastructures, indicators of vigorous rural development, are weak.
Oussa also learned in her research, which she has been conducting since 2004,that for these Beninese tribes, women are associated mostly with water, rain and fertility while men are associated with soil,land and fire.

"That's why women are tasked with gathering water and watering fields while men are associated with the soil and the harvest," said Ouassa. She also found that the tribes that the tribes consider fire, which is used to clear the land, an important element associated with new beginnings and rites of passages.

These beliefs can have an implication on women's land rights, said Ouassa, as women in these parts traditionally cannot own nor inherit land. So, she urges development planners in the government and private sectors to find ways to change these negative aspects of this worldview in order to benefit tribal women.

"Only when women can have their land rights can women be fully harnessed as resources and stewards of resources for survival in an era of climate change," she stressed. She said that women, for instance, can plant trees, just like their counterparts in Benin’s southern departments where cultural values are different.

But among these tribes, only men are associated with trees and the land. Besides, she said, in their cosmogony, trees are God’s gifts, like the land, and do not need to be planted and nurtured by people.

Meanwhile, Juliette Koudenoukpo Biaou, the country's environment minister, readily admitted in a press conference that her government has not done much in charting out the course of the country's adaptation plan in the midst of "unequivocal" climate change.

The minister spoke against a backdrop of a brightly-colored painting of women farmers. "Generally, we have done little in terms of making a plan of action, concerning gender and climate change. We are still in the phase of re-confirming research results and informing and orienting decision-makers on what to do, policy-wise," said Koudenoukpo Biaou, a former non-government worker who is also the country's first woman forestry expert.

She informed that the United Nations Environment Program is organizing a gender and climate change conference late this year for Western Africa, in which research like Ouassa's can be discussed and disseminated.

"Things are going slow, we have not done much to implement the Bali Plan of Action. We have not gone beyond improving women's incomes and providing seminars on planting trees and making more efficient cooking stoves," the minister said.

Note: July 30 -- this article has been updated,incorporating the editing suggestions from Professor Nick Mills, (of Boston University), author of "Karzai:The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan", who was my co-participant at the Media 21 workshop in Geneva and the field work in Benin.