Are there Customary Rights to Plants? An Inquiry among the Baganda (Uganda), with Special Attention to Gender

Abstract

Debates around Common Property Resources and Intellectual Property Rights failto consider traditional and indigenous rights regimes that regulate plant resource exploitation, establish bundles of powers and obligations for heterogeneous groups of users, and create differential entitlements to benefits that are related to social structures.Such rights regimes are important to maintaining biodiversity and to human welfare; failing to recognize them presents dangers. The case study investigates the gendered nature of informal rights to selected tree and plant species that are distinct from, but related to, customary rights to land and trees, and are embedded in cosmology and social norms.

Gender and Sustainable Forest Management in East Africa and Latin America

“…The security of women's property rights to forest and tree resources also serves as an important incentive for their adopting resource conserving measures (Marchetti 1997, MeinzenDick et al 1997, Kaimowitz and Angelsen 1998, Quisumbing et al 2001; uncertainty greatly limits women's capacity to undertake action to mitigate degradation or unsustainable use (Yadama et al 1997). Attention to gender differences in property rights can shed light on the sustainability status of forests; it is important to identify the nature of rights to forests and trees held by women and men, and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another (Howard and Nabanoga 2007).…”

Forests and Food Security: What’s Gender Got to Do with It?

“…It has long been recognized that many 'common' property regimes include spatially and temporally overlapping use rights. Spaces that may be legally recognized as belonging to men or as village property may be subject to rights and claims by women, especially for tree and plant products [27,87]. For example, Howard and Nabanoga's mapping of tree tenure in Uganda reveal rights and obligations to forest resources nested and layered in the same geographic space, corresponding to species and specific uses of the same species depending on social norms, including gender.…”

Towards a Gendered Agro-Commodity Approach

“…Because of low productivity of their farms, U gandese women usually produce for domestic consumption and men produce for the market in Uganda. Moreover, where women's subsistence production has become part of commercial chains as for example exportable fruits and vegetables, their traditional control mechanisms on the land may be lost by the formalization of (Western style) property rights (Howard and Nabanoga 2007;Meinzen and Mwangi 2008).…”

“…Traditions, customary law and (world) religions may hamper the access of women to property rights, capital ownership, and employment and stimulate gender inequitable attitudes in general (Joireman 2008;Seguino 2010). Nevertheless there are also experiences where traditions are useful to reduce the disparities of formal regulations, like the cases of witchcraft in Kenyan contract horticulture (Dolan 2002), the customary gender rights on trees and crops of the Buganda in Uganda (Howard and Nabanoga 2007) and the historical women dominance of shea nut chains in Ghana (Wardell and Fold 2013).…”