240/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!this measure would also mean giving a boost to the flagging
domestic market.
Guaranteed Access to Land'Land to the tiller' is as relevant a demand as ever. For much of the
Third World, land is the key question for ensuring sustainable and
socially just development. On the eve of the twenty-first century,
guaranteeing individual or collective access to land and the means to
put it to good use (low-interest loans, infrastructure, transport and
communications) remains a central goal. Significant agrarian reform
is essential in a number of countries. To take just two highly
populated countries, India and Brazil, tens of millions of landless
peasants have a stake in such reform. Providing the ways and means
for working the land to those who want to do so, is also a way to stem
the rural exodus to the sprawling urban monsters of the Third World.
This is also a way to slow the increase in the size of the industrial
reserve army of labour. This in turn would reduce downward
pressure on industrial salaries in the countries concerned, and indeed
on an international level. The matter of access to land also continues
to be relevant in a number of countries of the North.
Women's Liberation
Women are the first victims of austerity policies, in both the South
and North. Enduring oppression in patriarchal society, women are
also directly hit by attacks on job security, wage levels and social
programmes. Such attacks further restrict their participation in
economic, social and political life. To ignore the major contribution
of women's work, however, would mean scuttling the very idea of
development. The UNDP's 1995 Report estimates at S16.000 billion
(SI6 trillion) the value of human activity not accounted for in the
current wage system. This is equivalent to just under 70 per cent of
annual world production, officially calculated at S23.000 billion.
Of these SI6,000 billion, SI 1,000 billion correspond to the
'invisible' contribution of women. One major objective is acknowl
edging this contribution and, above all, ensuring that it is reflected in
the way social power is shared between men and women.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the industri
alised countries, it was only after fierce struggles for social rights - in